#1,499 Beautiful Ruins.

I finally felt 100% today! Woohoo! I ate well, had lots of energy, took the dogs for a walk, back to the grind. Thank goodness it wasn’t the flu.

I had a hard time falling asleep last night so I stayed up late into the night finishing Beautiful Ruins and I just can’t recommend it enough to you. It was so, SO good. You should know that the cover is meant to be ironic, I think—it’s a book mostly about men, written by a man. The cover is clever in that it makes you think “Oh! What an easy and fun chick lit read!” but what you get is a story that is dark, honest, and beautiful about what it means to really love and sacrifice, and most of all I think the cover is about life the way you imagined it would be instead of the way it actually was.

I couldn’t stop thinking of it all day, how I’m going to miss the characters. Do you ever feel that way when you finish a good book? I’ve never stopped thinking of Susie from The Lovely Bones, or Florentino and Fermina from Love in the Time of Cholera, or Hadley from The Paris Wife. It’s like they were all real people I met at some point in my life who had a great impact on me—though now I’ve lost their contacts. I can’t get back in touch with them. I can tell that Dee and Pasquale will be hanging around in my mind for a while too, now.

Are there any books you love that I need to know about? Next up, the book Ben gave me this Christmas called The Tenth of December. I hear it’s wonderful.