427 - another book, yeah!

The Graveyard Book.

I finished the book some days ago!

I realized that my reading pace of the book was slow. I mean, it’s quite an “OK” pace initially, but then, it started to go downhill when I found another book… SPOOK’S.

Yup. I think I’m heading into another fandom once again. This is a whole new fandom. I know the movie is coming out next year, but trust me, that’s not what really got me into the books. Well, the movie pointed out the book for me, but I didn't pick it up yet. Later while looking for new books on dragons in the library, I saw this art cover of a girl, a really badass girl in my opinion. And well, that’s kind of cool and dark, I thought. And realised that it was from the SPOOK’s series. This got my interest. Following that, I bought 3 hardcovers from Whitcoulls for $3, meaning $1 each. CHEAP! And they were hardbacks you know! They were all SPOOK’S. I always like hardbacks, so, once I saw the genre I like and in that price, I grabbed everything up.

… I kinda side tracked there. I was supposed to be talking about The Graveyard Book.

OK. This is mine…4th…? book from Neil Gaiman. Actually, this is my first interest in Neil Gaiman’s book. But along the way, I found Coraline and started reading that first.

The Graveyard Book was about a boy who lives in the graveyard with his foster parents and guardian and other inhabitants in the graveyard. Every chapter has title, like every book has. Reading along, I realized that the book is about the Bod’s time in the graveyard. With every chapter, Bod aged. Not a day or 2 but weeks or months, or sometimes, years. By the end of the book, he’s grown up to be a young man.

I’m not going into the summary of the book as there’s no point doing that. I bet there are others who wrote wonderful summary or synopsis about it. Anyway, I like the settings and characters of the stories. I mean, come on, it’s about a boy living in a graveyard. How do you think a boy can survive in a graveyard? Also, he lived in the graveyard since he was an infant or maybe a toddler.

As you might have suspect, the ‘people’ in the graveyard raised him. He had the Owens as his foster parents and a mysterious man as his guardian. His parents raised him and his guardian took care of Bod’s needs to survive. Like bringing food and stuffs.

There are a few things I like in this book. It’s that Bod’s interactions with the graveyard inhabitants are natural! It might be that he never left the graveyard so it seems normal to him to talk to ghosts and stuffs. Besides that, he had lessons from them too! He had respective teachers to teach him about things that we normally didn’t learn in school. For example, types of people, how to Fade and stuff. By the end of the book, Bod even learned how to Dreamwalking! It’s where he walked into the other’s dream and projected his own thoughts to either terrify others or talk to them. 

I find it kind of sad at the end. As a living boy, Bod would need to leave the dead world to venture into the living world. Well, like most children books do, it teaches a child about growing up. You stepped out of your comfort zone and explore the world. The help from your family will be limited and you would need to take risks. From what I learnt from How to train your dragon books, growing up is really, a painful and bittersweet progress.

awww......... I'm still a bit ...sad about it. But, need to grow up!