Jim Minick

I've been excited to read this book since its release, especially since I grew up in the community where the story takes place; my father worked summers at the same Blue Mountain Esso/Exxon station during the childhood; my mother worked at that Howard Johnson's when she was a young adult - and my mother's farming family boarded several of the workers who built the PA Turnpike near Blue Mountain. I also had the privilege of growing up with author Jim Minick and still consider him a friend (as show more well as relative). Jim has written vividly and beautifully of the Hopewell landscape and peoplescape. I was truly mesmerized by his rendering of these hearty and beautiful farming families. His storytelling kept me engrossed long past my usual bedtime; I was up again early the next morning to finish. Rarely have I started a book and stopped my life to finish it within 24 hours. Granted, I was invested in the location and the people since they were so familiar, but this is a book for anyone who cares about heritage, family, the power of love, and how faith and doubt are sides of the same coin. After the final page of this highly satisfying read, the only sadness I felt was that I never had the guts growing up to squeeze through the fence and traverse 4 lanes of highway to get some ice cream at HoJo's. show less

So here's my issue with too many memoirs:

I make photo books on photography websites for my kids, since I'm not patient or crafty enough to scrapbook. I go through all the pictures I took of them over the course of a year or two and try to cram all the best ones into forty or so pages. Inevitably, I end up with 80 or 100 pages on the first go and have to ruthlessly cull all those pictures down to a manageable number. I imagine it must be similar to write a memoir. You want to include show more everything important, but after it's all down on the page, no one really wants to see four pictures of your toddler's face smeared with yogurt.

And this is my repeated complaint with memoirs. Instead of leaving me wanting more, I usually think, "Enough, already!" Maybe I should avoid memoirs as a general rule, but I always come across interesting lives that I want to read about...and then it becomes too much.

So this one -- the story of a couple who dreamed of being self-sufficient blueberry farmers/ homesteaders -- seemed to have a lot of promise, but got bogged down in the details. It doesn't help that the author is a professor/poet. (I found the poetic excerpts at the beginning of each section a tad painful.) Too many customers described, too many mundane details of their lives, just a little too much in general. And many of the chapters felt disconnected, like they were written as blog entries, or more likely in this case, newspaper columns, and then strung together, with information repeated or out of chronological order. I think I would have enjoyed the book more if it had lost 1/3 to 1/2 of its 300 pages in the editing process. (I fully admit that I skimmed or skipped most of his "blue interludes.") show less

This is another book I had some trouble settling in to, but once I did, I enjoyed it quite a bit. Finding a Clear Path is a collection of short nature essays, many closer to meditations than anything else. Some of the pieces on farming and food remind me a bit of Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, though that book is quite different in style. A pleasant read, akin to a short walk through the woods in words. Minick is also a graduate of my undergrad college (though he graduated show more some seventeen years before me, so our paths never crossed), and that's cool. show less

It got slow at one point and I almost stopped reading it. Didn't think I liked his voice. Then a friend encouraged me to continue. Minick's voice grew in the writing of the book.