What's Your Recommendation?

A few weeks ago, two different people recommended a book for me to read. The first person is a friend from church, and the other is a workmate. I don't recall exactly how the conversations led to the book recommendations, but hearing the same book title from two different people piqued my curiosity. I am usually very particular about the kind of books I read, and take the subject matter very seriously. But, in the spirit of my 2006 resolution of trying new things, I went to Barnes & Noble and bought a book - blindly. I had no idea what the book was about and I intended to keep it that way to prevent myself from judging it too fast. The cover was pretty. That's lame, but for me, it was a good sign. The title made no sense to me, but that didn't matter. As I sipped my grande chai latte, I tentatively opened the first page and started reading.

The book was centered on the brutal rape and murder of a fourteen-year-old girl and her account of events following her murder, as she observes from heaven. One thing stood out for me: the fact that the description of the rape and subsequent murder and dismemberment of her body was not as detailed and gruesome as you would expect. In fact, the tone of that book is so light that at some time, I had to stop and wonder why exactly these two people had recommended the book to me. It was the kind of book you read just because. But, in the end, it did make me think how horrible it would be if people really died and went to heaven and watched the world from heaven (this is a theological theory I don't buy into. From my own understanding of the Bible, death is like sleep, and people don't die and immediately go to heaven or hell). In the end, I still didn't understand what the title "The Lovely Bones" means.

Since this was a new writer previously unknown to me, I did what I do with every writer. I dug around for reviews of her other books. It turned out that Alice Sebold had a memoir on top of the fictional "Lovely Bones". I am going through a memoir-phase right now, and I decided to go out and buy that book, especially since I found out that she is a "rape victim". I am always interested in learning how other people have coped with trauma in their lives and figured I had nothing to lose. So I went out and bought "Lucky". In contrast to her fictional work, Alice Sebold started the first five pages of this book with a detailed, gruesome account of how she was attacked and raped in a park in the middle of the night when she was an eighteen-year-old college freshman. Perhaps it was the shock of the account, or the matter-of-fact way in which she wrote about it. Whatever it was, I was hooked and ended up reading the entire book in a day. The last few pages were so surprising and dismaying that when I was done reading, I felt like I had lost something. Not sure what that "something" is, exactly.

So, that's how I started my new year. Reading about rape. And crying. Lots of crying. I allowed myself to wallow in self-pity for a few hours. After all, it's my first holiday without my kid bro, we had a winter storm that ensured there would be no new year's eve parties (I wasn't about to be the dumbass being rescued by the National Guard simply cuz I had the urge to drive to a party in the middle of a winter storm). My parents had already called and wished me happy new year at 9:00 p.m, they had no intention of staying up late for no reason. Lilly is gone. And Steve. Steve had gone to St. Louis to visit his grandma and his flight back was cancelled. Plans to spend new year's eve together went out the window then. In bed and alone, I had plenty of time to feel lonely and miss all the people I loved. Hopefully, that's not indicative of how the rest of my year will pan out.

Of course, I'm digressing. Now the point of this post. I want to indulge this memoir craving I'm having. Have any of you fellow bloggers read a mind-blowing memoir that made you cry, laugh, paranoid, or simply go "wow"? One that touched you in some way, perhaps because you could relate? Please make a recommendation, and say why you recommend the book. Thanks, and happy new year. Hope your year started off on a more upbeat note than mine did!