ŷ������

Rest in peace, Carlos, and thank you for your books, I will treasure them for the rest of my life:

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This is a book about books and the people who love them.

I picked it up randomly when I worked at a bookstore: I was making one last pile of books to buy with my employee discount before starting my first “adult�� job. It had a cool cover, so I plopped it on the pile. It took months before I got around to reading it; I finally did one evening when I was alone in my first apartment. I felt lonely and lost, so grabbed something from my pile of unread books�� and a few pages in, I was no longer lonely or lost. I was in a dark, gritty, gorgeous city, full of beautiful but shifty people, whose passions were about to take me on a very Gothic journey of secrets, forbidden love and vengeance.

When Daniel first visits the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, he picks up an obscure novel by Julian Carax: “The Shadow of the Wind��. Enchanted by the book, he decides to go and find the author’s other works only to discover that a mysterious man has been tracking down every copy of Carax’s books to burn them. Daniel refuses to surrender his copy and thus begins a race against the strange man to find out the truth about Julian Carax, and to understand why someone would want to destroy every trace of his existence.

I wish I could read Spanish, because if the prose managed to be this beautiful translated to English, I think it would take my breath away in the original language. I feel like Zafon was having so much fun writing this, because the writing flows with a palpable joy, even when it describes terrible, dark turns of event. The atmosphere swallowed me whole, and I quickly forgot to be annoyed by the two-dimensional female characters (who are really there to give the male characters a motive to do whatever it is they will do, and as such, are more plot devices than characters per se) or the uncanny coincidences, but then again, it is a neo-Gothic novel��

This book made me laugh and cry and feel like my chest would burst with all the emotions it made me feel. The main character is still so young, and he feels things with the raw intensity of youth, and it bleeds off the page, straight under the reader’s skin. It also expressed the unabashed love of books that I have had almost my entire life, more beautifully than I could have ever done myself.

I lose track of the amount of people I have recommended this book to. I usually tell them it’s one of the most beautiful things I have ever read. Maybe because it reaffirmed my old belief that one is never truly alone when holding a good book? In any case, it is one of my all-time favorite books, that I will probably go to again and again, when I am in need for luscious prose and brutally intense emotions.