I just recently read, “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn”, a book that has been on my book self for about four years. My grand daughter was giving away her books she was require to read in high school. Never reading this book I added it to my books to read. Every time I went to my bookshelf to choose something to read another book jumped out at me so I never got around to reading “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn”.
Last week I found myself needing a book to read and the only one left on my shelf was this one. I started to read and found I could not put it down. It has to be one of my all time favorite books I’ve ever read.
It’s a simple story about the life of an impoverished immigrant family in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. It is about their struggles and their accomplishments. It is about their humanness. It was the right book for me to read at the perfect time.
I am so discouraged today with people’s lack of humanness. I cannot believe the division in our country, the caustic behavior and lack of dignity in people today. People in government no longer work together for the greater good of our country. Countries rather fight then work together to server the better good of their citizens.
I long for the time when families struggled to give one another a better life. A time when everyone in the family did whatever was necessary to help their family survive or have a better life. A time when children weren’t bored because they all played together, talked with each other, used their imagination to create.
This book took me back to a time when we were more human and more tolerant.
Another book I loved was “A Man called Ove.”
This book made me cackle out load! Ove is a 59 year old widower who wants to kill himself because he is depressed after his wife has died. Ove is ill-tempered and unfriendly and doesn’t like the boisterous new neighbors who have moved next door to him in his neighborhood. Ove is an isolated retiree who spends his days enforcing block association rules as he sees them. Through the association with his new neighbors an unlikely friendship develops and what emerges is a heartwarming tale and the realization that life is sweeter when it’s shared.
The Third book that I have recently read and adored is, “All the Light We Cannot See.”
This book won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and also the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction in 2015. It is set in France during World War II about a blind girl and her father who works as a locksmith at the Museum of natural History. It’s about a French girl and a German boy whose paths cross in Occupied France.
It illuminates the ways people try to be good to one another.
All three of these books give me hope that there can be a better tomorrow!
What books can you recommend that will show how our world can be more tolerant and compassionate?
Katy is Eighty 