Why I Cried In Target Today

You know how you get all caught up in your daily life, and things you would normally know about kind of fall by the wayside? Like, say you’re a Star Trek fan and before your life got really complicated you would have known what every Star Trek cast member was appearing in currently. But then you get caught up in your job or your sister’s colonoscopy or whatever and you totally space and then all of a sudden there’s a new Star Trek movie in the theatre.

So there we are in Target, halfway between Men’s Cargo Pants and iPod headphones, walking past the book endcap. I usually ignore the Target Book Endcap because it’s usually got stuff that I’ve either already reserved at the library or wouldn’t read unless there were no cereal boxes left in the universe.

But today. Today. There it was…a book I’ve waited for even longer than I waited for Harry Potter Book 7. A book that has been rumoured for more than fifteen years and hoped for by book geeks and casual readers alike.

The sequel to The Pillars Of The Earth. There aren’t words for how much I love that book. Follett, an admitted athiest, created two of my favourite religious characters of all time–Father Phillip and Ellen. In those two characters he captured the essence of the British Isles’ two main religious folkways and showed how they both conflict and compliment each other. I’d like to think that as I grow in my own faith I would embody a bit of both of them–the sincerely devout Christian Phillip with the maternal sensibilities and grounded awareness of Ellen.

Since he wrote one such wonderful book I can’t help but think Follett can do it again, or nearly enough to still be something special.

Here’s what Follett says about the new one:

Ever since The Pillars of the Earth was published in 1989, readers have been asking me to write a sequel. The book is so popular that I’ve been nervous about trying to repeat its success. But at last I screwed up my courage, and wrote ‘World Without End.

I couldn’t write another book about building a cathedral, because that would be the same book. And I couldn’t write another story about the same characters, because by the end of ‘Pillars’ they are all very old or dead. ‘World Without End’ takes place in the same town, Kingsbridge, and features the descendants of the ‘Pillars’ characters two centuries later.

The cathedral and the priory are again at the centre of a web of love and hate, greed and pride, ambition and revenge. But at the heart of the story is the greatest natural disaster ever to strike the human race: the plague known as the Black Death, which killed something like half the population of Europe in the fourteenth century. The people of the Middle Ages battled this lethal pestilence and survived – and, in doing so, laid the foundations of modern medicine.

Yes. I cried for joy in Target. I love how sometimes being caught up in routine means that life can offer you a lagniappe.