Book Report

I’m not sure why, but I’ve struggled to finish books for awhile now. It feels like a small victory to have finished several lately… though this first one is still in process. After all, we aren’t to Easter yet.

Bread and Wine: Readings for Lent and Easter is actually a reread. I’ve had it for a number of years. It, along with Frederick Buechner’s Listening to Your Life, are books that summon me every year around this time. And every year, different readings stand out to me. They cover a wide range of authors and forms, so reading a little each day gives me the feeling of participating in a sprawling, many-faceted conversation about this season.

My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She’s Sorry is a novel told from the point of view of a precocious almost-8-year-old. Elsa’s brilliant, eccentric, unconventional grandmother (and best friend) dies early in the story and leaves various clues and missions for Elsa to accomplish. In the same way he does in his novel A Man Called Ove, Fredrik Backman shows an incredible eye for people. Elsa interacts with a diverse range of characters in her housing unit, each with his or her annoying quirks, personal tragedies and quiet nobility, and Backman weaves them like an expert against a suspenseful, well-paced plot that invites us to ponder how much more meaningful our relationships with others would be if we knew their whole stories. I was a bit of a skeptic when I read Ove a few years ago; I wasn’t sure I trusted the happy ending. But whether the story is plausible or not I’m officially a Backman fan now… even though he makes me cry. Or maybe it’s because he makes me cry — ? I’m reminded of one of C.S. Lewis’s poems:

Have you not seen that in our days

Of any whose story, song or art

Delights us, our sincerest praise

Means, when all’s said, ‘You break my heart’?

Interestingly, Amy Meyerson’s The Bookshop of Yesterdays, which I read simultaneously with Grandmother, also develops the story of a relative who disappears and leaves behind clues for a beloved descendant. Though not as masterfully told, this too is a story that drew me in and engaged my detective skills as the narrator, Miranda (named after the one in The Tempest), tried hard to put together the puzzle her uncle left her. The puzzle consists of a painful split between family members, a bookshop (called Prospero Books, also named after the one in The Tempest — detecting a theme yet?), and a series of clues placed in books, people, and letters strategically placed for Miranda to discover in sequence.

The story is a celebration of books and reading, among other things. I couldn’t help but reflect on the odds of two books at the same time, both chosen at random, with the theme of following clues from a loved one who has passed on. Maybe it’s because I got a double dose of it, but it seemed like the stories developed an almost religious longing to receive wisdom and direction from a trusted spiritual source. Both plots carry a sense of mystery, the desire for connection and significance, and the promise of many disparate pieces of a plan coming together to make a larger sense out of life. Aren’t these familiar touchpoints for people of faith? However, there is no God in either story; he has been replaced by loved people, trusted but desperately imperfect.

Stories that replace a transcendent vision with a secularized universe usually leave me feeling a bit sad. The best example is actually a movie: Interstellar, which depicts a dystopian future in which a family continually fails to restore togetherness across the galaxies as the father searches space for a new home for humanity. It is infused (unintentionally, I think) with the despair and burden of a universe without a loving God, yet like most efforts to envision a truly empty universe it creates a tawdry substitute: “Them,” mysterious impersonal forces that somehow keep some things from coming to disaster. I found it terribly depressing. These two books have some similarities, refusing to look beyond flawed people to suggest an answer to the question of why we’re here, and why it matters. But perhaps because there were moments of real connection and joy, they didn’t leave me feeling cheated, as some do.

Last but not least comes Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird, a book about writing. I’ve heard about it for years and even assigned certain passages to my students to read. Now I’ve read it for myself and found it to be a compendium of useful bits of wisdom. Many times, I laughed out loud. Several times, I read passages to nearby family members — a violation of my personal rules for readerly etiquette. I couldn’t help myself. I mean, who could resist reading aloud the helpful instruction to battle distracting internal voices by imagining them as mice, picking them up by the tail, putting them all in a Mason jar and screwing the lid on tight?

Lamott’s central piece of wisdom is that if you want to be a writer, write. She suggests various themes and subjects to focus on just to prime the pump and get yourself into the discipline of writing, and she has practical advice for various points in the writing process from invention to publication. Whether you’re struggling to get going, becalmed in the middle, or dotting your last i and crossing your last t, Lamott has something worth pausing to listen to.

I’ll admit that though I love Lamott’s honesty and irreverence to a point, after awhile I find her style wearing. I was ready for the book to end. But it was well worth the reading, a book I’ll likely revisit more than once.