(Time Warner Books, $29.99)This is going to be one of those beautiful books you nag your friends to read, assures the quote on the cover. Indeed, that’s how I got to hear about it, and now I’m nagging you to read it, too. Every now and then, a novel comes along that is just so original and heart-warming and quirky that you want everyone to get a piece of it.
The oemory of Running is one such delight. Smithson Ide is an unlikely hero. He is 43, fat and usually drunk. But when his much-beloved parents die in a car accident, something shifts inside Smithy’s idle porker body. And when he learns the whereabouts of his beautiful sister who disappeared more than 20 years before, something outside Smithy’s idle porker body shifts, too.
He gets on the trusty Raleigh bicycle he had as a kid and takes a wobbly ride around the old neighbourhood, and before he knows it, he’s gone further than he meant to. And he just keeps going. In fact, Smithy’s ride takes him from Providence, Rhode Island, on the East Coast of the US, clear across the country to Los Angeles.
Along the way, he gets hit by a car, mistaken for a vagrant and beaten up by the cops, but he is also shown acts of incredible kindness and discovers the joy of bananas.
oy mum was staying when I read this but I didn’t need to nag her even a little bit as she saw how much I loved it and picked it up the moment I put it down. “That lovely man,” she said of Smithy, when she finished it a couple of days later. “Such a klutz, always in the wrong place at the wrong time, but everything working out all right in the end.”
We agreed that we would nag all our friends until everyone we know has read this beautiful book.
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