Nineteen Minutes

I've just read Jodi Picoult's Nineteen Minutes. I don't think I ever went through 579 pages so quickly in my life. I read through Wednesday afternoon and evening, and again on Thursday morning, until I was finished. I did answer the phone when it rang, but I didn't do much else!

Like all Picoult's books I've read so far, this is centered around a family, with some traumatic events, the involvement of the law, and a good (but not totally unpredictable) twist at the end. It was a very interesting subject, how a bullied teenager ends up going into school one day and killing 10 people. I found the depiction of his parents very insightful. Peter, the killer, is chilling in parts, but human in others. I would hate to be a teenager in this day and age - the expectation that you have to conform, the bullying, the in-crowd. There was none of that when I grew up. In secondary school, I wasn't part of the in-crowd for the first 3 years, but then I changed class (I gave up Latin) and got on great with everybody - we were all very different, style-wise and in academic ability, but we had a great time together. I don't think anybody was left out or bullied. The girls in Latin-Maths and Latin-Greek were a bit more posh, but we just ignored them, by and large.

There are lots of gems in the book, that make it feel real - for instance, one of the characters is an economics professor who has developed the "happiness equation": happiness equals reality divided by expectations. So, if you earn €50,000 a year when you only expected to earn €25,000, your happiness level is pretty good. Reality - 50,000; Expectation - 25,000. Result = 2. If you expected to earn €100,000, the result of the equation is 0.5. Not so good. Or if you expect a perfect sunny day, and it's partially cloudy, your happiness level is not great. On the other hand, if you were expecting a downpour, and the rain clears to give a cloudy - but dry - day, you're all happy! It's quite neat, isn't it? And the best part is that, apparently, it's all real.

Oh, and My Sister's Keeper is coming out in movie format in June. Definitely one to go and see with Lucinda - the two of us will need plenty of tissues! There is a trailer on the website - it looks just like I expected it, except Alec Baldwin is a bit too old to play the lawyer, well not the handsome one I had imagined anyway!