dos libros

Last week I finished reading A Handbook of American Prayer by Lucius Shepherd. I enjoyed this book the whole way through. I've always been fascinated by religious-manipulation and evangelicalism, and the intertwining of the two. This book deals with both head-on. Shepherd's novel tracts the spiritual course of Wardlin Stuart, from his bartending-sexist-murderous days, to his prison-i'll-write-you-a-prayer-for-a-pack-of-cigarettes days, to his world-wide-success-Wardlinites-days, to, well you should just read the book. Shepherd likes to mix fantasy with reality to refreshing effects, and he's well worth your time.

This morning I finished Love Me by Garrison Keillor. I did enjoy this book, but felt myself rushing to get done with it. Not sure exactly why. Very funny at times, occasionally heartfelt, other times somewhat wincingly corny, but overall a good and wise book. This was the first book I had read by Keillor and certainly not the last. So that may say something. The protagonist is a writer who is married to a liberal saint - a steadfast woman with a heart of gold, who I guess Niel Young was looking for - and is trying for the first quarter of the book to write the Great American Novel. He succeeds with "Spacious Skies" and heads off to work at the New Yorker - how I envied him. Keillor does a wonderful job of creating a fantastical New Yorker, where magically JD Salinger is still hard at work. (Keillor makes the publisher a mofia-goon, for example). The scenes with 'Mr Shawn', the man-about-town editor, are a good time, as are the scenes with Tony Crossandotti, the afore-mentioned mafia-goon. Wyler, the protagonist, writes a sequeal to "Spacious Skies," "Amber Waves of Grain" which bombs and spends 8 years at the New Yorker, away from his unimaginably loving wife, with writer's block. Wyler becomes Mr. Blue, an advice-columnist, and the rest is for you to figure out my friends - or friend as the case may be (and is!). Give it a chance - it won't change your life, but it may change your hairstyle, or at least it could, conceivably.