With a wavering stack of books in my arms, I sat down on the floor of Barnes & Noble in an attempt to figure out which ones I could afford to buy and which ones would have to sit on the shelves until my next pay period.

While all the novels in the “to be put back” stack would, surely, have been well worth the holes burned in my pocket, none were quite right.

“I need a book I won’t be able to put down,” I told my sister. She came back with Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer, and, in true sisterly fashion, wouldn’t stop bugging me until I bought it.

And I haven’t been able to put it down.

This isn’t the typical tale of Sept. 11’s aftermath. It’s not an evaluation of the scene or a report of the events.

It’s the story of Oskar Schell, a strange, lonely and introspective boy who lost his father to fire, smoke and ash when a plane hit one of the Twin Towers.

Or at least that’s what he believes from the afternoon his family buries the empty casket to the night he ventures into his father’s closet for the first time since “the worst day.” There he discovers a misplaced tuxedo suit and a key — hidden within a vase and sealed inside an envelope endorsed with the word “Black” — at the very top of his father’s shelves.

These clues lead Oskar to plunge into an investigation that takes him through New York City’s five boroughs, his mission to seek out the person who can tell him into which lock the key fits.

The journey through which the reader accompanies Oskar is part of this novel’s charm. With him, we ring the doorbells of every New Yorker who shares the surname “Black,” we dig through Central Park, we hear stories and we search for the lock.

We collect the clues, piecing the past together in an attempt to find the truth.

Intertwined throughout Oskar’s progress are pages from one of the notebooks in which his grandfather — who had lost words, one by one, until his vocabulary no longer existed — communicated with the outside world.

These particular pages originate from the last notebook Thomas Schell used to convey the words he couldn’t speak. In it, he elucidates his life story, his rationale for leaving his wife, his fears and the past that triggered these fears.

So rarely do characters come along whose emotions, thoughts and personalities are conveyed so strikingly that, for a second, you’ve got to consciously bring yourself back from their lives.

Oskar’s thoughts, for instance, are completely tangential and confused — he says “obviously” after things that aren’t obvious at all and expresses his emotions quite irrationally (and quite realistically).

“In bed that night I invented a special drain that would be underneath every pillow in New York, and would connect to the reservoir. Whenever people cried themselves to sleep, the tears would all go to the same place, and in the morning the weatherman could report if the water level of the Reservoir of Tears had gone up or down, and you could know if New York was in heavy boots. And when something really terrible happened — like a nuclear bomb, or at least a biological weapons attack — an extremely loud siren would go off, telling everyone to get to Central Park to put sandbags around the reservoir.

“Anyway.”

But at the same time, Oskar is incredibly cognizant of his emotions and what he does and doesn’t know, especially for a boy whose peers are sword fighting, climbing trees and racing Mario and Luigi in a game of Mario Kart.

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is one of those books that will stay with you at all times, tucked safely away in a bookbag or purse, until its last page has been flipped.

And even then, it won’t stay closed for long.