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Don Miller is this guy. He’s a writer, and he writes mostly about real life. You could call it memoir, but that’s not all he writes. His most famous-est book of all was a little one called Blue Like Jazz. It ended up on the New York Times Best Sellers list. It was clever. I laughed. I cried. I read it about seven times. I made my friends read it, too.

Since Blue Like Jazz, I’ve read a couple of Don’s other books (Through Painted Deserts, To Own A Dragon). They’ve been good, but … well, he felt kind of forced. It was good, but it wasn’t epic like Blue Like Jazz. I didn’t feel what the narrative voice felt. I’ve also disagreed with some of Don’s personal decisions and wondered about his theology. The thing is, when he’s on, he’s one of the best Christian writers I’ve ever had the pleasure of reading. Or maybe, he’s one of the easiest to connect with of any Christian writer I’ve ever read. What’s more… Don’s books aren’t heavy on theology. Don himself may not be either. But, he has been theologically beneficial to me.

I had the pleasure of listening to him at the Festival of Faith and Writing at Calvin College in… ’04 I think. Maybe ’05. I remember him talking about calvinism and saying “Okay, so man is totally depraved… so what? What does that practically mean in your life?” It was the question I needed to hear. I needed someone to remind me, that day, that the “so what” was as important as the “what.”

A few weeks ago, Thomas Nelson was offering review copies of Don’s newest book, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years. I couldn’t miss the opportunity to read his new book and review it for you guys, so I promptly volunteered too.

A Million Miles feels like Blue Like Jazz, grown up. Don is growing up himself, dealing with different things now than he was seven or eight years ago. Bigger things. He is again personally revealing, profound, and challenging. He admits to struggling with continuing his writing career. A big theme of this book is “living better stories,” and he draws at length off the experience of writing a screenplay from, of all things, Blue Like Jazz.

For you Christian music aficionados, it will be of note that Steven Taylor is one of the men Don writes the screenplay with. Steven Taylor was a Christian rocker in the 80s. He made one of my favorite live albums of all time (Liver) and also ran a record label in the late 90s/early 00s called Squint Entertainment. It was home to Sixpence None the Richer. Reading the version of him that Don puts on paper was particularly fun for me, since I’ve been a fan of his for a long time.

Anyway, back to the book. I’d encourage you to pick up a copy. It’ll make you think in a lot of good ways. I was left thinking about the story I’m living; whether it needs some editing. I also laughed. A lot. My wife would set down her book every once in a while and say, honey… what’s so funny? I’d read her the relevant portion, she’d chuckle and go back to reading.

It also had some tear-jerking moments. Don recounts his own pain unflinchingly. He also communicates the pain of his friends in a remarkably empathetic way. He obviously has a great love for the people who are important to him, not just as characters but as friends.

It’s not the longest book. In an age where attention spans are short, A Million Miles is easy to recommend, because it won’t drag. But, I was left wishing for more and you might be too.

You can find Donald Miller on the internet at www.donmilleris.com and on twitter at @donmilleris. You can buy his new book, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years at Amazon.com.

And, if you have my copy of Blue Like Jazz… could I get it back? Thanks!

Matt was right. Matt, if you’re reading this, you’re right. If you’re not reading it, I’ll tell you next time we talk on the phone.

About a week ago, my little brother called me from the bookstore. We’ve been doing a better job at random calls lately, and it’s fun. I miss him, he’s a great friend. Anyway, he was looking for something to read. He came upon Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, and I said, “Oh, I want to read that!” He bought it and called me a couple days later.

If I recall correctly, his review was essentially: “The only good parts were the parts Jane Austen wrote. They added zombies, killing, and overt sexual innuendo. It all felt tacked on and needless.”

I found it in our library (Support your librarians! They put up with more crap than you can imagine!) and got it out to read it and see what I thought.

Matt was right. I don’t often say that because I don’t want him to get high on his horse, but, boy, was he right. It’s just not very good. You’ve heard of addition by subtraction? This feels like subtraction by addition. The story is worse. The clever parts were Jane Austen’s anyway.

Sorry we let them do that to your work Jane. We’ll get them one day. Probably in the zombie apocalypse.

I’ve confessed in the past a tendency to read things because people say they’re great. Sometimes this results in grave disappointment (Hello there Toni Morrison, I’m looking at you), sometimes in indifference (Yeah, the three times I’ve read the first 100 pages of the Grapes of Wrath come to mind), and sometimes in abject delight.

Which, in reality, doesn’t prove anything at all except that enjoying a book is tied more to personality than to the book itself.

I’m reading Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. I started it because, well, it’s a classic. I realized 20 pages in that “it’s a classic” is a dumb reason to read a book. I gave her 30 more pages to make me care about the story. She did that, by proving the environment to be interesting, the characters to be interesting — not in a human sense, but in an archetypal sense.

So, I’ll let you know how it goes, but I’m glad to say that I’m reading it for the story, not for the “classic.” Here’s hoping the story delivers.

There are some people whose abilities with prose are just… above average. Far above average in the case of this post over at the Rabbit Room by Ron Block.

It is so still and serene there. God’s creation is; it’s just simply being itself. There is an immutable silence in nature that mere noise and activity can’t eradicate; the silence is always there under the noise, patiently waiting.

I recommend the read… it reminds me of the prose in Walt Morey books that I read over and over again when I was 10 or 11. The kind of stuff that boys dream of.

I recently finished reading Notes from the Tilt-A-Whirl by N. D. Wilson. My previous exposure to Mr. Wilson came through one of his children’s books, Leepike Ridge. Leepike Ridge was a good book.

Notes from the Tilt-A-Whirl was a great book. In fact, Notes… was the smartest book I’ve read in a while. It was like Blue Like Jazz, but with a point. (Can I say that without disparaging Mr. Miller, whose book I enjoyed? I hope I can.) In Notes from the Tilt-A-Whirl, Wilson presents an apologetic of art in motion. He walks us through the seasons of a year, showing us the art in both the good and the bad of each season. Rather than denying the difficult things that we encounter as we live in the world God has created, Wilson hits them head on, appealing to scripture and to art to help us understand the way things are. Whether dealing with the existence of God, matter, or good and evil, Wilson points back to the art underlying the world.

What is the world? What is it for? It is art. It is the best of all possible art, a finite picture of the infinite… Assess it like that. And when you’re done, find an ant and have him assess the cathedrals of Europe (Wilson, p. 82).

Start to finish, the depth of thought that Notes from the Tilt-a-Whirl provoked provided me with the deepest reading experience I’ve had in a good, long while. I encourage you to pick up this book. When you do, set aside twice as much time as you normally would for a book of 204 pages. It’ll be well worth it. I came out of it with a renewed appreciation as a writer for the Creator/Artist who put this all together, whose great art we imitate as we “create” worlds for our readers.

This is a preview of a book I’ll have a thorough review of in a couple of weeks. Prior to this book, I have only read N.D. Wilson’s children’s book, Leepike Ridge. It was quite good. I enjoyed it and can’t wait for six or seven years from now when I can read it to my son.

I started in on Notes from the Tilt-A-Whirl not knowing exactly what to expect. So far, I’m thrilled. It’s good.

Mr. Wilson posted a little intro / taste of / teaser video over on his blog. Go watch it. Prepare for a thorough review. If it’s an eighth as deep as the book, it may still be over my head.

Moonrat at Editorial Ass(istant… get it?) has a brilliant post up about return rates. He is so insightful about publishing that I’ll forgive him the occasional language slip up.

He was asked if it was true that on average, 40% of the books that are printed by the publishing industry are destroyed because they didn’t sell. The best part of the post:

Publishing companies like to put out huge quantities of a book because they get paid by the vendors right away. The vendors send them cash for all the books they buy. Alas, remember, book publishing is a returnable industry–which means those vendors can (and will) in 4 months or so return all their unsold merchandise–which might be up to 100% of what they originally bought. And the publishing company will owe them the dollar value of every book they have to take back.

But hey! They solve that cash flow problem by paying back their debt with money they make from overselling NEXT month’s title. The hope is somewhere along the way, a book will actually sell THROUGH to customers, thus helping us overcome our own stupid cash flow cycle.

I’ve watched the return cycle at a very small publisher. I know that the books that come back are not at all necessarily in a sellable state. Nevertheless, the bookstore gets their money back and the publisher eats the cost.

It’s when I remember details like these that I get more excited about digital distribution and the future of the publishing industry in terms of short runs, etc. I don’t know how it will work, but I do know that the present model is in some ways broken. Beautiful, but broken.

After all, can you imagine if Starbucks had to give you back your money after you sat holding your cup for four hours, perhaps even taking a sip? Yeah… wouldn’t work for them, why should it work for anyone else?

A while back, I read a post over at Challies. For those of you who don’t know, Tim Challies is a ridiculously popular blogger. He’s also a Canadian like myself. We also share a lot of the same beliefs about the world and God.

He recently did a series of posts called “Don’t Take Your iPod to Church.” I enjoyed the second post in particular. In that post, Tim addresses some of the problems with using an interactive, hyperlinked and ADHD friendly device for studying a seriously important book.

I’m inclined to agree, dear reader. I’m also inclined to think that maybe there’s an application for the rest of the reading we do. Not that I’m coming out against electronic reading formats in general. But perhaps, as Mr. Challies says, there’s something good about a medium that isn’t inherently distracting. Your thoughts?

I had a great reminder tonight from a dear brother that the best motivation to keep doing something is simply that you love it.

(aside directed at Sam… if I could, I’d bring you real chips, because your statement that “you eat a bag of chips when you’re not thinking” was the only thing I disagreed with all night. /End aside)

There is a reason that I read so much… I love it. There’s a reason that I watch the same movies over and over with my wife: I love them (and her). There’s a reason that I don’t do so hot with writing: I have not made steady my affection for it. I don’t love it. Or, I don’t love it more than I love eating a bag of chips and watching 30 Rock reruns.

It’s a problem. It’s a discipline problem. But, if I start to think about it like I think of “discipline” I start to chafe… it’s the same reason I was never a good runner. The idea was good but the work part of it was too hard.

But if I loved it… clearly, you do the things you love. So, maybe the thing to do is… just choose to love something different. Love different.

love different is a trademark (registration pending) of the Andrew Mackay Media Empire (AMME), all rights reserved… any similarity to trademarks belonging to fruity computer companies are coincidental, I swear. Also, you owe me a bag of chips for reading this paragraph.

Yesterday I posted the first page of a book. It’s awful. It’s called Moon People by Dale M Courtney. It was self published, and it is clear that no editor ever even got started on it. It’s also probably equally clear that Mr. Courtney could use a little refresher on the standards of grammar and punctuation that come with the English language.

I originally found the link to that first page on Digg. Digg is a website where people vote on links. It can be a minefield in terms of finding content that is worth your while. It can also be a lesson in what is popular.

Occasionally, when enough people see something like this, they all get the same idea. In this case, over 50 people decided to go to Amazon.com and write positive reviews of the book. They mostly mock the author’s style, but they also mostly give him five stars.

Here’s the peril of modern media: as a result of 50+ five star reviews, this book… the one with terrible grammar and spelling so bad as to be unreadable… is ranked 860 on Amazon’s sales rank. It’s probably climbing too!

Amazon doesn’t rank based on number of sales. They rank on a proprietary set of factors. One of those factors just happens to be reviews.

Now, I don’t think many people are going to actually buy the book. Maybe… just maybe… if they’re gluttons for punishment they might. The real problem lies in our tendency to love a trainwreck. We pile on to things like this for the same reason that people like Lindsay Lohan and Paris Hilton are at all known quantities in hollywood — people like a disaster.

So, while I appreciate just how bad that book seemed, I’m going to try (and encourage you, friend, to join me in trying) to move on… you know, maybe read a good book… do something constructive… hug my wife. Good things in life. And stop loving the train wrecks.