At almost 800 pages, this book was a whole-life spiritual experience. Not a light read, but for people whose primary concern is enlightenment and self-awareness, it is a great leap forward in that understanding.
Through a host of full characters, I got a lived experience of how everyone is necessary—people who have no idea that there are any subtleties or not-so-visible layers of life as well as people who dedicate themselves to knowing All That Is.
The ending, which I cannot give away, took root in me and continues to influence my life.
There is humor, philosophy, metaphysical debates, a lot of intellectual Olympics, but there are also complex characters and sometimes, laugh-out-loud humor. We are silly, perhaps hopeless, creatures, but David James Duncan left me hoping for the best.
A random bolt from a DC-8 falls from the sky, killing a child and throwing the faith of a young Jesuit Jesuit into crisis. A boy's mother dies on his fifth birthday, sparking a lifetime of repressed anger that he unleashes once a year in reckless duels with the Fate, God, or Power who let the coincidence happen. A young woman on a run in Seattle experiences a shooting star moment that pierces her with a love that will eventually help heal the Jesuit, the angry young man, and innumerable others.
The journeys of this unintentional menagerie carry them to…
This is a hilarious, ingenious satire about our crazy internet culture.
I belly-laughed all the way through it. But what makes it a world above a lot of popular funny books is that it is about something. Under the laughs there is a serious depiction of how unthinking we have become in our herd reactions to whatever goes viral. It’s insane. And there is a very real mother/daughter relationship at the core of the novel which gives it soul.
“If you liked Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus, read The Society of Shame by Jane Roper.” —The Washington Post
In this timely and witty combination of So You've Been Publicly Shamed and Where'd You Go, Bernadette? a viral photo of a politician's wife's “feminine hygiene malfunction” catapults her to unwanted fame in a story that's both a satire of social media stardom and internet activism, and a tender mother-daughter tale.
Kathleen Held’s life is turned upside down when she arrives home to find her house on fire and her husband on the front lawn in his underwear. But the…
I read this book for the third time in 2023, and it seems to get better at every reading... Or more likely, I get to see how I’ve changed.
It’s a simple, mostly narrative, 115-page beautifully written story about a man whose rigidly controlled life living in a small room and working as a bank security guard is completely derailed by the appearance of a pigeon where a pigeon should not be.
It’s in my list of favorites for the same reason the first two books are: it sticks with me as a real-lived experience—in this case, of going from shut-down to freedom.
Jonathan Noel, bank security guard, has spent 30 years protecting himself from people and events. But an encounter with a glaring pigeon upsets his ordered life and flings him into a state of fear and insecurity. From the author of the international bestselling Perfume.
Growing up in Squitchit, New York, Leslie Kove doubtless imagined that she and her two siblings would one day marry, have kids, and live ordinary productive lives. But by 1970, her brother has died in Vietnam. Her sister, Susan, a scholarship student at Bennington College in Vermont, has changed her name to Sabra-Sou and dances topless in political demonstrations. And Leslie, a high school senior, has no idea what to say when people ask her what she's going to do with her life: She needs a plan.
This first-person tragicomedy traverses two decades as Leslie journeys through "the rabbit hole"—like a modern-day Alice in Wonderland that is America.
