Edited 25 April to add:
I finished this book last Sunday. After adjusting to the weekend and being able to sleep in a bit past my usual 6 am alarm, I always have trouble getting to sleep on Sunday nights. I should know better than to pick up a good book, which always makes turning off the light and saying goodbye to another weekend even more difficult. But I just had to finish The Book Thief. Given the subject matter, I don't think it would be too much of a spoiler to mention that I wept, deeply wept, as I finished the last few pages. A couple of passages stuck with me:
"For fifteen minutes, she walked alone, and even when Rudy arrived at her side with jogging breath and sweaty cheeks, not another word was said for more than an hour. They only walked home together with aching feet and tired hearts. There was a chapter called 'Tired Hearts' in A Song in the Dark. A romantic girl had promised herself to a young man, but it appeared that he had run away with her best friend. Liesel was sure it was chapter thirteen. 'My heart is so tired,' the girl had said. She was sitting in a chapel writing in her diary. No, thought Liesel as she walked. It's my heart that is tired. A thirteen-year-old heart shouldn't feel like this."
"Often, I wonder what page she was up to when I walked down Himmel Street in the dripping-tap rain, five nights later. I wonder what she was reading when the first bomb dropped from the rib cage of a plane. Personally, I like to imagine her looking briefly at the wall, at Max Vandenburg's tightrope cloud, his dripping sun, and the figures walking toward it. Then she looks at the agonizing attempts of her paint-written spelling. I see the Fuhrer coming down the basement steps with his tied-together boxing gloves hanging casually around his neck. And the book thief reads, rereads, and rereads her last sentence, for many hours...I have hated the words and I have loved them, and I hope I have made them right."
