Books.

I tend to do things obsessively until I burn out, and lately my obsession has been reading. This subject is a little bit different from what I normally talk about (Emily) but I just found some gems that were too good to keep to myself.

The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis
This book is very well known, so a lot of you have probably already read it, but I hadn't until last month. I don't know why I put it off for so long. It didn't take very long to read - I think I finished it in a day and a half and that was going at a leisurely pace. For those who aren't familiar with it, it's basically a collection of letters between a young demon, Wormwood, and his higher-ranked uncle Screwtape. The letters discuss the easiest way to tempt a man and lead him astray. It really made me think a lot about my habits and the fickleness of man.





The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
This book has gotten a lot of hype lately so I finally got it from the library and sat down with it. It's about a young German girl living during WWII who is taken to live with foster parents when she is nine. It follows her as she sees her brother die, builds a new life with new friends, learns to love books, and develops her own ideas and opinions concerning the war, Hitler, and the Jews. I didn't have very high expectations because the subject matter is so serious and the cover is kind of boring, but it was amazing. Everyone should read this.




The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch
I loved this book. It might be because the author was a Carnegie Mellon computer science professor and reminded me a lot of Joseph, but I loved it. This book records the words of a father of three young children diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and given about six months to live. The thoughts and stories are entertaining, inspiring, and thoughtful. I found myself reading chapters aloud to Joseph just because I couldn't resist, and he enjoyed it as much as I did. He's next in line to read it.





The Underneath by Kathi Appelt
This is a children's book that I only checked out because the children's literature book club in my ward chose it. I never would have been interested in a book about a hound and a couple of cats on my own. But it was amazing! I don't really know how to make this sound interesting without typing something really long, so you might just have to take my word for it. I loved one of the reviews though, that said "Kathi Appelt's novel, The Underneath, reads like a ballad sung." It is poetic and magical and really worth reading.

I know I'm not very good at reviewing books. It's way harder than it looks to make a book sound good in a couple of sentences so you should probably go to Amazon and read the real review. But I've read a lot of books in the last couple of months and these ones really stood out. I know I'm always on the lookout for a new good book to read, so hopefully someone reading this will remember the next time they're in search of a good book and give one of these a try!