To Elvis, With Love

Over the past 12 months I've written down every single book I've read, books for school and books for pleasure, everything. The total is 48. That works out to 4 books a month. I'm not entirely sure if I'm impressed with that (which in all honesty is 1 book a weekish) or disappointed. I think, when I break it down, I'm impressed that even with everything else going on, I still managed to read 48 books in 12 months. I guess writing down each and every book I've read reminded me how much I love reading.
I won't post the list but I will mention a few that I enjoyed.
The Mortal Instruments, Infernal Devices, Vampire Academy and Harry Potter were a number of my favourites even if half of them I'd read a number of times before. I also really enjoyed Letters from the Inside which Hannah leant me, mostly because it was written in such a different format to anything else I'd ever read (not that I'd expect anything else from the man who gave us 10 books of Ellie's point of view) as it's written entirely in letters between two girls. Like everything John Marsden writes, it really hits you hard.

Probably my favourite book was To Elvis With Love by Lena Canada. I heard of it while on one of my procrasta-Googling sprees reading about Elvis. It's a true story about a girl with cerebral plasy and all she wants is to be friends with Elvis who is her idol and, essential, her reason for living.

They made it into a movie too but I haven't seen it and I don't want to. Some things, some stories, only books can tell just as some stories only movies can tell.
I learnt the first as a reader and the second as a writer. I will always infinitely prefer books to movies because of the depth of the stories they can tell even though on occasions Movies do a fantastic job also.

To Elvis With Love, is an old book, not only in print but the copy I have is old. It was published in 1978 and I think it's gone out of print because I struggled to find it and ended up with a worn and battered second hand copy off eBay. I wondered, as I read through its yellowed pages, was it worn with love or with neglect? Had there been a teenage girl who'd read this book over and over like I've read Harry Potter? Or perhaps an elderly lady who remembers Elvis' death but also his life when she read this book annually? Or maybe even a young man, enthralled by Elvis like my Dad has always been, who read it more than once?
Or perhaps this book wasn't loved at all, maybe it was lost, hidden and discarded at the bottom of a box, shoved carelessly at the bottom of a shelf before it finally ended up in a second hand bookstore and came to me.
All I know is I'm glad it did because it's quite a beautiful story, not just because it shows the King of Rock and Roll as a human being but because it shows the power of love and hope. Read it.

Lena Canada manages to express things in such a perfect way that I only strive for. My favourite quote is: A mother is supposed to be so many things that she does not always have the power or ability to be.
How true. How many things is a mother each day? Hundreds. Cook, cleaner, maid, seamstress, teacher, chauffeur, coach, the list is infinite and a mother's job never ends, we all know this but I doubt I ever could have articulated it as well as Lena Canada did.

Maybe the reason why I love this book so much is because it's written the way I want to write. The same thing happened when I read Regeneration in year 12, I love that book because Pat Barker's narrative voice is like mine, or at least how I'd like mine to be.
I admire other authors as well, J.K. Rowling, J.R.R. Tolkein, C.S. Lewis, but more for their creativity than how they write. I'm in awe of how they can weave words together to create a world so different to ours but the words they use, the way they put sentences together, on occasion it strikes me but for the most part it's just a means to an end.

This book didn't make me cry like I expected it to. I knew Karen was going to die and I thought for sure it would make me tear up, then she died and...I was sad, of course, but no tears. Then the writer started talking about how she was writing down Karen's story and she finally wanted Elvis (and the rest of the world) to get the whole thing. Just when she had it all written down and sent to a publisher she got a phone call.
"Did you hear about Elvis?"
"What?"
"He died."
"What? No! He can't have died! I haven't told him about Karen yet!"

Then came probably the most heartbreaking line of the book: "Perhaps now, at last, Karen will get to meet him."

And end scene.