The short-list was released on October 1st:  Evolving in Monkey Town by Rachel Held Evans, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years by Donald Miller, Halfway to Each Other by Susan Pohlman, God Hides in Plain Sight by Dean Nelson, and Hear No Evil by Matthew Paul Turner.  All of the authors were new to me, although I have heard of Miller’s best seller, Blue Like Jazz.  From reading the blurbs, I didn’t have a sense of which book I would be drawn to, which I guess is a good place to start the process.  I’ve never ‘judged’ a book before and found that I read each one with a much more critical eye.  There are exclamation points in the margins or comments such as “needless tangent” and “pacing shift too abrupt.”

I entered the discussions last week with a couple of favorites and a top choice, Evolving to Monkey Town.  Many Christians, including myself, don’t have a dramatic conversion story.  We weren’t drug dealers, evil bosses or abusive people, we simply grew up in the church.  For us, there is a time when we transition from accepting the faith of our families to finding a faith of our own.  That transition can be subtle or rocky, quick or lifelong.  For Evans it was tumultuous and she showed great courage in sharing it so honestly in her book. As I stated in the INSPY Award press release:

Evans’ Evolving in Monkey Town chronicles the author’s move from complete acceptance of the faith of her childhood, through a desolate period of questioning, arriving at a renewed conviction about the love of God. Interweaving her own tale with the views of people she meets, Evans juxtaposes all of the voices about God in her life. Evans’ honesty in telling her faith journey impressed us along with how much her love of the Lord imbued the entire narrative.

In an interview on the INSPY Award website, Evans described why she writes about her faith journey:

For me, the biggest challenge in writing about my faith is that it is always changing. Like a lot of twenty-somethings, I’m going through that quarter-life reevaluation of things, struggling through some difficult questions about life and faith and Christianity. So rather than sharing these grand spiritual insights with my readers, I find myself writing about the highs and lows of the faith journey, the view from wherever I happen to be. As it turns out, this ever-evolving approach to faith is a bit more universal than I originally thought, because readers seem to really connect with the idea that faith is less about certainty and more about risk. So the challenge is also the benefit. I’ve made my readers feel less alone in the journey, and now I feel less alone too. And isn’t that the point of writing? To feel less alone?

I found it delightful to read about Evans faith journey.  She asks the questions that many Christians mull over without dictating an answer.  In fact, that’s one of the points of her book, to spend less time insisting on the answer and more time explore the questions with God.  Congratulations to Rachel Held Evans on winning the first INSPY Award for creative non-fiction.

Sunday morning’s conversation circled around the subject of faith, spirituality and religion.  Dani Shapiro, author of Devotion, Eric Lax, writer of Faith Interrupted, and Michael Krasny, radio interviewer and author of Spiritual Envy mesmerized us with their discussion of belief, unbelief and serious pondering over the meaning of life.  [Loved their conversation, I bought all of their books also.]  About half way through, Robert Goolrick, author of The Reliable Wife, joined the stage. I recalled picking up his book last summer, reading the back and putting it back down.  It wasn’t for me.  I could see how many would, and do like it, I could envision reading it by the pool or on the beach, but I wasn’t going to either of those places, so I passed.  Now I own it.

Before Goolrick joined the group, the conversation was a variation of “I don’t know what I believe about God” or “I knew and now I don’t know” or “I know a little.”   Goolrick told everyone what he does know and that is that the practice of religion, he couldn’t care less which religion, gives a person an internal life.  He described living in NYC years ago, where he felt he lived life very publicly, that everyone did.  Sunday mornings he went to the most upscale Episcopalian church to give himself an hour to consider how close he was to being a good and moral person.  It gave him the space to contemplate his life and actions.  He couldn’t care less how people spend their Sunday mornings, he cares who people are and the practice of religion shapes who people are.

In Goolick’s opinion, goodness is the only thing that matters.  Goodness is the only thing that survives when we die.  He defines good by action.  What acts of goodness and kindness has a person performed?  It’s not an easy question, especially since we don’t see the whole picture of the past and future, sometimes it’s hard to know what is good.  He gave the example of giving a homeless person $1, is that a good act, or not?  In his opinion, a writer can’t start with good characters (later in the day McCann described writing a good character as very hard) and the main characters in The Reliable Wife behave badly and are abused, yet they are trying to get back to some sense of redemption and wonder at life.

Asked what work of fiction he would want on his bedside table at death, he answered Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past/In Search of Lost Time.  He named it the best piece of literature ever written, everything else is just stories.  He found that Proust created a totally complete world that didn’t feel like fiction.

Goolrick sold me.  I can’t wait to read his book.  I don’t even care what it’s about.

I’m counting the days to this event!

Watch for a seismic shift in the literary landscape of Southern California next month.  No, it won’t be an earthquake, it’s the inaugural Beverly Hills Literary Escape, a unique weekend for literati.  This isn’t another festival where the attendee sits in the audience listening to a panel of authors and a moderator and then line up for a few Q & A, here the goal is for everyone to mingle and have conversations.  The organizers, Julie Robinson and Tyson Cornell, are striving to create an European cafe culture and Algonquin Round Table atmosphere of give-and-take between authors and readers.  Here’s the schedule:

I’m in a terrible choice bind about which events to choose for the lunches and afternoon lectures.  I can tell you this, I’ve never met a woman who hasn’t fallen in love with Lynn Batten after hearing him talk about Jane Austen.  I recommended both Ethan Canin and Susan Straight before and would love to hear them speak, but that could mean downgrading my groupie status with Lynn.   What could be better than having lemon cake with Aimee Bender, yet one of my favorite books this summer was Gin Phillips’ The Well and the Mine (if you liked The Help, run to the store to get The Well and the Mine).  I’ll be wallowing in the torture of deciding for awhile.

Two events are free:  An evening with Colum McCann author of Let the Great World Spin where he will receive the first Medici Book Club Prize (more on that in a future post) and a discussion with Abraham Verghese, author of Cutting for Stone. The prices for the remaining events vary and there are passes for multiple events. (Click here to purchase tickets.)  Readers of Bookstore People are entitled to purchase the lowest price passes and tickets for conversations by using the discount code LITERARY. There will be one private VIP event, a coffee with Joseph O’Neill, author of Netherland, on October 15th.  We have one ticket to the O’Neill coffee to giveaway, just leave a comment that you want it by 11:59 October 7th and we will pick the winner.

It looks like a spectacular event, don’t miss it!

Disclosure:  Kim is a Medici Founding Patron

The Power of Art

It’s not uncommon to hear that a work of art changed a person’s life.  In The Return of the Prodigal Son, Henri J.M. Nouwen, one of the great 20th century Christian writers, describes his encounter with Rembrandt’s painting of the same name. Nouwen first sees the painting in a colleagues office when he is exhausted after lecturing in US churches about preventing war and violence in Central America.  Over the next few years he ruminates on its meaning as he leaves his teaching post at Harvard and begins working at Daybreak, a home for the mentally handicapped.   Nouwen opens the book:  “A seemingly insignificant encounter with a poster presenting a detail of Rembrandt’s “The Return of the Prodigal Son” set in motion a long spiritual adventure that brought me to a new understanding of my vocation and offered me new strength to live it.”  Talk about life altering, it almost makes me afraid to visit a museum.

Nouwen divides his book into three primary sections which follow the primary players in the prodigal son parable:  the younger son, the elder son, the father.   In each section, he analyzes that character in the painting, in Rembrandt’s life, and in Nouwen’s spiritual journey.

The Younger Son 

In the parable, the younger son asks his father for his inheritance early, the father gives it to him, and the son spends it on wine and song.  Penniless, he works feeding pigs and realizes he would live far better as a servant of his father.   He returns home to find his father watching for him, and then greeting him with exuberance.  In Rembrandt’s painting, the younger son is in tatters and kneeling before his father receiving an embrace.  Nouwen looks at one of Rembrandt’s earlier self-portraits, a vision of the younger son in the amidst of his spendthrift living, a girl in his lap, fancy clothes and a tankard held high, and compares it with this painting:

As I look at the prodigal son kneeling before his father and pressing his face against his chest, I cannot but see there the once so self-confident and venerated artist who has come to the painful realization that all the glory he had gathered for himself proved to be vain glory.  Instead of the rich garments with which the youthful Rembrandt painted himself in the brothel, he now wears only a torn undertunic covering his emaciated body, and the sandals, in which he had walked so far, have become worn out and useless.

Nouwen looks at how he is the prodigal son.  Every time he looks at how the world values him rather then how God sees him, he rejects his spiritual journey for a worldly one and denies his sonship.  When Nouwen expects God’s love to be conditional and dependent on his own actions rather than from grace, Nouwen turns his back on the embrace we see between the father and son in Rembrandt’s painting because “one of the greatest challenges of the spiritual life is to receive God’s forgiveness.”

The Elder Son

The elder son worked side-by-side with his father his entire life.  He is furious at the father’s reception of the loose-living, irresponsible son and leaves the party.  In the parable, the father meets the elder son outside and reassures him of his importance.  Rembrandt’s painting twists the events a little bit.  In the parable, the elder son returns home in the midst of the party, but in the picture the elder son is witnessing the homecoming the moment it happened.  During Rembrandt’s time, it was common to associate the elder son with the Pharisees, those unforgiving, uber-rule followers of Christ’s time.  Here, the stern, disapproving man on the right fits that personification.   Nouwen discovered Rembrandt was just as much the elder son during his life as the younger.  Rembrandt was known to act bitter, resentful and vengeful.  One of the worst examples was Rembrandt’s maneuvering to have his former housekeeper placed in a mental institution to be rid of her.  Nouwen reflects that it is much harder to appreciate a man ”with deep resentments, wasting much of his precious time in rather petty court cases and constantly alienating people with his arrogant behavior.”

The younger son was externally lost among the world, but interiorly he repents and returns to a wonderful homecoming.  The elder brother does all of the right things externally, but internally seaths and is lost in resentment.  Nouwen describes his own struggle as the elder son:

The more I reflect on the elder son in me, the more I realize how deeply rooted this form of lostness really is and how hard it is to return home from there.  Returning home from a lustful escapade seems so much easier than returning home from a cold anger that has rooted itself in the deepest corners of my being.  My resentment is not something that can be easily distinguished and dealt with rationally.

Nouwen finishes this section with how he found a way home of the land of resentment and judgmental reactions.

The Father

It is with the father that Nouwen feels Rembrandt painted the intersection of the human and the divine.  The father is a half-blind, old man who suffered much but exudes love, compassion and forgiveness.  Even from the reproduction on the cover of the book, I could feel the emotion, this is the heart of the masterpiece.  Nouwen talks about the roles we all need to take on as the father, to “steal all the real joy in life” and point it out to others, not to ignore the hardship but to live in it while trusting the good more than the bad, to live without comparison, and to live with compassion.  The role of the father reminds me of the saying of a former pastor–when living my everyday life, always chose grace.

The Return of the Prodigal Son is a beautiful story of how a masterpiece launched a spiritual, life-changing evaluation.  The book analyzes the painting, the artist and the odyssey it sent the viewer on.  Far more than an art history book, it also tells the personal story of viewer.

Once again our friend Laura Sanderson Healy is contributing a review and we’re so grateful to her.  If you haven’t yet read her earlier review, click here.  The rest is her writing.

Calling all Bodhisattvas: enlightenment by the multiple armload awaitsyou at The Bodhi Tree in Los Angeles, a spiritual bookstore beyond compare (though Zen practitioners might tut-tut that comparisons are odious). Since 1970 the Bodhi Tree has been the MRI-strength magnet on Melrose Avenue for seekers of all sorts, whether one is hunting down books on Eastern gurus like H.P. Blavatsky or G.I. Gurdjieff or Western psychics like Edgar Cayce. Books about God or gods/goddesses (and their nemeses), manuals on physical health and wellness, cures and treatments, and self-help titles for those who find themselves on mental or chemical obstacle courses, all find space, as do all the religions, good and — verdict’s out. The store presents all the
theories without passing judgment, according to its literature.

Though it caters to the mind/body/spirit crowd, carefree shoppers also
drift in to browse the esoteric goodies: bumper stickers, puppets,
children’s books and magazines (I always buy Highlights for Kids here
for my young nephew), cards, calendars, windchimes and gongs, candles,
music CDs and and buckets of malas (meditation’s answer to rosary
beads). Siddhartha Gautuma became the Buddha while sitting beneath a
bodhi tree on a Ganges tributary, and the store has its very own “Tree
of Enlightenment” (ficus religiosa) growing right behind the store in a
courtyard, having been nursed from a young potted plant in the store’s
stained -glass decorated front window decades ago.

“The Bodhi Tree is a metaphysical smorgasbord,” its cashier laughed to
a customer when I visited recently, “but be careful or you might get
indigestion.” You needn’t be a bearded mystic to love the place; even
before I made Los Angeles my home I made regular pilgrimages to the
Bodhi Tree over the years to soak up the atmosphere (though its incense
is as pervasive as that of Christian “High Churches”). Posers might
announce they go to the Bodhi Tree for karma roadchecks, but I’m simply
there for book and gift browsing and to enjoy some Harriet-the-Spyesque
eavesdropping, consuming endless free cups of Celestial Seasonings’
“Tension Tamer” herbal tea. On a street better known for label-reading
fashion hunters, the funky old Bodhi Tree sits as a complex comprised
of three buildings: the New Book branch, a Used Bookstore (behind the
main building, it is entered off Westbourne and boasts a resident cat),
and The Annex where events are held. While there are book signings by
notable authors, the most popular “readings” are those of the intuitive
variety: the Bodhi Tree Annex offers Psychic Readers every afternoon
and evening of the week, whether you prefer Tarot, Animal Divination,
Palmistry, Reiki or Astrology.

Though my own spirit is happiest out in nature, I reach a
particular Nirvana when I find a legal parking space near the Bodhi Tree because WeHo can be tricky for non-resident drivers. There are coin or key
meters on Melrose, there are a couple of spots behind the main store on
the property, but you may also valet park your car at the station
between the Annex and the Urth Café: the Bodhi Tree will credit the $5
valet charge towards any purchase over $15.

I enjoy my visit most when I have no demands on my time as I make my
way up the five steps up the stairs of the Melrose entrance. Once
inside, there are dozens of tuned Woodstock Chimes hanging in front of
the big round front window (with enormous fitted stained-glass art); as
one moves through the different rooms, skylights shed light and
colorful prayer flags and flying diva models decorate the ceiling.

Negotiating the hundreds of subjects from books on Christianity to the
Occult Sciences, one roams through a library-like maze of polished
wooden bookcases (some glass-fronted and locked). One author’s works
have to be housed in the office at the back up on a high rack due to
high theft occurrences (Hemingway’s MOVEABLE FEAST references this
fellow’s notoriety).

The Eastern side of the New Book Branch is dedicated to the teachers
and philosophers of the East, while the Western half of the store has
space for the writings of the Western Hemisphere’s wise men and women.
Paraphernalia such as bells and singing bowls hints at wicca and Native
American traditions, tools for yoginis are plentiful, and there are
glass cases of stones and and crystals for those who want to work on
their mojo (herbs are for sale in the Used Book wing).

One book I purchased at the Bodhi Tree is a perennial favorite: A Book
of Days for the Literary Year; there is a literature section for
non-fiction and fiction (Tom Wolfe but no Thomas Wolfe) and visionary
fiction (William Blake). The Spiritual Tourist by Mick Brown gave me
endless mirth as I read about various disciplines friends had described
to me; the accompanying CD of the same name features ethereal music
from spiritual traditions around the world and the Used Bookstore had a
copy of it my last visit. There are all sorts of books about weird
phenomena, though it all fits here and doesn’t seem like a Ripley’s
rip-off. And I’m a sucker for the Unexplained.

Bodhi Tree Bookstore
8585 Melrose Avenue,
West Hollywood CA 90069-5199
(800) 825-9798; within Los Angeles County call (310) 659-1733
Email: info@bodhitree.com

Laura Sanderson Healy is an L.A.-based writer; during her days as a
correspondent in PEOPLE WEEKLY’s London Bureau, she reported on strange phenomena such as the moving statue near Ballinspittle, Ireland, and the mysterious crop circles in Wiltshire, England. She believes in
ghosts and once took her father dowsing at the Rollright Stones near
Oxford.