Books: December 2005 Archives

Traveling Mercies

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by Anne Lamott

I kept running into people had had read "Traveling Mercies" by Anne Lamont, so while making an Amazon Christmas order for others I snuck in the book for myself.

I really enjoyed reading this book. It's a loose collection of personal essays sprinkled with both humour and sadness, revolving around her personal faith. It's not what I would call a traditional approach to faith and it's not, how shall I say it, "the Fox News approach to faithTM".

My favorite quote from the book is this one.

"Our preacher Veronica said recently that this is life's nature: that lives and hearts get broken -- those of people we love, those of people we'll never meet. She said that the world sometimes feels like the waiting room of the emergency room and that we who are more or less OK for now need to take the tenderest possible care of the more wounded people in the waiting room, until the healer comes. You sit with people, she said, you bring them juice and graham crackers."

Anne Lamott, Traveling Mercies

That quote sums up the last year very nicely.

I loved Lamott's complete unapologetic honesty and her way of describing herself.

Cider House Rules

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by John Irving

I finally finished Cider House Rules by John Irving.

It wasn’t "A Prayer for Owen Meany", which is one of my all time favorite books, but it was very good. John Irving is a fabulous story teller, although sometimes I wish he would release his books as trilogies, since they tend to become slow in the middle. He does have a gift for making the most improbable story line seem completely believable.

I liked the main character, an orphan named Homer, a lot. For me, Homer turns into an everyman character as he lives out the longings for connections and family. I ended up identifying with him much more than I would have ever expected to.

I had lots of favored passages but I think my favorite bit was the benediction given to the children to signify that an orphan had been adopted. "Let us be happy for Fuzzy Stone," Dr. Larch said… "Fuzzy Stone has found a family … Good night, Fuzzy."

Ephemera

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About this Archive

This page is a archive of entries in the Books category from December 2005.

Books: October 2005 is the previous archive.

Books: February 2006 is the next archive.

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