From the Bookshelf

Jen A. Reccommends

I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home, By Lorrie Moore

“Failure is how you meet people. Failure is how you sometimes get strong.”

— Lorrie Moore

So much of what happens in our lives is out of our control. Relationships are forged and evaporate into thin air at the whim of the universe. It's how we handle those sometimes devastating moments of happenstance that tests our ability to rely on our fundamental core beliefs of who we are. Life leaves a mark and we are often haunted by all that has come before.

Lorrie Moore's I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home , sets us down gently into the eye of a whirlpooling primordial soup of life, love, loss and carrying on. Moore roots Finn, her protagonist, in the reality of an experience everyone living has probably had. But it is a difficult, painful experience. So she sends Finn out to distract himself from his original pain with another even more difficult to manage pain.

He embarks on an extraordinary magical mystery road trip with a sort-of-dead therapy clown. There is also a very clever interstitial vining throughout the novel of letters from a Civil War era boardinghouse owner to her sister. All of these seemingly disparate threads come together with ease in the end. Though she is mostly celebrated for her short story collections, I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home is Moore's first novel in 14 years. It is a mesmerizing and deeply satisfying tale, well worth the wait. It tells us that those we love, whom we often fail, will always be with us — haunting us from the great beyond. As someone who is haunted, I found it warmly, reassuringly comforting. Carry on!

My grandmother was a suffragist. She fought hard and picketed on President Wilson’s White House lawn, or as close as she could get to it!

Therefore, I am not recused from voting, no matter how much of a burden it feels.

I did have fun voting for mayor and council members this August 3. I got to personally talk with each representative interested in representing my area. They actually responded well to receiving The Contributor and promised to read my articles.

I had some great teachers in grade school and high school, who taught a thing that I noticed is no longer being taught. That is what is now known as Critical Thinking: how to notice when someone is framing the argument for you instead of allowing you to look at the facts and frame the questions yourself.

Socrates was the first known scholar to develop the ideas behind rational analysis.

When people only react randomly or emotionally, without really being able to evaluate underlying motives, we have a disaster.

Propaganda was used to chilling effect on