I normally find myself getting tripped up and lost in a sea of potential choices when someone asks me what my favorite film or song is, and how can you blame me? There are so many good contenders out there. However, the one consistent and solid answer I can give for an icebreaker or a curious inquirer is my favorite book.
In 8th grade, I was assigned what I now consider to be the best piece of literature I have ever laid my eyes upon: Mark Zusak’s “The Book Thief.” The book takes place during the onset of World War II where the protagonist, Liesel Meminger, is taken in by a foster family who finds themselves at the center of Germany’s political turmoil as air raids and the loss of Jewish friends plague their lives.
Whether or not you know a lot about wars, the book finds its true value in the way that it can emphasize the true brute strength of words. Conflicts in history, especially on levels as devastating as the Holocaust, are presumably fought with fancy weapons and guns. While that may be true to an extent, the story proposes the idea that words could be a force equally as destructive. Zusak makes mention of the fact that Hitler was never one to raise a gun in this war, he merely planted the seeds of his hateful, intolerant words until they grew into a nation of farmed thought.
The first time I read it, I felt more sadness than anything, but what drew me back in was the opposing consideration. While it is true that words have the power to destroy, and that’s exactly what Hitler used them to do, they can also be used to create change. Liesel Meminger is a book thief, she saves a great deal of people with the words off pages of a story she stole from an old woman. Later, she begins to write her own words and thoughts amid the ugliness of the world around her to preserve her own life.
I don’t like to claim that this book is what pushed me to become a journalism major because there certainly was an array of confounding factors that inspired me to enter the world of COM. However, what this book did give me was my love for words. At 14, I learned a rather harsh way, the weight that words carry. These little semantics can both tear something down, and build it right back up. Words can disband, they can unify, they can strengthen, they can kill. What changes the outcome of how words impact us is how they are used.
Zusak closes the book with this eloquent quote: “I have hated words and I have loved them, and I hope I made them right.” Words are difficult to articulate, verbalize, and compose, but when they do arrive, we get to witness in real-time the influence they possess.
