Sad yet Stunning.....

I read The Reader when it first came out in the late '90's, by recommendation of my mother. A powerful story that stayed with me, a book I passed on to many people, an excellent movie which came out last year, but I decided I needed to revisit the story after almost 12 years have passed and so I downloaded it onto my iPod and listened to the heart-wrenching story all over again of a 15 year old German boy, Michael Berg, who falls in love with a 36 year old woman, Hanna, whom he knows nothing about. The story is divided into 3 parts...the first describes their love affair, the middle part takes place 10 years later when Hanna is on trial for war crimes that occurred when she was an SS guard at a concentration camp, and Part three when Hanna is imprisoned for those crimes. We are taken deep into Michael's heart and mind and see how Hanna has affected everything in his life, how he tries to come to terms with her crime and the reasons she is imprisoned, how he tries to reconcile his feelings towards the end of the book. A great study into the human character, a very sad story, and one I highly recommend.