Book Reviews: The Book of Lost Things

The Book of Lost Things

by John Connolly
★★★★☆

The story opens with David, a 12-year-old boy in England, who is grieving the loss of his mother. Soon his father remarries and moves with his step-mother and half-brother to a new home. He’s frustrated and lonely and he turns to books for comfort, but when he follows their tempting whispers he ends up in another world with no way to get home.

This book is an odd mix between a coming-of-age story a fairy tale and a horror story. Connolly’s brilliantly re-imagines classic fairy tales with adult endings. For example, there are communist dwarves who live with an abusive, obese Snow White. The book’s ultimate foe is the Crooked Man, one of the cruelest, most depraved villain’s I’ve ever encountered in a novel. He is manipulative, evil, violent and vindictive.

This is definitely not a book for kids, but the author never intended it to be. I was a bit shocked by it at first because for some reason I thought it was a YA book. In actuality it’s a fairy tale for adults. At its core it is about remembering the pain of growing up and accepting the heartaches and tough decisions that follow you through life. Once I understood that I enjoyed it much more.

I don’t think this book is for everyone, but even though some moments made me squeamish, I really liked it. I’ve found myself returning to the story frequently after finishing it. I think about the characters and David’s journey and I’ve discover new depths to the challenges he faced along the way. To me, any book that has the power to linger for so long is worth reading.

“Um, and what about happily ever after? asked David. “What does that mean?”

“Eaten quickly,” said Brother Number One.

Wordless Wednesday: San Fran Sunflowers

Sunflowers in the San Fran Saturday market.

More Wordless Wednesday here.

Photo by moi.

BBC Book List

So I've been seeing this list everywhere, like at Wicked Wonderful Words and Chasing Bawa and I love lists, so I couldn't resist.

The BBC believes most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here. How incredibly depressing is that?

Put an 'x' after those you have read. Unless I counted wrong, I've read 71.75 (I'm counting the 3/4 of Shakespeare's complete works that I've read).
 
*UPDATED 1/5/16
1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen [X]
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien [X]
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte [X]
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling [X]
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee [X]
6 The Bible [X]
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte [X]
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell [X]
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman [X]
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens [X]
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott [X]
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy [X]
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller [X]
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare [about 3/4]
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier [X]
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien [X]
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk [X]
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger [X]
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger [X]
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot [X]
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell [X]
22 The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald [X]
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens [X]
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [X]
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams [X]
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh [X]
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky [X]
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck [X]
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll [X]
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame [X]
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy [X]
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens [X]
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis [X]
34 Emma-Jane Austen [X]
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen [X]
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis [X]
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini [X]
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres [X]
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden [X]
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne [X]
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell [X]
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown [X]
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez [X]
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving [X]
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins [X]
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery [X]
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy [ ]
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood [X]
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding [X]
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan [X]
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel [X]
52 Dune - Frank Herbert [ ]
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons [X]
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen [X]
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth [ ]
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos RuIz Zafon [X]
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens [X]
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley [X]
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night - Mark Haddon [X]
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez [ ]
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck [X]
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov [X]
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt [X]
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold [X]
65 The Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas [X]
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac [X]
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy [X]
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding [X]
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie [ ]
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville [X]
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens [X]
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker [X]
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnet [X]
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson [X]
75 Ulysses - James Joyce [ ]
76 The Inferno – Dante [X]
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome [X]
78 Germinal - Emile Zola []
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray [X]
80 Possession - AS Byat [X]
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens [X]
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell [X]
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker [X]
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro [X]
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert [X]
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry [ ]
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White [X]
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom [X]
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle [X]
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton [ ]
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad [X]
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery [X]
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks [ ]
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams [X]
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole [X]
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute [ ]
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas [X]
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare [X]
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl [X]
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo [X]

Photo by moi.