Favorite Book

I'm crazy about this book.

I usually have this thing where I don't like being asked the question, "What's your favorite...."

To give one answer for my favorite something often feels too narrow, too definitive.

It's just a nightmare for my at once exuberant and indecisive tendencies.

But please.

Please do ask me what's my favorite book.

Because I like this one so much that it is, absolutely, my favorite. 

I read Bittersweet: Thoughts on Change, Grace, and Learning the Hard Way earlier this fall, but I've just been quietly absorbing its inspiration for awhile.

And thinking about how Shauna, the author, is my new author crush.

I read her first book called Cold Tangerines this summer.

Both books but especially now Bittersweet, have, more than anything else this year

shown me and taught me a way to live.

In the book, each chapter is its own free-standing small essay, and the writing is fabulous- she uses words just the way I love them to be used.

Through both humorous and heavy anecdotes, the painful and bitter parts of life are exposed and processed.

At the same time, she writes about the joy and glory of everyday life, with courage and a good eye, good taste, for the simple things.

The book is raw and funny and sad and deeply solid.

Honest, challenging, so spiritual and then so not, all at the same time in all the best ways.

Bittersweet uncovered so much for me, and wrote to me in my soul language.

Were you to buy it for a girlfriend, sister, or mom for Christmas, I think she might just love it.

Or of course, for yourself, for fireside holiday reading (oh, yum!).

And who knows?  It could become a new favorite, just like it has for me. 

Since I borrowed the book, I'm hoping it could turn up in my stocking as well, *wink.*