Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close--Jonathon Safron Foer

Not only does our most recent poster TJ Huff recommend this book, but I also strongly urge you to read it. If I were to submit one of these silly lists this would be in the top-5 of my must read picks. After a year or two of TJ telling me I had to read Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close I finally broke down and bought it used off Amazon.com for $4.00. You can currently get it there at the amazingly low price of $3.05. Crazy!

It usually takes me a long time to read a book...like months. This isn't because I am stupid (it may be partially because I am stupid) or a slow reader. It just tends to take me a while to get involved in a book, and I end up reading most of them a few pages at a time over the course of a couple of months. This, however, is one of those books that as soon as I picked up I couldn't stop reading and ended up finishing it in two days. If you want a nice big-word explanation of the book you can check this summary out over at Wikipedia.

Basically it is the story of a boy named Oskar (I think he is 12, he might be 9, but I think 12, but maybe 9 now that I really think about it) dealing with the loss of his father who was killed in the Septemeber 11 attacks. He goes on a city-wide search (in NYC) looking for the owner of a key he found in his father's room. Now, the book has its share of very saddening moments as could be expected. As Oskar would say some of it makes you "wear heavy boots." But what I loved most about the book is how these sad parts are paired with funny...really funny, like some of the funniest things I have read in a book, like LOL funny, parts. The overall effect of this is what TJ calls happy-sad, or beautiful-sad...I'm sure everyone can think of an example of a happy-sad thing they love. Happy-sad is sort of the same as salty-sweet, which is why things like chocolate-covered pretzels are so good. It is also why life-long friend (and weirdo) Matthayes dips his french fries in his frosty when eating at Wendy's. A lot of songs are happy-sad, one of my favorites being Martha by Tom Waits, which you can check out here. Sad because what he's talking about is so depressing, but happy because the song is just so good. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is this same kind of thing. I urge fellow Friends Recommend readers to leave their favorite happy-sad things in comment form. I'm dying to know! I'll leave you with this excerpt from the second page of Extremely Loud:

My first jujitsu class was three and a half months ago. Self-defense was something that I was extremely curious about, for obvious reasons, and Mom thought it would be good for me to have a physical activity besides tambourining, so my first jujitsu class was three and a half months ago. There were fourteen kids in the class, and we all had on neat white robes. We practiced bowing, and then we were all sitting down Native American style, and then Sensei Mark asked me to go over to him. "Kick my privates," he told me. That made me feel self-conscious. "Excusez-moi?" I told him. He spread his legs and told me, "I want you to kick my privates as hard as you can." He put his hands at his sides, and took a breath in, and closed his eyes, and that's how I knew that he actually meant business. "Jose," I told him, and inside I was thinking, What the? He told me, "Go on, guy. Destroy my privates." "Destroy your privates?" With his eyes still closed he cracked up a lot and said, "You couldn't destroy my privates if you tried. That's what's going on here. This is a demonstration of the well-trained body's ability to absorb a direct blow. Now destroy my privates." I told him, "I'm a pacifist," and since most people my age don't know what that means, I turned around and told the others, "I don't think it's right to destroy people's privates. Ever." Sensei Mark said, "Can I ask you something?" I turned back around and told him "'Can I ask you something?' is asking me something." He said, "Do you have dreams of becoming a jujitsu master?" "No," I told him, even thought I don't have dreams of running the family jewelry business anymore. He said "Do you want to know how a jujitsu student becomes a jujitsu master?" "I want to know everything," I told him, but that isn't true anymore either. He told me "A jujitsu student becomes a jujitsu master by destroying his master's privates." I told him, "That's fascinating." My last jujitsu class was three and a half months ago.