Well, school is just around the corner and that means the return of routine. I love the summer. I love the lack of structure – the simplicity of the days, knowing the kids and I can just take off if we feel like it. (I have the luxury of being off during the summer because I am a teacher.) I thought that in an effort to get back into the swing of things and sort of turn my brain back on, I’d use these book-related questions courtesy of Portrait of the Would-Be Artist as a Young Woman. I’ll post one answer a day for the month of September.
What is the best book you read last year.
I am going to tweak this question slightly because it’s September and the year’s not done and I haven’t really started to reflect on the books I’ve read this year.
The best book I’ve read in recent memory, though, has got to be John Connolly’s tremendously moving novel The Book of Lost Things. I was teaching a writing course at the time I was reading it and I took the book in to one of the students in my class and said: “You have to read this book.” Although an avid reader, this young man mostly read fantasy stuff, but The Book of Lost Things has an element of the fantastical about it and I thought the student would like it. The very next day we passed each other in the hall and he said: “I am on page 280. I can’t put it down.”
The Book of Lost Things did everything a really good book should do: it transported, it instructed, it illuminated. As if that weren’t enough, it was exciting and creepy and made my cry. I don’t think you can ask for much more than that. I have a couple other Connolly titles on my bookshelf. I hope they live up to my very high expectations!
The Ludic Reader 