The Book Of Lost Things

I began the new year by reading the thoroughly satisfying and magnificent novel, "The Book of Lost Things" by John Connolly. If ever there was a book written for storytellers, it is this one. John Connolly has brilliantly interwoven ageless myths and folktales into the tale of a boy who is teetering on the brink of adulthood. He suffers through the death of his mother, the arrival of a new stepmother, a new baby brother, a world war..and so he finds escape in books and the wisdom of the tales in them.

Here is one of my favorite excerpts from the first few pages of the book:

"Stories were different, though: they came alive in the telling. Without a human voice to read them aloud, or a pair of wide eyes following them by flashlight beneath a blanket, they had no real existence in our world. They were like seeds in the beak of a bird, waiting to fall to earth, or the notes of a song laid out on a sheet, yearning for an instrument to bring the music into being. They lay dormant, hoping for a chance to emerge. Once someone started to read them, they could begin to change. They could take root in the imagination, and transform the reader. Stories wanted to be read, David's mother would whisper. The needed it. It was the reason they forced themselves from their world into ours. They wanted us to give them life."

This is one of those books that begins grandly, poeticly - immediately enticing one to read on and on. The reader can only hope that the author can maintain that kind of momentum and come to an equally (or even grander) finale, and god bless author John Connolly, because he does!!!

I can think of few better ways to start the new year than by reading such a marvelous story.