Oh hi there. It's still 80 degrees here, so
I'm eating some popsicle in a cup that I made.
I wish it would just hurry up and turn fall
already. But it won't. So I have to make my
own fall by baking pumpkin gingerbread, drinking
pumpkin lattes, and the most successful technique
so far: reading The Graveyard Book. When I
picked this book in September I wasn't even
thinking about October and Halloween. But
this book is perfect for fall.
The premise is that a boy's family gets murdered
and he is raised by the inhabitants of a graveyard,
mostly ghosts. The boy, who comes to be called
Bod, short for Nobody, learns to read from
worn gravestones, hears history from the people
who lived through it, makes friends with both
the living and the dead, and generally has
a pretty idyllic childhood. Can't believe
I just said that about a boy who lives in
a graveyard.
 
The book is told in episodes, like the Jungle
Book on which it was modeled. This made it
perfect for short bursts of reading. You didn't
really have to pay attention to lots of threads
throughout the book because many of them get
wrapped up by the end of the chapter.
The other thing great thing I did with this
book is get the audiobook. I listened to it
on my drives to school. Neil Gaiman himself
reads it, and he does all the voices and everything.
It was wonderful. I find myself skimming dialogue
when I read a text, but when that same text
is read aloud, all the dialogue and speech
comes popping out and I caught even more gems
in Gaiman's writing. I highly recommend the
audio book.
I wish this book had been published when I
was a kid. I feel like I would have loved
it even more. It has important ideas about
life and death and destiny and potential.
One important thread running through the book
is that even though the ghosts and other not-traditionally-alive
characters can do all sorts of cool things,
like induce fear and walk through walls, Bod
has the potential to actually change the world.
The residents of the graveyard have already
had their lives, they've already put their
mark in the world. Bod may love it in the
graveyard, it may be his home, but he needs
to go out do stuff. The living have infinite
potential. So we need to go out and make some
stuff happen. Kids need to hear stuff like
this. So I'm going to file it away in my list
of books to give to children someday.
