I'd like to write about ideas, not the book itself, but a system of ideals.

Color is a focal point to the first few chapters and, as it happens, extensive to our very livelihood. Color is everywhere and in everything. From the trees, whose lives come to a sad yet beautiful end every year, they make a dance of changing their leaves to colors, painting the ground their masterpiece. It can be the sky, who brings us the only conclusive evidence that Robin's Egg Blue should be a color, but can also bring a deep purple, an ominous grey, and if you are reasonably lucky, a literal rainbow of colors. As capitalists, our very foundation and what we measure much of our success and worth is the color of money. A bright green, hard to miss so that we can pompously flash our cash and deem ourselves worth it. Furthermore, as much grandeur as there occurs in nature, there is an unmistakable color in people. I am not talking solely of the clothes people wear, but what they are. The soft pink when someone blushes or the dirty brown after a hard day's work. The metaphorical blue when someone is sad or the blackness of someone betrayed. My favorite, despite all the beauty of these things, the most magnificent color, is that of her eyes. Many of us guys, no matter how masculine we appear, fall weak to that one girl's eyes. We look in them and see color, color in which we forget our stresses and losses, and we get lost at sea, comforted by the continuous tide yet afraid at the same time at what might happen, happen if we take a step further out into the blueness of the ocean. And yet, there is an elegance and beauty about the way the waves continue to comfort the sand no matter how many times the sand pushes away.

Now, if I may, I shall dutifully overanalyze the title and setting of The Book Thief.  Books, an object, can feel comfortable, but nonetheless, frail. It can be a symbol of one's love passed on from generation to generation. But what is more, it can be our dreams, our escape, from a harsh reality that we live in, where people are starving on the streets, or the most petty things are of dire importance, or where our politicians fight a war on drugs all while smoking crack (I'm looking at you Toronto). Books are where we can dream. Dream of a place where we can fall in love with shooting stars, where "I love you" truly means "I love you," where we won't be cheated on or used for our kindness, and where the nerd gets the girl. It is a place where we can identify with the characters, rooting them on to live their dream and take chances because we are living vicariously through them and if they can do it, so can we. If we build upon that thought, that books are where our dreams can come true, stealing one's books, in turn, steals their dreams. On the other hand, giving one the gift of books and poetry and rhyme, can forge them. But books are fragile, and during the book's setting, the nazis burned many books, and at the same time, burned many bridges, bridges to Terabithia, and bridges to imagination and wonder. They cut off ideas and ruined many Jews' futures all in the name of ethnic cleansing. Because who needs dreams anyway?

Books are the very thing that keep our minds open, spawning dreams where the colors in people are equal (Martin Luther King Jr.), where people keep their promises, and where we can escape into a magical world where anything is possible. For that period of time where the book is in our hand, we can be all that we can be. And most importantly, we can start our own stories, where the pen can be linked to our heart to write the poetry that is our destiny.