love, read, write

I finished The Book Thief yesterday, and I was hit with this wind of sadness. So I kinda found salt water on my face after finishing the book. I usually don't excrete salt water through my eyes from reading books or watching movies, but this thing practically forced them out.

The Book Thief.
By Markus Zusak.

One word to describe it: Words
One phrase to describe it: The Power of Words

During World War II, a time of difficulty, suffering, and hardships, a German girl, Liesel, lives with her foster parents in a small German town. She tries to figure out between right and wrong in the Fuhrer (Hitler), assists her family in sustaining a barely livable life, and even in the meantime, makes friends with Rudy, her soon-to-be partner in crime. As Liesel learns to read after being humiliated by her classmates, she begins to realize the power of words and the great stories they can tell. She falls in love with books and soon finds a hobby of not just reading them, but stealing them. Together, with Rudy, they steal books to apples, and scrape enough of a living to stay alive during the war. Liesel's life changes as she soon meets a man named Max Vandenberg, a Jewish friend who comes to hide in her house. Liesel and her family experience the terror of guilt and the fury of righteousness. She learns from Max the power of creating words, which in the end, saves her life.

This is a gross and very cluttered summary, but really, it's a great book that everybody should read. I tried my best not to ruin it.

Main characters:
Liesel
Max
Frau Hermann
Hans and Rosa Hubermann
Rudy

I want to write things about the ending. So if you have not read it or finished it already, DON'T.
Although the book does have this really annoying way of telling you the ending before it actually happens. The chapter starts with "blah blah this is going to happen." And then two chapters later it does, and you're totally angry that the book ruined it. But then again, it's the book that told you what would happen in that same book. You can't say anything. You couldn't have stopped it. Eh.

So.



If that wasn't a big enough warning, I don't know what is. At this point, anybody reading this should have finished the book. Because it's a pretty big blow.

What blow, you ask? Then stop reading.

...

I can't believe everybody died. I'm sure that Zusak did this to give us a tiny sliver of a feeling of what it's like to lose people in a war. But--how cruel! How sad! How... heart-prickling. Only Liesel to live? And what made me even more sad and upset was that everybody was all peacefully lying in bed, sleeping, knowing nothing, unaware, living their lives on, as the bomb quietly lifted their souls away. I don't know. The fact that they were all sleeping and peaceful as a chaotic bomb came down and tore their limbs apart was just. too. much.
(Basically emergency dial to tear ducts.)
What also tore my heart was the death of Rudy. Actually, all of the individual deaths, if you think about it, tore my heart. Rudy was because she secretly loved him (and he openly loved her, hah), and she never got to kiss him, which is funny and sad at the same time. I love how Rudy would always say, "How about a kiss, Saumensch?" I wish Rudy was a real person. He'd be an awesome friend. Liesel would be the strong willed, righteous kind. Rudy would be funny and determined. Ah... one of those reoccuring moments where I long for fictitious characters to be real humans...

Max's book, "The Word Shaker," was, to my opinion, the nub of the book. It really represented the message, I think, and it was also very cryptic. Obviously he was talking about Hitler, Liesel, and Max (even the book reveals that), and how Hitler's powerful words were handed out to the willing people, and the word shakers would climb the trees to pick the words off the trees and hand them down to the people... I guess the point is that anybody can be a word shaker. Anybody can plant a tree. But we have to stand by it, we have to stay up in that tree, or it will fall down. Stay with your words and nobody can chop them down.
Hitler's words planted hope in some and killed others. Liesel's words planted hope in some and also saved her life. Our words can do the same.

I have no idea what I just wrote.
(maybe I might, actually)

I guess anybody can interpret books differently, and it's really up to the reader, so that was my little analyzation of the book, which was put under the spoiler section for some reason. Whatever.


I want to read now.
So bye.


Happy Reading!
I'm probably going to read "Paper Towns" by John Green next. Or "American Gods".