Lovely Little Shelf

The Book: Gilead, by Marilynne Robinson

The Story: John Ames is a pastor.  His father was a pastor. His father’s father was a pastor.  John Ames is also 77 years old and dying.  He has a 7 year old son who he knows will never hear his stories, hear his heart, unless he writes it down.  This book is the information this father wishes to pass on to his son.

While that sounds kind of deep and really heavy, it’s not.  It’s just his story.  It’s how he sees life, in retrospect and how he sees what is coming up.  There is also a “current” story going on, but it sort of takes a backseat to the history bits.

Because he has been raised by pastors and is a pastor himself, there are a lot of ideas and thoughts on Christianity woven throughout the different stories.

The idea, the overall message, in this book seemed to be to just wring this life out.  He doesn’t come at this in a preachy way, but you can just tell that he has just lived this small-town life and has learned to love these small moments.  He talks about taking walks when no one else is out and how the church feels when he is the first one in it and how he felt when he first met his son’s mother.  He doesn’t tell his whole “life story” but it is possible to capture it, to capture him, through the moments that he shares along the way.

What I Thought: This was a weird one for me.  I went in with really high expectations: I’d recently seen this book on several “Best of the Decade” lists, not to mention that it won the Pulitzer.  I didn’t know the storyline or what to expect, but I was ready to be blown away.

I have also been in a book rut, and I wanted to be entertained.

The part of me that wanted blown away was totally satisfied.  The prose was breathtaking.  I found myself continually going back to different passages and rereading just because they were so… true.  There is an art to getting big ideas into simple sentences, and Marilynne Robinson seems to have that down.  She threw down a few of these that were just awesome.

The part of me that wanted entertained was a little bit let down.  There is only the vaguest trace of a storyline here.  It is mostly kind of rambling and ideas and stories. Which is fine. I’m not complaining. But it took me 4 days to read a 250 page book.  Not like me at all.  I just couldn’t get myself to sit down and read it for any stretch of time.

That being said, I really did like this a lot.  I think that I will probably find myself recommending this to friends and buying it for people as gifts.

The copy that I got, I got at a library book sale.  Whoever donated this book also seemed to enjoy it, as about half of the book was highlighted.  And this is a highlightable book. I get it.  What was weird was that whoever highlighted it, would just highlight random words or phrases or even character’s names.   I would sometimes flip from page to page just reading the highlighted parts to see if it made up some sort of message or something.  So far nothing has come together, but I think I may have a treasure map on my hands.

Conclusion: Read this when you are feeling quiet and contemplative.  Don’t try to read fast.  Slow down and let the pace of the book determine how you read it.  This is not a book to be devoured, but instead read slowly and chewed over carefully.