Girl Meets God by Lauren F. Winner

I don't even know where to begin with this book. Reading non-fiction is always a problem for me, but this book really irritated me to an excessive degree. Like, I get it lady, YOU THINK YOU'RE SMART and YOU LIKE TO READ. But I DON'T CARE. After the first half of the book, I was trying to give this chick the benefit of the doubt. I thought maybe if I was Jewish, all this crap she kept yakking about would be more significant to me. But nope, a quick online search indicates that Jews are just as annoyed by this girl as I am. I usually wouldn't call a woman who has published a book a girl, but that's what she calls herself in the title, and it's what she acts like, so that's what she gets called. I have a lot of little problems with this book, which I will certainly enumerate later, because I need to have some sort of cathartic experience to stop myself from being angry that I wasted my time with this drivel. First, though, I want to address my main problem with the overall theme of the book. This girl was Jewish, right, and decided to become a Christian. She was really into all this Jewish history and all the traditions that went along with being Jewish. Now she's really into Christian history and all the traditions that go along with being Christian/Episcopalian. I didn't see a lot of evidence to indicate that she was personally transformed by her relationship with Jesus, just that she traded in one set of religious ideals for another. In other words, this book was more about religion than personal faith, or spirituality, or whatever you want to call it. I'm not even really sure why this girl wrote a book. It seems that in order to write a memoir, one should have something of note to say, not just be bent on being the center of attention. The overwrought prose and overlong explanations of facts she had accumulated screamed to me that Lauren F. Winner's main objective in writing this book was to get people to recognize how smart, cool, sophisticated, and just generally great Lauren F. Winner was. Well, I don't agree. Let me tell you, the next Columbia (or Dartmouth, or Cornell, or any other Ivy perceived to be second tier) no-brain who complains within my earshot (or eyeshot, as it were) about how out of place they felt visiting Harvard because they hadn't attended the right camps or schools, can bite me. Privileged people who complain about feeling outcast among people of even higher privilege, and skinny people who complain about their negative body image, listen up: Dante has reserved a special circle of hell for you. Okay, on to the lighter treasons. One of the big deals Lauren blathers about is her friend who has an affair. She's upset about this or whatever, yet later we find out, almost in an amusing aside, that Lauren herself cheated on a boyfriend by sleeping with an ex. How about a little sympathy for your friend, since you clearly know what this situation is like? Or how about, instead of ranting about how your friend is abandoning her wedding vows, letting the reader know that you're not exactly speaking from a position of innocence? Oh, and speaking of weddings, if I want to hear some slack-jawed yokel whine about how they want to get married so badly and fear they'll never meet someone, I'll go talk to any number of idiots I actually know and somewhat care about instead of reading about it in some tedious book. Overall, this book was incredibly annoying and eye-roll inducing, and I'm glad that my hotel kicked me out of my room thereby causing me to miss Lauren Winner's session at the Festival of Faith and Writing this past weekend.

Searching for God Knows What by Donald Miller

I've been reading this book, along with a few others, for a while now, and I hope to finish a few of them soon so I can move on to more interesting reading material. I must confess that I skipped much of the last few chapters of this book because it was beginning to drive me crazy. I understand and agree with a lot of what Donald Miller says, and a few things I read will probably change the way I see my relationship with God, but the self-help nature of this book wore on my nerves, as those types of books always do. There's very little in these kinds of books that I don't already know, and sitting around reading about stuff that I know but don't practice is never beneficial for me. The conversational style of the narrative also bugged me a bit. I like prose that is straightforward but not conversational. Anyway, I'm planning on reading Blue Like Jazz soon since that's the book Donald Miller is most known and most praised for, so we'll see if it has the same effect. We'll also see what I think of him when I hear him speak at the The Festival of Faith and Writing later this month.

Edit after seeing him speak at the Festival of Faith and Writing at Calvin College: My husband and I both saw Donald Miller this past weekend, and we really enjoyed hearing him speak. He spoke about a lot of the same topics he wrote about in Searching for God Knows What, and the ideas were a lot more appealing to me coming from a real person instead of a written page. We have both started Blue Like Jazz, and we're both really enjoying it. So I'm glad I went to see Donald Miller speak, and I hope to maybe revisit this book sometime to actually read the last few chapters instead of skimming.