For my book club last month, our pick was The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold, a book in which I spent the fall of my sophomore year in college stubbornly avoiding since it seemed like everyone else on the swim team was reading it. I'm weird like that - I refused to read The DaVinci Code for years because it seemed like everyone else was (long story short, broke down and picked it up - read it in one day, I couldn't put it down). But, one of the main reasons I was so excited to join a book club was to help me get outside my comfort zone of romance novels and chick lit, so I again broke down and read a book I swore I would never read.
Again - phenomenal. A little slow in places, and you really have to push yourself through the first chapter or two - the subject matter is disturbing to say the least, but it's well worth it in the end. Without giving anything away, since the narrator tells you this within the first paragraph of the book, but one of the main themes, if not THE main theme of the book is death and how it effects people and changes relationships. And there are a few characters in the novel that had vague connections to the narrator in life but are profoundly effected by her death.
It got me wondering crazy morbid thoughts about the people that might miss me if I were to die tomorrow (knock on wood). By this, I mean the people that I probably wouldn't normally think would miss me - the people that I don't have close ties to in life. Who would come to my funeral - not out of curiosity or duty - but because I genuinely touched their lives in some way and because they would honestly miss me? Am I the only one who believes that you can tell a lot about how a person lived based on the number of people that attend their funeral? All I can say is that I hope when the time comes, my funeral is standing room only.
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