Det här är ett enda långt hyllningsinlägg till en väldigt vacker bok.

Vissa är rädda om sina favoritböcker och vill hålla dem i så fint skick som möjligt. Det har jag aldrig riktigt förstått mig på. Böcker jag älskar läser jag sönder, jag viker taxöron på alla sidor jag vill minnas och går lös med bläckpennor för att markera mina favoritbitar. Som jag har gjort i Jonathan Sarfan Foers bok "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close". 

Och varför jag älskar den?

Första sidan

"WHAT THE?

What about a teakettle? What if the spout opened and closed when the steam came out, so it could become a mouth, and it could whistle pretty melodies, or do Shakespeare, or just crack up with me? I could invent a teakettle that reads in Dad's voice, so I could fall asleep, or maybe a set of kettles that sings the chorus of 'Yellow Submarine,' which is a song by the Beatles, who I love, because entomology is one of my raisons d'être, which is a French expression that I know. Another good thing is that I could train my anus to talk when I farted. If I wanted to be extremely hilarious, I'd train it to say 'Wasn't me!' every time I made an incredibly bad fart. And if I ever made an incredibly bad fart in the Hall of Mirrors, which is in Versailles, which is outside of Paris, which is in France, obviously, my anus would say, 'Ce n'étais pas moi!'

What about little microphones? What if everyone swallowed them, and they played the sounds of our hearts through little speakers, which could be in the pouches of our overalls? When you skateboard down the street at night you could hear everyone's heartbeat, and they could hear yours, sort of like a sonar. One weird thing is, I wonder if everyone's hearts would start to beat at the same time, like how women who live together have their menstrual periods at the same time, which I know about, but I don't really want to know about. That would be so weird, except that the place in the hospital where babies are born would sound like a crystal chandelier in a houseboat, because the babies wouldn't have had time to match up their heartbeats yet. And at the finish line at the end of the New York Marathon it would sound like war."

Några bitar

"So here is the point of everything I have been trying to say. If I were to give a bracelet to you, now, I would measure your wrist twice.

With love, 

Your grandmother"

"When I was a girl, my life was like music that was always getting louder. Everything moved me. A dog following a stranger. That made me feel so much. A calendar showing the wrong month. I could have cried over it. I did. Where the smoke from a chimney ended. How an overturned bottle rested at the edge of a table.

I spent my life learning to feel less.

Every day I felt less.

Is that growing old? Or is it something worse?

You cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness."

"Sometimes I imagined stitching all of our little touches together. How many hundreds of thousands of fingers brushing against each other does it take to make love? Why does anyone ever make love?"

"I had never told her how much I loved her.

She was my sister.

We slept in the same bed.

There where never a right time to say it.

It was always unnecessary.

The books in my father's shed was sighing.

The sheets were rising and falling around me with Anna's breathing.

I thought about waking her.

But it was unnecessary.

There would be other nights.

How can you say I love you to someone you love?

I rolled onto my side and fell asleep next to her.

Here is the point of everything I've been trying to tell you, Oskar.

It's always necessary.

I love you,

Grandma"

"I probably fell asleep but I don't remember. I cried so much that everything blurred into everything else. At some point she was carrying me to my room. Then I was in bed. She was looking over me. I don't believe in God, but I believe that things are extremely complicated, and her looking over me was as complicated as anything ever could be. But it was also incredibly simple. In my only life, she was my mom, and I was her son

I told her, 'It's OK if you fall in love again'".

Baksidetexten

In a vase in a closet, a couple of years after his father died in 9/11, nine-year-old Oskar discovers a key.

The key belonged to his father, he's sure of that. But which of New York's 162 million locks does it open?

So begins a quest that takes Oskar - inventor, letter-writer and amateur detective - across New York's five boroughs and into the jumbled lives of friends, relatives and complete strangers. He gets heavy boots, he gives himself little bruises and he inches ever nearer to the heart of a family mystery that stretches back fifty years. But will it take him closer to, or even further from, his lost father?

I grund och botten tror jag bra saker om människor och kärlek och när jag börjar bli för cynisk och tänka i fyrkant så kan det hjälpa att läsa böcker som den här. 

Och så är den bra att ha till hands om jag helt enkelt vill läsa en otroligt vacker och välskriven bok.