Book Review Monday

Okay, I've received two books to review and I've read one and loaned it to my son, and read 90% of the other. As such, both merit reviews and as a writer, there's an obligation to do for others what I ask of them.   The problem remains, I'm a poky reader.  I start. I stop. I put down the books and forget where I started so I start again or I lose the book and that's the end of it for weeks on end. 

It's why I'm often reluctant to do book reviews, because I know me.  However, Sunday Will Never Be the Same reminded me of a younger me, in that much of it takes place in New York City, right near where my husband and I lived our first year of marriage.  I kept stopping as I read and thinking, "I know that spot."  It isn't there anymore, but I remember it.  The book recalled some of the joy of living in New York City as it crackled with that urban energy and insanity of the early 90's. 

Dawn Eden Goldstein's book journals her gradual conversion from Judaism to Music (rock and roll) to Catholicism, via beauty, via poetry, via exposure to the beauty and frailty of others souls in their music and in their lives.   It's a good thing to give to someone who is in the process of growing up, and trying to see how God fits into life or rather, how life fits into knowing God. It's earnest and I enjoyed the book but I admit, I wanted more of the conversion, more of the moments when her heart felt pierced, more of the interior but it's her story, and this is how it happened. 

She does bring us along with her.  My teenage son is reading her book.  The artists she covered when they were young and new, he loves now.  So I'm hoping the journey he takes while reading her book, in between skateboarding and high school and listening to Green Day and Weezer, brings him to the same point, the point where he understands what Dawn discovered amidst the music and the lives of those artists she covered, that God is there in the beauty, and expressed in the longing of every heart, most especially the heart that knows it aches, but does not know what that ache is. 

I'll finish up the other book for next Monday...