Michelle Albert Albert itibaren Santarapur, Odisha 758027, India itibaren Santarapur, Odisha 758027, India

Let me start by saying that on principle, I don’t dog-ear pages. I’m one of those anal people who goes through all of the copies at the bookstore to find the one in the most pristine condition and then does everything in my power to keep it that way. That said, Gilead found me not only dog-earing pages but inventing a new kind of mutilation for when both sides of the page need to be turned down: the double dog-ear (which looks kind of like a newspaper hat). Subtly beautiful, Gilead is a collection of reflections by a dying Congregationalist minister, John Ames, for his 7-year-old son. There’s not a whole lot of action, per se, nor is there much linear plot until the mysterious John Ames Boughton appears on the scene. (Truth be told, it took quite a while for this book to grab me.) Instead, the author gradually teases out for us a rich sense of John Ames’s life and inner being through his musings on his childhood, his parents and grandfather, his brief first marriage, and his many years of lonely singlehood until—in his late 60s—he meets his much younger second wife. Wisdom practically gleams off the pages as he puts into words the things he wants his young son to know about himself and about the mystery of life and being. At some point we sense that where at first there seemed to be little plot, actually Robinson is forming the story in accumulating layers—adding a little more here, a little more there—until in those last thirty pages we realize we’re holding something beautiful and luminous as a pearl. I love that John Ames, though a minister, is not drawn as perfect. He speaks plainly about his own weaknesses—chiefly, controlling his anger. And he grapples with unforgiveness and some very complex emotions toward John Ames Boughton—the son of his best friend, who was named in his honor and who made a series of heartless and selfish choices, with tragic consequences, before he left Gilead years ago. I also love that John Ames Boughton is not drawn as the one-dimensional bad guy we might first suspect him to be. He “abides by manners most people forget as soon as they learn them” because he’s afraid, to a fault, of unintentionally offending someone. A few of the passages that caused me to fold, spindle, and mutilate with happy abandon: “I wish I could leave you with certain of the images in my mind, because they are so beautiful that I hate to think they will be extinguished when I am. Well, but again, this life has its own mortal loveliness. And memory is not strictly mortal in its nature, either. It is a strange thing, after all, to be able to return to a moment, when it can hardly be said to have any reality at all, even in its passing. A moment is such a slight thing, I mean, that its abiding is a most gracious reprieve.” “Love is holy, because it is like grace—the worthiness of its object is never really what matters.” “Why do I love the thought of you old? The first twinge of arthritis in your knee is a thing I imagine with all the tenderness I felt when you showed me your loose tooth. Be diligent in your prayers, old man. I hope you will have seen more of the world than I ever got around to seeing. … And God bless your eyes and your hearing also, and of course your heart. I wish I could help you carry the weight of many years. But the Lord will have that fatherly satisfaction.” “It seems to me sometimes as though the Lord breathes on this poor gray ember of Creation and it turns to radiance—for a moment or a year or the span of a life. … Wherever you turn your eyes the world can shine like transfiguration. You don’t have to bring a thing to it except a little willingness to see.”

I love the story of Maniac Magee because even if his parents died and his aunt and uncle wouldn't stop fighting he needed to escape.