A must read

I recently finished a really great book that's pretty relevant to next week's headlining news - the five-year anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. It didn't tell the story of the people in the towers, the passengers on the planes, the firefighters who responded or the government's response. It took a subtler, but just as powerful approach. "Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close," by Jonathan Safran Foer, follows 9-year-old Oskar Schell throughout New York City on a secret mission: to find the lock that matches a key owned by his father, who died in the World Trade Center. This fictional story is definitely a tearjerker. Oskar, a super intelligent outcast who is constantly inventing devices in his head, writes letters to Stephen Hawking and calls vaginas "VJs," keeps a box of "things that have happened to me," including successive photos of a man jumping from the towers. As he wanders through the city, he meets a cast of characters just as strange, each with their own pain. His humor and bluntness is both uplifting and sad, and a look at how Sept. 11 might have affected those who were left behind.