Markus Zusak

Have you read The Book Thief? Because you need to. You really really need to. I first read it a few years ago and was so impressed with the writing, the story, the creativity in choosing to have Death narrate the book. I read it again (and listened to it on cd) a few months ago when my book club read it--I was impressed once more. In short, it is the story of a girl in World War II Germany and the book is narrated by Death--not creepy death, but a sympathetic death who is haunted by the actions and qualities of humans. It's a fantastic book.

And last weekend I met the author, Markus Zusak.

I live in Boise and he came to the Provo Library. I heard he was coming through a friend of mine and told Tim about it. He said, "You should have your mom go and get a book signed for you." Huh. I politely explained to Tim that Markus is from Australia and that Provo is only 6 hours away and The Book Thief is one of my favorite books, and I really think it would be best if we made a family trip to Utah that weekend so that I could meet him in person. Tim may have noticed the slightly maniacal gleam in my eye because he quickly agreed that we could do that. So we did.

My brother, Kevin, and his lovely wife, Nicole, got up early on a Saturday morning to wait in line for my 4 precious tickets to this event. I went with my mom, my sister, Emma, and my sis-in-law, Nicole, to the library at the early time of 4:30 (this proves a fortunate choice later in my tale). We got in line and were allowed in at 5:00. We grabbed some great seats in the middle and only a few rows from the front and settled in to wait until 6:00. We visited, took pics with our books, and then I spotted my old roommate, Jenny Lynn, and we caught up and smiled a lot because we are both book nerds and this is just our kind of thing. Hooray for fellow book nerds!

Then Markus came out and holy cow! He is cute. He is young. His accent his wonderful, and he gave the BEST talk/lecture. I know it sounds cheesy, but the room was just filled with this feel good vibe because we were all so happy to be there and he was so happy to be there and there was just this huge amount of love going back and forth between him and the audience that night. In a few weeks, the library is going to put the whole thing up on their website so that all of you can watch it--and you should totally watch it. Really. But until then, here are some highlights you can read. Miss Nemesis took great notes.

After Markus finished speaking, he left to go to the book signing room. Groups of 25 were let in to have their books signed. This is where getting to the library early really paid off because we were assigned to the second group and I think there were at least 12-15 groups. It wasn't long before it was our turn so we got up and went to the signing room and stood in line for awhile. This is when we realized something: Markus Zusak was in absolutely no hurry. He was talking to everyone who came by, he was writing notes in their books. Holy cow. They said no posed pictures but we were able to snap a few while he was signing our books. I asked him about the pictures in the book while he was writing and he said that they had been drawn by a friend of his without any direction from him. He said that the friend had drawn Max as a bird because she feels more comfortable drawing animals than people. He also said that he had to really fight to have the pictures included in the book and now he feels vindicated by how successful the book with the pictures included, is.

He wrote personal notes to each one of us and we left feeling like it had been one of the best nights ever. Really, it was so wonderful. I found out later that he was there until around 1:30 in the morning meeting his fans and signing their books.

Isn't that amazing?