The five people you meet in Heaven

As you all very well know, I've been trying to read through a list of books that have long been recommended to me by both friends and family (and BBC) as books you "have to read before you die". There are many great titles in that list, but only a few jewels that I would keep reading again and again. One of these jewels is "The five people you meet in Heaven" by Mitch Albom.

The book starts with the end. A strange place to start a story, perhaps, but as Albom says "All endings are also beginnings. We just don't know it at the time." The story tells us about Eddie - an old maintenance worker at Ruby Pier, an amusement park near the ocean, who dies on his eighty-third birthday while trying to save a young girl from a falling cart. Eddie awakens in the afterlife remembering nothing from his last seconds on Earth except that he felt two small hands in is. He has no idea whether he managed to save the girl or not and thoughts of whether his life was worth anything in the end torment him throughout the whole story. He soon realizes that Heaven is not at all like the Eden he had imagined it to be, but rather a place where your earthly life is explained to you by five people who were in it. Five people who's path you changed forever, or who might have changed yours likewise. Strangers and loved ones who wait for you in their own version of Heaven to tell you their story and give you a lesson to learn.

Throughout the book Eddie starts understanding what his life meant to those around him. Seeing more than one incident from another point of view helps him accept the things he could not come to terms with before and see things, and people, in a different light. In the end he realizes that the ordinary life he thought he had settled for was the one he was meant to lead all along.

I believe this book is one of the most powerful stories I have ever read. An ordinary man leading an ordinary life that touched so many others whom he never knew. It' s a story that inspires, a story that comforts and a one that stays with you for the rest of your life. I highly recommend reading this book. It's good one for the soul.

Wuthering Heights

Ok, so I have attempted to read this book online but failed miserably as the copy they have doesn't actually correspond to the real book. It jumps over chapters and there are misspellings and misprints everywhere, half of the sentences don't have endings and there are letters in some that just don't belong. So I went to my favorite bookstore to seek a hard copy, yet the only one they had had a Twilight-styled cover that said "Bella and Edward's favorite book, read the original now", and as I could not get myself to buy a book that has anything to do with Twilight I ordered a different copy which will hopefully arrive within a week. Meanwhile I have watched 3 different film adaptations of the book and can say right now that I much preferred the 1998 version to the 1992 and 2009 versions. I also found a song about it sung by Kate Bush. Never heard of her before but the song is good and I guess it helped her earn some money. Well well, as I remarked earlier she is not the only one taking advantage of this book's popularity.

Judging by the book

So today I spent at least 5 hours trying to understand these 2 chapters in the Bible that were just difficult to grasp. These were Judges, chapters 11 and 12. Can't say it was time wasted, but it was definitely very challenging and somewhat frustrating. When your Bible is a New-Norwegian translation and you are reading the old testament, things become very complicated in a matter of seconds. The language is just a bit...tricky, to say the least. Luckily I did not have to despair for long because of the great invention of the Internet!!! I googled the NIV version and read the chapters, but then a new problem arose. I just did not get it. Have you ever had that happen to you - one minute you are reading something and you understand everything and all is fine, and the next you're just lost and you can't seem to grasp anything? It's like you kind of know what it's saying but then again something isn't quite adding up and there seems to be a deeper meaning with all of it that you just don't get. Well, that's what happened to me anyway. Never mind all the people and places that have oh so difficult names (which I often seem to confuse...I always confuse city names with people names :S), but the random vow and the brutal sacrifice just don't fit in let alone make any sense.

Luckily the Internet had some answers for me. As did my pastor who happened so conveniently to be online when I was stuck with all these questions. At the end of the day I finally grasped some valuables from these chapters and here is what I learned:

1) Never make rash decisions or vow's. And whatever you do don't treat God as a vending machine saying if you give me this then I will... God knows what he wants from you and he will tell/ask whenever and whatever he sees fit

2) All can serve God, no matter what background you come from, what your relatives and family have done you are not them and it is up to you whether you are going to choose to serve God or not. He has a plan for everyone and he never puts anyone in "booths" of useful and useless. Therefore neither should we put each other in those booths, for none of us are better than others

3) If you are in a quarrel with someone, do not attack them with aguments and anger, you are then stooping to their level. In stead, try to show the other party their unreasonableness by calm explanation of your point of view, if the other person hears you then you can resolve the issue calmly and no one will come to harm.

4) Trust in God in all you do and ask for His advice. Only He knows all and will tell you what the right thing is. Doing it your way without consulting God is very silly and often you end up in a situation you could have easily avoided if you had just sought God's word and listened to Him in the first place.

The new and edited book list :)

Books I'm in posession of

Books I need to buy/borrow

Books I've read since I posted this

To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee

Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte

Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell

Complete Works of Shakespeare

Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier

Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk

Middlemarch - George Eliot

The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald

Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy

The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini

Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden

One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy

Atonement - Ian McEwan

Dune - Frank Herbert

Brave New World - Aldous Huxley

Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov

Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas

Moby Dick - Herman Melville

Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres

Life of Pi - Yann Martel

The Inferno – Dante

Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray

Possession - AS Byatt

Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell

The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom

Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

The Thorn Birds – Colleen McCullough

Идиот – Ф. Достоевский

Ревизор – Н. В. Гоголь

Золотой Телёнок – Ильф и Петров

A Farewell to Arms – E. Hemingway

Three Comrades – Erich Maria Remarque

The Splendors and Miseries of Courtesans - Honoré de Balzac

Hatter's Castle – A. J. Cronin

I play, do you?

Meaning nothing else than me finally finding a book store online with low prices and free delivery. Play.com is a really wonderfull internet site that allows you to find books, DVD's, music, clothing, electronic devices - pretty much everything you would ever want to purchase online - for the price and the condition of your choice. The dispatching time is usually within 48 hours of your purchase, and they send it wherever in the the world that you happen to be, free of charge :D

It is safe to say that I am completely in love with this site, as well as another pretty handy online book store - The book depository - which left me suprisingly satisfied with my new purchase of no less than 8 books from my reading list. Lovely titles such as I capture the castle, The five people you meet in heaven, The lovely bones and Wuthering Heights are awaiting my arrival in England at our new house (which I, of course, can hardly wait to move into). I am delighted beyond all imaginable when I think of the prospect of reading all those books!

Also I beg you to excuse my changed forms of writing. I have recently been engaged in reading The Woman in White, thus I have been influenced by its unmistakable writing style. It is the second book from my reading list and I expect to finish it my tomorrow.

(My reading list, as of now, consists of 36 books which I plan to read before the end of this year. The final list will be posted online after I have obtained most of the books, as well as updates on my progress in reading them.)

My new reading list

The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books here. How do your reading habits stack up?

I've read 32, and I plan on reading at least 30 more. The books I've read are marked green and the books I plan to read in the nearest future are marked blue ;)

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible (in entirety)
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens

11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot

21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame

31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma-Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne

41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan - No

51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville

71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Inferno – Dante
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt

81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton

91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

The Shadow of the Wind

The Shadow of the wind is a book you feel with all your being. The laughter, the suspense, the tragedy, all of it captures your soul and remains in your heart as though you yourself are in the story which dragges you into its dark alleyways of the spanish capital, slowly unfoldig the mysteries of the city and the life story of the brilliant author Julian Carax. I laughed, I cried, I was scared and suprised, and shook to my very core, all by this book.

This story is about a man's books and how they changed the lives of those who knew him and those who happened to realise the true value of his work. And also about a boy, who risked his own life so that the life of his favourite author would never be forgotten.

Short summary: One evening Daniel's father takes his 10 year old son to the "Cemetary of Forgotten Books" where he is allowed to pick out one book to take care of. By slim chance he picks out "The Shadow of the Wind" by the mysterious author Julian Carax. As time passes Daniel becomes more and more intrigued by the book and it's unknown writer. He discoveres that dark shadows lure in the streets of Barcelona, all trying to get a hold of his book for various reasons. As he begins to investigate Julian's past a story of great pain, love, jealousy and hatred unravels before him, sucking in him, and those who are close to him. What secrets will Daniel find while hunting this shadow of the wind?

If you haven't read this book I urge you to do so right away, the feeling it has left me with is undescribable, and yet it seems so familiar. It is the breathtaking feeling you get after reading a great book. One of those rare books that are really worth reading. A feeling well described in this book by the way, because it is, after all, first and foremoast a story about books and how they influence our lives.