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Columbine - Dave Cullen I don't even know what to say about this book. I don't usually like non-fiction. I keep trying to change my mind, but I never even make it to half-way, unless it's for a school assignment. I mean, there's an obvious difference between trying to read a biography of Katherine Hepburn and something like this, an account of a high school shooting that occurred when you were in high school yourself--this is something I remember seeing on television (and not paying much attention to, actually, though I do recall hearing a rumor that something was going to happen at a pep rally at my own school the week after the Columbine massacre).

So, anyway, I guess the subject matter is naturally riveting, and it would have been easy for this to be written like a novel. I mean, I've read this novel (see: Jodi Picoult's 19 Minutes). It could have been riveting and sensationalized and emotional, and I'm sure I wouldn't have been able to tear myself away from it. Instead, it was a lot like really fantastic journalism, which is of course what it is. It's a statement of facts; it's calm, it's clear, it's distanced and professional, but it leaves room for your own emotional response. I cried more than once, but I didn't feel--man, I read The Notebook, and I know when I've been manipulated into feeling one way or another, and that is not this book. And I couldn't tear myself away from it.

I was fascinated by the inaccuracies that were spread across the media, inaccuracies that I accepted as fact until I read about them here, and I never knew anything about police errors or the cover-up.

As horrific as the entire event was, I was almost...sorry to see the book end, as awful as that maybe sounds. I was reading two other books when I started this one, one of which I'd just started, the other I was in the middle of, and they both got laid aside while I finished this one. It's almost like I want to know more, but I don't think there's anything left to know, unless I want to Google around for the surveillance footage from the cafeteria or the video tapes the killers made, or the photos of the crime scenes, (and no, I really don't want to) I really don't think there's anything left to know. I think David Cullen did a pretty amazing job with this book.