The Book Thief

Guess what people!! Dan and I have both finished The Book Thief. I'm actually super impressed that we both finished so early - we still have like a week until our deadline! I was kind of skeptical at first; I just know how busy we have been, and the book is 550 pages. But we both completed it, and I'm so proud :)

Daniel finished it before I did. He checked out the audio copy of it from the library, and then listened to it on his iPod at work. We had been reading it together, and then it took him a day to finish it! It was awesome! I was a little bit slower and just read the normal book. I finished it earlier this week at the McGuire family reunion. Now on to our August book! We're reading Ender's Game. We have decided that every book we read for our mini-book club we're going to buy a copy of it for our personal library. We're going to scout out used bookstores this weekend and see if we can find it on the cheap :)

As for The Book Thief . . .  i liked reading it, but I didn't love it. Everyone had raved and ranted about how amazing the book was, and it was actually kind of slow. There wasn't really anything that grabbed my attention and excited me about the book. I was always anticipating some major event that would all of a sudden get the book going. But it was over before anything like that really happened. 

It did however have some really important and valuable themes that I enjoyed. One of them was the value of the written word. This is something that I have always felt strongly about. Writing and words have so much power, both for good or evil. We can influence so many people with our words, and that power is so crazy to think about. I feel honored to have lived a life full of reading and writing, and the chance to share my thoughts and ideas with people I come in contact with. We truly are blessed.