Run by Daisy Whitney at daisywhitney.com

When I was on girls getaway vacation in Mexico two years ago I finished reading Water for Elephants on the beach one afternoon. I read the last line, closed the book, and immediately picked up the next book I had with me and started reading The Next Thing on My List. My girlfriend Michelle gave me a shocked look. How could I move on so quickly — with literally no time in between — from one book to the next?

It’s just what I do. I love reading so much that if I’m in a reading state of place or mind I want to keep doing that. So I move on to the next one. That doesn’t mean I didn’t love a book. That doesn’t mean it didn’t linger with me. It just means there’s a hell of a lot of books in the world and I want to get to more, more, more!

What do you do? Can you move seamlessly from finishing one book to starting another without skipping a beat? Do you need a day or two, an hour or two, or a second or to to let it linger?

For the longest time, I resisted.

I refused to read The Lovely Bones. I was adamant that I didn’t want to go anywhere near a book narrated by a teenage girl who’d been raped and murdered. We all have certain lines about stories we will and won’t read and I just couldn’t go there. Even when my sister-in-law read it, even when friends read it, even when they insisted I would love the book, I always declined. Then my friend Ilene read it and, like the others, she said it was amazing. I still didn’t want to crack the spine, but I was also intrigued about what I was missing. So I insisted she tell me how it started and ended. I wanted the spoilers, even if I wasn’t going to read it. Especially because I wasn’t going to read it. But I would at least know what the buzz was all about.

“Are you sure you want to know?” she asked. I insisted I did. So she told me the story and the famous scene between Ray and Susie (or, really, Susie in Ray’s body), but mostly she conveyed that while heart-wrenching, the novel was, as the title suggests, quite lovely. It was then that I decided I could handle it.

And it was like a gift. It’s the kind of book that’s more than a book, the kind of story that lives inside of you, and when you put it down, it stays with you, it lingers, it makes you think there is grace and beauty and that all things are possible. The Lovely Bones might just be the most beautiful book I’ve ever read.