Nathanael Yellis

While in high school, I worked at Wallingford Farm, a somewhat touristy food and garden store. My coworkers were an odd mix of local workers: people spending a lifetime in dead-end jobs along with some high-school students like me. As a fairly privileged and definitely homeschooled kid, Wallingford was quite the learning experience.

When a book becomes a movie, watching a few trailers gives away the plot. This is usually enough to keep me away. When I saw Life of Pi on the side of the road, I almost didn't pick it up. But, free books. The movie didn't tell me the best part of the story: the first hundred pages or so are all about how a spiritually inquisitive teenager finds religions.

There's great baseball and then there's great baseball stories. I'd put Ball Four up there for both, because both the story and the way this book is written are reminiscent of what makes baseball great.

I haven't read much about the unglamorous transitions of history. That's one reason, in retrospect, that I found Macaulay incredible. For all of the words written about 1775-1800, 1840-60 in Europe aren't routinely in my thinking.

Even weeks after reading Jesusland, I still can't wrap my head around it. My brother Andrew had a great theory, which he introduced via a bizarre theatre of the mind text conversation loosely based on what the author was trying to say to him and I through her ending to this book. And that theory is that just as the author was deeply and irreparably injured by her parents via her childhood, she delivers a blow in this book that you can't recover from.

Sad, but in a riveting way. One of those "fiction" books that you know it's real. Too real.

I've spent this week almost catching up on the reviews I owe my 2014 resolution. While the full review below was a fun one to write, I think I missed the most important point: honest religious writing by an unreligious person is worthwhile reading.