Everyone with a blog and a counter looks at their stats. Everyone. Some people may be too cool to care about hits or visitors, but they still look.

I obsess over our search string referrals from engines like Google or Yahoo. Hardly any are for porn and they're also not very weird. Not surprisingly, most visitors land on us while looking for information about books. A thing I think we do well, besides discuss books, is provide meaningful and ongoing coverage of a select catalog of titles.

Many of the queries we receive are easily answered by reading through our discussions. It is unfortunate when some people leave without the information they seek. In this post, I will try to help the helpless by responding to our most common unanswered search strings.

Search String: the five people you meet in heaven narrator

Today alone, we received more than 30 similarly worded searches for the above. I don't know if there was a Five People scavenger hunt going on or if a single person was in denial over not finding a satisfactory answer, but that's a lot of hits for an easy one. The book is written in the third person; there is no narrator. If your American lit instructor absolutely demands an answer, say it's the author, Mitch Albom.

Search Strings: coraline spark notes and coraline cliff notes

Neither exist because Neil Gaiman's Coraline is a children's book that anyone over the age of 12 could probably finish in a few hours. Sucks having to do your own work, doesn't it?

Search String: What Is the Point of Reading?

The point of reading is to get some point (or meaning) from what you read. If you don't get my meaning from reading the last sentence, then there is no point. Go watch TV.

Ana brought up Mitch Albom's The Five People You Meet in Heaven in the comments of another post, but I thought it could do for a mention on the home page. Tonight, ABC will air the made-for-tv version of our July 2004 selection at 8 p.m. EST. You might want to check it out. Or not, if you read some of the reviews.

From The Boston Globe: "It turns out that the five people you meet in heaven are going to bore you to death all over again."

From Chicago Sun-Times: "Albom has turned his slender novel into a movie so thin you can't help but see through it. For this, ABC is pre-empting 'Desperate Housewives'?"

From The New York Times: "For all of its eventual effectiveness as a weepie, 'The Five People' is too often turgid."

Well, it's time.

I'd just like to thank you all who read The Five People You Meet in Heaven.

Even if you didn't like it. ;)

My last words...

I enjoyed this book overall. I'd recommend it to anyone.

I'd been seeing the title on the best sellers' lists since I don't know when...And I honestly thought it was a self-help book or something.

I saw it at the library, picked it up, and realized it was fiction...and since it was short, I said, "hey, why not?"

So here we are.

I'd just like to say that for those of you who did not like how the author listed the five lessons that Eddie was supposed to learn...
what if you look at it from a self-help book perspective?
(is that even the correct term?)
I think it's valid to say that the set up is something like that...no?

One last thing,

My favorite part out of the entire book was the following:

p. 144 Thursday, 11 A.M.

"'Eddie,' he finally said, 'really loved his wife.'"

P.S. I noticed that no men participated in this...

All right.

This topic seemed quite controversial

I hope I don't get tomatoes thrown at me.......?

What ARE the five lessons in The Five People You Meet in Heaven?

I went back to each lesson section and tried to extract the lesson from each person.

1- On the same page with Barbara, the Blue Man seemed the least interesting. But anyway, I took a direct quote from the Blue Man for this lesson:

"Strangers are just family you have yet to come to know."

2- The Captain, I wish he would've said something more objective, but that supports what Mary said, that the lessons were inteded for Eddie to learn:

"...Sometimes when you sacrifice something precious, you're not
really losing it. You're just passing it on to someone else."

From this, I take the lesson is Sacrifice...

3- Ruby:

"You need to forgive your father."

Forgiveness

4- Marguerite, the most sentimental:

"Life has to ened, love doesn't."

Basically, love doesn't end, just takes a different shape or form.

5- Tala, what a surprise:

OK, I honestly don't know the lesson here....someone please throw it in my face.

I think the order of how the Five People were introduced was logical. Every person brought along even more sentimental and difficult issues that Eddie suffered with throughout his life. I'm not sure about the Blue Man. He's significantly less meaningful...well, to me.

Anyway, do say what you take the Five Lessons to be. I missed them, on a conscious level. I wasn't reading for meaning here.

Take it away.

Ah, welcome.

I know that it seems like it's been forever for this day to come for such a short novel, but it's finally here!

This novel is so short I don't know where to start!

Let's begin with a simple discussion...

Did you or did you not like The Five People You Meet in Heaven?

Why, why not?

What did you like/ dislike the most?

Did anyone have a hard time reading this, pfft, haha...?

Personally, the first part of the book, "The End," was EXTREMELY boring! It made me not take any interest in Eddie. "I thought, what a boring man...don't care about his bitterness or his boring job...blah, blah, blah, the rest of this book better not be like this!?"

I think the reason why I hated this part so much was because we knew he was going to die. I already knew what to expect. And the fact that the narrator was counting down the moments to Eddie's death was really annoying. It actually didn't create any suspense for me. His heroic action right before his death was a little more exciting, but not by much. And the last lines--"A stunning impact. A blinding flash of light. And then, nothing." Those lines seemed really cliche to me. The blinding flash of light seems like the common thing for everyone to see at the time of their death... So, I finally made it through "The End." (It really slowed me down; I was very disappointed)

Ah, it started out not too well, but of course, it got better as it went!

The greatest thing about the Five People is the structure after "The End." It's really fascinating how we are present during Eddie's arrival in heaven and meeting the five people of his life and learning the five lessons, while at the same time we are also present at what is going on down in Earth, where his body lies and what happens afterwards. And the going back to his birthdays, I think, were wonderful insights into his personality and life and what he is going through in Heaven. Makes me realize that I was wrong in judging him the way that I did at the beginning. Which, I'm sure, was purposely written that way. Hey, it worked!

Five People just got better and better. Suspense became stronger and the emotions just poured out. Personally, the end was COMPLETELY unpredictable, as I expected him to meet the little girl that he saved, which is weird...I don't know why. I don't even remember if she lives or not. But what an ending! For him to meet the little girl from the burning hut, man...I never expected that. Especially since I never expected for the person, if it turned out that Eddie was right, to be a little innocent child. I hate to admit this, but I had streams of tears down my face during this entire section...

Five People satisfied me completely. It made me feel so damn good at the end, I just couldn't believe what this little book was capable of doing.

How did you all feel???

(More later.) :)

Hello Everyone,

This month, we'll be meeting The Five People You Meet in Heaven. We might be surprised, might not. We might like them, might not. We might remember them, might not. We'll find out in the coming weeks.

Be nice!