Reading Night

Alright, so apparently if I don't click the "publish" button, my blog posts don't get published. What a shocker.

You see, I wrote a post a few days ago and it vanished from existence because I neither published nor saved it. The thing I wrote about is no longer topical. Darn.

Maybe I should talk more about school. This blog is focused on the life of a high school student. The problem is that it's hard to write about school without boring people.

We recently finished Night by Elie Wiesel in English. It's a very short book, only about a hundred pages depending on which copy you got. But man, those hundred pages have so much emotion in them.

This shouldn't be much of a shock, but I loved this book. As an avid reader, it's very rare to find a book I was required to read that I truly didn't like. I would recommend Night, however I feel that I must put a disclaimer: this book is very very sad. It's a memoir about Wiesel's adolescent years going through the Holocaust. This book might make you cry. It made me cry.

It was very well written. He used a lot of fragmented sentences where just a single word grabbed hold of you and made you think. I circled the word "night" every time I could. Very appropriately named. The themes were so powerful: losing faith, holding on despite everything, the bond between father and son. It gripped my attention.

Like I said, it made me cry. There are many publications and translation variations of Night. Most of my peers owned the most recent one which had certain parts and paragraphs omitted. My copy, however, was published in the 1980s (I think) and on the copyright page, it literally says that not a single thing was taken out of the book. It was the raw emotion version of Night.

I remember one night while reading I actually had to place my bookmark in the book, set it down, and take a break. It had a very deep affect on me. You can research facts and statistics about the Holocaust, but nothing will touch you the way first-hand knowledge does.

Again, I would definitely recommend it because it was incredible, but be warned: it was very, very sad. I'd like to meet Elie Wiesel. I'd also like to get my hands on Dawn, the sequel.

Hannah Renea