On Saturdays in the summer and fall, I usually get up and head to the local farmers market and then head to the Jewel to do my mom’s grocery shopping. But since the farmers market has ended and I was feeling like a pajama morning, yesterday I grabbed Neil Gaiman’s THE GRAVEYARD BOOK. I’ve never been one to hang around graveyards, but I did not want to leave this one. My friend AJ warned us that we wouldn’t want this book to end and boy was she right.
The Graveyard Book
I’m not a fast reader, and I generally favor books under 200 pages since longer books take me FOREVER to read–usually. This 320 pages was over before I knew it. I can’t remember when a book made me actually get that creepy pang of impending danger during the climax. I was scared for Nobody Owens, the book’s main character and the only living resident of the historic graveyard. And I could barely read the last few paragraphs of the book because my eyes had gotten some kind of watery substance in them.
Besides having total awe of Gaiman’s imaginative setting and characters, THE GRAVEYARD BOOK left me thinking about what it means to be alive. I realized that some of us think we are alive, when we really aren’t. Not in a Sixth Sense kind of way, but in a sense that we have yet to fully live our lives, experience new things, and really see the world around us. Some of us are more like the permanent residents of the graveyard–static and stuck in the past.
Take a visit to this graveyard and let me know what you think.
