I've never really experienced the death of a person close to me. My grandmother is the most recent relative that passed away but I hadn't seen her in 10 years when she died.
Which actually makes me feel awful that her death didn't impact me that much because she practically raised me from age 0 to 8 before she moved back to Korea. That's really disturbing. My lack of grief grieves me more than the actual cause of grief. It's times like these I wonder if I'm a terrible person.
... Anyway, let's leave the psychological probing for later. The reason I bring this up is that I finished The Dogs of Babel and the whole book is about grieving, and coping, and moving on. Although a certain heaviness pervades the entire story (after all, someone dies in the first chapter) I found the ending to be ultimately positive.
It reminds me of The Lovely Bones, and quite honestly The Lovely Bones is better (Peter Jackson's next project!!). But Dogs of Babel is a little less grisly (no little girl victims) and a little more weird (talking dogs as a central obsession).
Because of my lack of experience with death, I don't know how *accurate* these books are in portraying the process of grieving, but if a mark of a good story is having an unapologetic spark of truth in them, I'd recommend them both.
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And now to lighten the mood, check out 25 Sesame Street Memories. Reading these made me so happy!
