Gilead

Hello, friends. To those of you who have been faithful participants in our very special book club: thank you. I'm having a lot of fun reading and talking books with you, and I very much hope you feel the same.

My number has come up in the book selection process, and as I've previously stated I would like us to read Marilynne Robinson's Gilead. She's an author I've been meaning to get to for some time now, and I figured there's no better place to start than with the novel that earned her a Pulitzer.

Gilead is written in the form of a letter from John Ames, an aging Iowa preacher who believes his time is this world is running short, to his young son, a product of a late marriage. The New York Times describes it as "religious, somewhat essayistic and fiercely calm. Gilead is a beautiful work -- demanding, grave and lucid," and The Washington Post says it's "written in a prose so gravely measured and thoughtful, that one feels touched with grace just to read it." We've read a lot of different things so far in this club, but we've yet to read anything by a female author, nothing that could be classified as spiritual, nor anything that can safely be called "beautifully ruminative." I say it's time.