Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

by Jonathan Safran Foer

I started reading this book because Amazon.com kept recommending it to me, and it was one of the few books at the library that I recognized and was pretty sure wouldn't be as disappointing as ones I'd previously gotten from there.

It's about a boy whose father died on September 11th. I wasn't sure I wanted to read about that. But then I thought maybe I should read about it, and that was enough to get me started on it. I just finished it, and just got off the phone with my mother, telling her to go out and buy this book and read it, because I don't know what to think of it by myself.

I really liked this book, once I got into the rhythm of it (which took about 50 pages, maybe 75). Really, really liked it. Another book I was sad to end, but it's a book that I'll keep thinking about for awhile.

It's about how you keep going on after a tragedy. It's about trying to understand what legacy you've been left, and even the one that you're leaving. It's about the ways that people cope with a mutual loss. And it pulls in all sorts of other man-made disasters. It made me think of a heart that has been broken and put back together many times, and never in the same way as before. Of that old thing about how if something is perfect than it could never change, because if it were perfect than changing could only make it less perfect, but then there are things like the ocean that are always changing but could be considered perfect. On the other hand, maybe they're not perfect, and that's why they can change, and what's so desirable about being perfect anyway. Sigh.

"Only a few months into our marriage, we started marking off areas in the apartment as "Nothing Places," in which one could be assured of complete privacy, we agreed that we never would look at the marked-off zones, that they would be nonexistent territories in the apartment inwhich one could temporarily cease to exist, the first was in the bedroom by the foot of the bed we marked it off with red tape on the carpet, and it was just large enough to stand in, it was a good place to disappear, we knew it was there but we never looked at it, it worked so well tha twe decided to create a Nothing Place in the living room, it seemed necessary, because there are times when one needs to disappear while in the living roome and sometimes one simply wants to disappear... It became difficult to navigate trom Something to Something without accidentally walking through Nothing, and when Something - a key, a pen, a pocketwatch - was accidentally left in a Nothing Place, it nevr could be retrieved, that was an unspoken rule, like nearly all of our rules have been. There came a point, a year or two ago, when our apartment was more Nothing than Something... The longer your mother and I lived together, the more we took each other's assumptions for granted, the less was said, the more misunderstood"

"All I wanted was to fall asleep that night, but all I could was invent.
What about frozen planes, which could be safe from heat-seeking missles?
What about subway turnstiles that were also radiation detectors?
What about incredibly long ambulances that connected every building to a hospital?
What about parachutes in fanny packs?
What a about cuns with sensors in the handles that could detect if you were really angry, and if you were, they wouldn't fire, even if you were a police officer?
What about Kevlar overalls?
Whata bout skyscrapers with moving parts, so they could rearrange themselves when they had to, and even open holes in their middles for planes to fly through?
What about...
What about...
What about...?