Books for people who love books

Over the past couple months, I’ve been making my way through the Inkheart trilogy by Cornelia Funke. Although these are marketed as children’s books, I would venture to say they aren’t for children, but they are excellent. I haven’t finished the last book yet, entitled Inkdeath, but so far it’s the same quality as the others. The premise is that there are people in the world who can literally bring the written word to life with their voices. The catch is that when something or someone is brought into this world from a book, something or someone from this world becomes trapped in that book as a trade-off. The nightmarish turn bringing a book to life takes reminds me of a scene from another great book, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, where Caspian and crew come across one of the lost Lords on the island where dreams come true. Initially the crew thinks that’s awesome, but quickly realize the true horror of it.
An overarching theme of the series is the power of words to change lives, individually and across nations. There is also just the plot of the story, which I’d say is later Harry Potter novels levels of dark, but with American mild cursing and implied sex. There’s death, violence, and hurt, which mostly stems from the use and misuse of the power of words.
Something I think is brilliant stylistically is that the author uses quotes from literature and poetry at the opening of every chapter, which communicates her own respect for the power words can have. She’s also German, which doesn’t surprise me because these fairy tales are much more in the style of the Brothers Grimm than of Disney.
One of the most tragic scenes in the story involves book-burning. If you’ve never been friends with a book, you won’t understand why, but if books come alive when you read them, I guarantee this scene will haunt you. If you’re a fan of Harry Potter I think you will like these as well. If you love books, you will get even more out of these than if you just love an adventure story.
The movie version, btw, was terrible.