The Lovely Bones

Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones is a book my buddy Julian kept trying to get me to read. It's about a teenage girl - raped and then murdered - who narrates the book from a sort of "heaven" as she watches her family survive, live, love, in the wake of her death.

I put off reading this for as long as possible, because I was in South Africa, and with rape all over the news and being talked about all the time in your academic circles, the last thing you want to do is to spend your free time reading about it.

But it's a damn good book.

Sebold herself is a rape survivor, which makes it even tougher to read, but it's worth every damn ounce of your time.

And I am ecstatic to hear that Peter Jackson & co. have optioned rights for the movie version.

They'll do it justice.