I purchased this book with the 13 or 14 others at the Boston Book Festival last year in a bag for $20 from one of the book sellers. And although the elusive ‘they’ say never to judge a book by its cover, I would not have read Gilead If I hadn’t. From the beautiful and simplistic close up of a fading front door to the title so steeped in folkloric and mythic tradition, I never once read the synopsis until I decided to read the book and there was no turning back.
The lack of religiosity impressed me considering the book’s protagonist is a Congregationalist minister. The religion that does seep in comes across more as universal kindness and understanding than tongues and bible thumping. The protagonist, his best friend, his father, his grandfather, and various other characters are all ministers and yet they are real people–they love, they kill (in the name of abolition), they run away from the world and they live normal lives.
“I was suddenly aware of how ignorant I was, alive with curiosity, doing academic work at a level I would not have thought possible a few years before. I did not know it yet, but I was learning the basic educational fact of life: the answers are meaningless until the questions are asked.” (17)
You have to love a book with its first chapter titled “Rainy Days and Mondays Always Get Me Down.” I’m not positive but I think most of the chapters were song lyrics and most of them made me smile. Bootlegger’s Daughter takes place in a fictional rural county of North Carolina which vaguely resembles the surrounding counties where I grew up (thank you I-95).
White Teeth was a much more interesting read than I thought it would be. It was originally selected as one of the book group books for our AmeriCorps book group, but that sort of fell to the wayside a few months ago and I’d already purchased it.