The Measure – by Nikki Erlick
I am still doing my thing and you know…living life! But I decided to go back to sharing my book adventures again (yeah, I said “book adventure”, I am easily pleased and take joy from the littlest of things) so here I am, sharing yet another book.
The basic idea of this book would get a 120/10, however, I must admit I didn’t really like the execution much. I didn’t get into any of the characters, or their stories, which was a bummer.
I am not sure if this is going to be considered a spoiler, so you may wanna stop reading if you think you may want to read this book.
Basically, everyone in the world receives a box with a string in it. The length of the string reveals how many years each of them still has to live.
This caused a lot of issues in America. Division, arguments, depression, end of friendships / relationships, discrimination between short and long stringers.
No one was forced to open their box, so my first question was: would I have opened mine? I think my curiosity may taken the best of me, but I wouldn’t wanna know, I wouldn’t wanna open it. Why would I need to find out? So I could do what I always wanted to do? That’s how I lived my life anyway!! Well, within my lmeans, of course. There isn’t much on my bucket list, as I have always been impulsive, courageous, and driven enough to do what I wanted to do.
This brings me to my favourite part of the book. An American couple goes to Northern Italy (Venice to be exact) for a bucket list vacation, after finding out one of the girls was a “short stringer”. While looking for a souvenir, one of them asked the shop owner if the strings caused that much division in Italy too. And the lady’s response reminded me why I am how I am.
She said (more or less): “I heard that in America the strings caused a mess, as they made people rethink their priorities. Here in Italy, it wasn’t like that. My sister is a devoted catholic, and she didn’t even open her box, as she has always lived her life knowing God had a plan for her, and her time would have come when God decided so. Me…and most Italians have already decided our priorities. We put art first, we put food first, family, and we put all the little life pleasures first. We already know our priorities. We don’t need a string to make sure we live our lives and evaluate our priorities”.
I loved that part. This is why I am who I am. Italians are that way (the ones born or at least that lived and grew up there, not the wannabes from the States. No disrespect but…yeah). We have our priorities sorted out. Not the same way we do it here, we don’t care if we find out later in life what we want to do, or if we aren’t rich and famous, or married by 30…our priorities are the little things that make life fulfilling and pleasurable. We just live life.
We live.
These are my people…and that’s what I loved about this book 🙂
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️/5