Today's Featured Book
Jayber Crow by Wendell Berry
Genre: Fiction
Published: September 5, 2000
Page Count: 384 pages
Summary:
“This is a book about Heaven,” says Jayber Crow, “but I must say too that . . . I have wondered sometimes if it would not finally turn out to be a book about Hell.” It is 1932 and he has returned to his native Port William to become the town's barber.
Orphaned at age ten, Jayber Crow’s acquaintance with loneliness and want have made him a patient observer of the human animal, in both its goodness and frailty.
He began his search as a "pre-ministerial student" at Pigeonville College. There, freedom met with new burdens and a young man needed more than a mirror to find himself. But the beginning of that finding was a short conversation with "Old Grit," his profound professor of New Testament Greek:
"You have been given questions to which you cannot be given answers. You will have to live them out―perhaps a little at a time."
"And how long is that going to take?"
"I don't know. As long as you live, perhaps."
"That could be a long time."
"I will tell you a further mystery," he said. "It may take longer."
I never put up a barber pole or a sign or even gave my shop a name. I didn’t have to. The building was already called “the barbershop.” That was its name because that had been its name for nobody knew how long. Port William had little written history Its history was its living memory of itself, which passed over the years like a moving beam of light. It had a beginning that it had forgotten, and would have an end that it did not yet know. It seemed to have been there forever. After I had been there a while, the shop began to be called Jayber Crow’s, or just Jayber’s. “Well, I’m going down to Jayber’s,” people would say, as if it had been clearly marked on some map, though it was so only in their minds. I never had a telephone, so I was not even in the book.
One thing you would sooner or later realize about The Good Shepherd was that it had no neighbors. Like (I think) most institutions, it was turned inward, trying to be a world in itself. It stood at the edge of the little town of Canefield, which it looked upon as a threat to its morals. In his many chapel talks and sermons, Brother Whitespade suffered over the possibility that some of the Canefield merchants might sell cigarettes to The Good Shepherd children for some of the tiny allowance of spending money we received, and over the possibly regrettable results of mixing between our older girls and boys and the older boys and girls of Canefield, who had not had the advantage of orphanhood and the moral instruction of Brother Whitespade.
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January 19th-25th - Have you ever loved a book that everyone else hated or hated a book that everyone else loved? (submitted by Billy @ Coffee Addicted Writer)
My oldest friend begged me to read John Irving's A Prayer for Owen Meany. "It's my favorite book!" she gushed.
So I read it.
I hate, loathe, despise A Prayer for Owen Meany.
And yet so many people, including my friend Karen, love that book.
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