I've been sleeping dreamless these days, must be because I am so tired, even though I'm sleeping enough hours.. One of the reasons is that I am going to bed late, been trying to finish this book, I know this much is true, by Wally Lamb.

I have first tried to read it in my first year, but it's such a big book, I never got beyond the first few pages before I had to return it to the library at the halls I was staying that year. It was the last book I started to read in the holidays, and now I have finished! Yay! Now finally I should be able to start studying for that French aural test tomorrow!

It's a sad story, and I wished it so much to end on a good note, so even as I was getting into the story, I would back out, not wanting to get to the bad stuff..
Every family has secrets locked up in the closet, and this one is no exception. Identical twins, one of whom is schizophrenic, a hare-lipped mother, an abusive stepfather. The sane twin is the narrator, and how he deals with his family when growing up, looking after his mother, and his weaker half, from the world. It is hard hating and loving at the same time the mother that loves his sweeter brother more, and the brother who is going madder with age. He hates his stepfather, how he treats the three of them, but who picks on his weaker brother more than himself, like everyone else at school. The story takes us on his journey of learning to understand, to accept, to discover, things he hadn't perhaps fully understood as a child, but can recognise when looking back into the past. Which also is really frustratingly hard and draining, especially when these are things you have been trying to forget. In the end he learns to forgive, and move forward.

I am not a smart man, particularly, but one day, at long last, I stumbled from the dark woods of my own, and my family's, and my country's past, holding in my hands these truths: that love grows from the rich loam of forgiveness; that mongrels make good dogs; that the evidence of God exists in the roundness of things.
This much, at least, I've figured out. I know this much is true.