The Book Thief

After three days of heavy walking I decided to focus on work today. I’d accumulated a lot of emails and my employer is strongly encouraging us to take part in an online event to shape the companies future identity and I wanted to spend a couple of hours on that.

I’d planned to walk along the river into Carlisle and then spend a few hours in Caffe Nero, but after a bit of research I decided that the river walk looked very badly maintained so I decided to just do my walking around Carlisle centre itself.

I did go to Caffe Nero though, in fact I went twice for two hours each time and I took my laptop and got everything done that I needed to, I’m now in good shape for staring back at work on Monday.

I was surprised that I still managed to walk 8 miles today and without any pain from my knee.  I’ve been icing the knee each night and taking MSM. Although there’s no real evidence that it helps lots of people swear by it and it doesn’t do any harm to give it a go as the only thing most everyone agrees is that it’s safe.

By late afternoon though I had spent enough time in Caffe Nero, done enough walking and shopping’s lost any interest for me now that I can’t buy anything so I had to decide between Cinema and Museum.  Cinema won and I went to see the Book Thief, which didn’t get great reviews, but looked sumptuous, just the sort of film I like.

On balance I liked it, whilst there wasn’t much story to tell, the story that there was needed more time. The culture of the time, the characters and the powerful emotions needed more time to do them justice.  I’d like to have seen more:

• details of Liesel Meminger’s early life
• development of the angel of death character, which really didn’t work well in the few minutes it was given
• evidence of the threat that the Hubermann’s felt in harbouring Max

As it was the film was a cross between Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl and perhaps more strongly the movie Titanic.  As in Titanic you have the young girl as the focus of the story, an impending sense of doom, young love, a ‘sole’ survivor and the closing scenes of a life well lived by the young girl.  Even though it was predictable I still shed a tear at the end.  I particularly liked the design of the room that they panned around in the last few frames, it was a room that had the best of old and new, had been cherished and lived in.  I want to grow old in a room like that.