DEAR FINDER,

Welcome to BookCrossing!

Please make a journal entry so we know this book has found a new home.You don't need to join BookCrossing and you can remain completely anonymous. However, we encourage you to join so that you can follow this book's future travels. (You’ll receive an email anytime someone makes a journal entry). It's fun, free, and confidential.

Take your time reading the book, and after you finish, please make another journal entry to record your thoughts about it. This book is now yours, and you can keep it if you choose, though we would love for you to share it. If you pass it along, please consider making either a release note here on Bookcrossing to let others know where you left it “in the wild”, or a journal entry if you gave/sent it to a friend.

I hope you enjoy the book!

This book was origionally donated to the Little Free Library on Belcher Street in Essex, MA, by a member of the Manchester/Gloucester/Essex "Buy Nothing" Facebook community.

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Welcome to the Belcher Street Little Free Library!

Please borrow a book; that’s what they are here for. There is no need to return the same book, but we would love for you to replace it sometime with a book (or books!) that you’d like to share. We hope to keep this Little Free Library stocked with a steady, but ever changing, supply of books for all ages and reading appetites.

We'd love for you to let us know what you thought of this book by leaving a journal entry or sending us a message on our Facebook page, and would be interested in learning where this book continues to travel once it's left your hands.

Happy Reading!

I chose this from the lovely LFL while dropping off some books of my own.

Lamott's interesting to read - wickedly funny, sporadically spiritual, and given to wild swings of mood from euphoria to black depression and back again. As a survivor of long-term alcohol and drug abuse, she's not what comes to mind as the ideal mother, and yet her "operating instructions" journal of the first year of her son's life is really wonderful - she covers the sublime, the incredibly difficult, and the ridiculous aspects of child-rearing, along with forays into the meaning of faith and the value of friendship. Funny and heartbreaking by turns... I'm not a "baby" person at all, but I really enjoyed this book [all the while being profoundly thankful that it wasn't happening to me!].

Samples:

"Sam is two weeks old today. His umbilical cord fell off. I'm probably supposed to feel like the cord is very lovely and natural, but I must say I'm going to be able to live without it somehow. It's like something a long-haired cat would get stuck in her tail."

And this one, which pretty much typifies her world view, I think:

"Now there is something that could happen that I could not survive: I could lose Sam. I look down into his staggeringly lovely little face, and I can hardly breathe sometimes. He is all I have ever wanted, and my heart is so huge with love that I feel like it is about to go off. At the same time I feel that he has completely ruined my life, because I just didn't used to care all that much.

"God, they sure shit a lot, don't they?"

I should perhaps caution potential readers that Lamott's language tends towards the, um, colorful. OK, crude, with side trips into the obscene. But if you like a little vinegar with your lyricism, give her a try.

I left this book in the Little Free Library this afternoon; hope the finder enjoys it!

*** Released for the 2017 Keep Them Moving release challenge. ***