2014 Book #1: The Graveyard Book – Shelf It.
Many years ago, before I stumbled onto Instagram, I dived headlong into Tumblr. I like Tumblr. I like that it allows you to have multiple blogs. One can hide behind different pseudonyms, and each one can have different “streams of consciousness“. Oh, and to think that I have neglected it for many years now. Perhaps I should go back to it and blog there anonymously…
I followed a few young ones in Tumblr who were Neil Gaiman fans. I wasn’t. Who is he anyway? Why does he have rock star status to his adoring female fans? I, ever so curious of new things, looked up this male author. I have not met a male fan yet! (Let me know if you are) So anyway, in one of our Kinokuniya Bookstore excursions, the hubby and I bought a couple of hardcover Neil Gaiman books.
‘Face your lifeIts pain, its pleasure,Leave no path untaken’ – Neil Gaiman, The Graveyard Book
The Graveyard Book
If you are a fan of Stephen King, you will think this novel to be a little childish. Well, it should be, it is categorised as a “children’s fantasy novel”. The large letters and the huge amount of white space in each page (read: spacing) will unhinge you. It certainly did me. Although unhinge may be too dramatic a word. Let’s use…off-putting instead!
Then I started enjoying the random illustrations which were dark and sombre. The story is about a boy whose family was brutally killed in their own home while sleeping. The little toddler managed to crawl away from the house not because there was an intruder but simply because he wanted to crawl his way into an adventure. As most toddlers do. They lived in a house right beside a graveyard. The baby crawled his way into the safety of the graveyard ghosts, where the killer could not find him.
So the story goes that this boy who was named Nobody Owens or Bod grew up living with the dead and was allowed the “Freedom of the Graveyard”.
I quite enjoyed each dead character who were all alive in Bod’s world. My favourite was Silas, Bod’s guardian, neither dead nor alive. A vampire perhaps. It was fascinating how Gaiman transported me into a cemetery. There was a whole new world of characters from different eras ranging from The Emperor of China to Victor Hugo!
There was passport in his bag, money in his pocket. There was a smile dancing on his lips, although it was a wary smile, for the world is a bigger place than a little graveyard in the hill; and there would be dangers in it and mysteries, new friends to make, and old friends to rediscover, mistakes to be made and many paths to be walked before he would, finally, return to the graveyard or ride with the Lady on the broad back of her great grey stallion. But between now and then, there was Life; and Bod walked into it with his eyes and his heart wide open. – The End of the Book where Bod finally ventured into the world of the living.