2nd Favorite Novel of All Time

Just thinking about my second favorite book of all time suddenly has me so eager to read it again that as soon as we move (next week) and get our stuff out of storage, this is going to be the first book that I break open.

The book is "A Prayer For Owen Meany" by John Irving, and if you love reading fiction and you haven't read it . . . FOR THE LOVE OF GOD GO OUT AND BUY THIS BOOK.

Ever feel like your life has no purpose? In this book you'll meet a character who knows the date that he will die, and he lives his life in a way that every experience is preparing him for this final purpose-filled event.

The book is written in the first person, and the narrator's best friend is a strange little fellow named Owen Meany. The book begins with this reflection:

"I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice. Not because of his voice, or because he was the smallest person I ever knew, or even because he was the instrument of my mother's death, but because he is the reason I believe in God. I am a Christian because of Owen Meany."

There are so many interweaving storylines and characters and events that I won't even attempt to summarize it, but the following are some quotes from the book:

"If you care about something you have to protect it – If you’re lucky enough to find a way of life you love, you have to find the courage to live it."

"When someone you love dies, and you're not expecting it, you don't lose her all at once; you lose her in pieces over a long time -- the way the mail stops coming, and her scent fades from the pillows and even from the clothes in her closet and drawers. Gradually, you accumulate the parts of her that are gone. Just when the day comes -- when there's a particular missing part that overwhelms you with the feeling that she's gone, forever -- there comes another day, and another specifically missing part."

And a quote that I have to include due to the tv-less state of my life right now:

"If watching television doesn't hasten death, it surely manages to make death very inviting; for television so shamelessly sentimentalizes and romanticizes death that it makes the living feel they have missed something - just by staying alive."

Next Thursday, my favorite novel of all time.