the five people you meet in heaven

As mentioned in the previous post, I had decided to try to read as many of the 100 books listed in Waterstones '25 year celebration' booksellers' choice.

The first one is: "the five people you meet in heaven" by Mitch Albom.

This was a very pleasant 'one-sitting' read - nicely written, but with no great or profound insights. The ideas are of the 'every ending is also a beginning', 'all our lives are connected' and 'the only wasted time is the time thinking we are alone' variety.

Things I liked: The 'Whrrsssssh' of the waves breaking on the beach; that he (i.e. Eddie, the central character of the book) loved his wife; and that he did not hve children of his own.

Things to keep you reading: Did he save the child from the falling "Freddy's Free Fall" (a funfair ride at Ruby's Pier)?; What happened with Marguerite (his first true love)?; and Was there a child in the burning building?

In my opinion, the main weakness of the book was that it centred only on 'life-and-death' issues, while, in reality, our lives are shaped as strongly by smaller tragedies and joys. Perhaps it was also slightly forced that so many of the events occurred on Eddie's birthdays.

Would definitely not be on my personal top 100 of all time, but can see why it made it onto the Waterstones list.

25 Years in Books

At the moment, Waterstones are celebrating their 25 th year and are calling readers to vote for the favourite out of 100 books published in the last 25 years.

Of these 100 books, I had only read 23! And 8 of those were books that I really did not like all that much.

Anyway. I voted for my favourite from the list (Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke) and decided that I would try to read as many of the books on the list as possible!

While I am sure that most of the books on this list are excellent, I was surprised that there were NO books by:
PD James,
Patricia Cornwell,
Kathy Reichs,
Steven King,
Jostein Gaarder,
Alexander McCall Smith, or
Jacqueline Wilson

My favourite book written in the last 25 years: 'How to be good' by Nick Hornby was also not there and neither were 'We need to talk about Kevin' (Lionel Shriver) and 'Death and the penguin' (Andrey Kurkov).

Armed, with the list, I went to my local library, and I made the following observation:
Most of the books in the library were not on that list. I hypothesise two reasons for this:
(1) Even though books are being published at an ever increasing rate, most of the books out there were written more than 25 years ago.
(2) People borrow newer, good books preferentially over old favourites.