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Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith by Anne…
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Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith (original 2005; edition 2006)

by Anne Lamott (Author)

MembersReviewsPopularityAverage ratingMentions
2,339456,553 (3.92)89
Biography & Autobiography. Nonfiction. HTML:From the New York Times bestselling author of Hallelujah Anyway, Bird by Bird, and Almost Everything, a spiritual antidote to anxiety and despair in increasingly fraught times.
As Anne Lamott knows, the world is a dangerous place. Terrorism and war have become the new normal. Environmental devastation looms even closer. And there are personal demands on her faith as well: getting older; her mother's Alzheimer's; her son's adolescence; and the passing of friends and time.
Fortunately for those of us who are anxious about the state of the world, whose parents are also aging and dying, whose children are growing harder to recognize as they become teenagers, Plan B offers hope that we're not alone in the midst of despair. It shares with us Lamott's ability to comfort and to make us laugh despite the grim realities.
Anne Lamott is one of our most beloved writers, and Plan B is a book more necessary now than ever. It is further evidence that, as The New Yorker has written, "Anne Lamott is a cause for celebration.".
… (more)
Member:Paul-the-well-read
Title:Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith
Authors:Anne Lamott (Author)
Info:Riverhead Books (2006), Edition: Reprint, 320 pages
Collections:Your library, Currently reading, Wishlist, To read, Read but unowned, Favorites
Rating:****
Tags:Before Apr. 2020

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Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith by Anne Lamott (2005)

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Showing 1-5 of 45 (next | show all)
As Anne Lamott knows, the world is a dangerous place. Terrorism and war have become the new normal. Environmental devastation looms even closer. And there are personal demands on her faith as well: getting older; her mother's Alzheimer's; her son's adolescence; and the passing of friends and time.

Fortunately for those of us who are anxious about the state of the world, whose parents are also aging and dying, whose children are growing harder to recognize as they become teenagers, Plan B offers hope that we’re not alone in the midst of despair. It shares with us Lamott's ability to comfort and to make us laugh despite the grim realities.

Anne Lamott is one of our most beloved writers, and Plan B is a book more necessary now than ever. It is further evidence that, as The New Yorker has written, "Anne Lamott is a cause for celebration."
  PSZC | May 20, 2019 |
I read this while babysitting my grandchildren for a week. Ms. Lamott's eloquent honesty on living with children was balm in the evening of the day. The column format (each chapter, I assume, was a previous column in some online form) was fine for this kind of intermittent reading. There are some hilarious gems on weddings and funerals and patchwork families. I wrote notes to myself of the advice which felt like a girlfriend had emailed me when I was desperate: "Change the way you treat people to change the way you feel" (p.143) and "Hope is the cousin to grief" (p.238).

Thank you, Anne, for sharing yourself with so much hope. I am grateful. ( )
1 vote MaryHeleneMele | May 6, 2019 |
I love Anne Lamott! Nothing else needs saying. ( )
  LouisaK | Feb 2, 2016 |
I love Anne Lamott! Nothing else needs saying. ( )
  LouisaK | Feb 2, 2016 |
I love Anne Lamott! Nothing else needs saying. ( )
  LouisaK | Feb 2, 2016 |
Showing 1-5 of 45 (next | show all)
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Epigraph
Monet Refuses The Operation

Doctor, you say there are no halos

around the streetlights in Paris
and what I see is an aberration
caused by old age, an affliction.
I tell you it has taken me all my life
to arrive at the vision of gas lamps as angels,
to soften and blur and finally banish
the edges you regret I don't see,
to learn that the line I called the horizon
does not exist and sky and water,
so long apart, are the same state of being.
Fifty-four years before I could see
Rouen cathedral is built
of parallel shafts of sun,
and now you want to restore
my youthful errors: fixed
notions of top and bottom,
the illusion of three-dimensional space,
wisteria separate
from the bridge it covers.
What can I say to convince you
the Houses of Parliament dissolve
night after night to become
the fluid dream of the Thames?
I will not return to a universe
of objects that don't know each other,
as if islands were not the lost children
of one great continent. The world
is flux, and light becomes what it touches,
becomes water, lilies on water,
above and below water,
becomes lilac and mauve and yellow
and white and cerulean lamps,
small fists passing sunlight
so quickly to one another
that it would take long, streaming hair
inside my brush to catch it.
To paint the speed of light!
Our weighted shapes, these verticals,
burn to mix with air
and change our bones, skin, clothes
to gases. Doctor,
if only you could see
how heaven pulls earth into its arms
and how infinitely the heart expands
to claim this world, blue vapor without end.
---Lisel Mueller
Dedication
For Rory
First words
On my forth-ninth birthday, I decided that all of life was hopeless, and I would eat myself to death.
Quotations
"The problem with God–or at any rate, one of the to five most annoying things about God–is that He or She rarely answers right away. It can take days, weeks. Some people seem to understand this–that life and change take time... I, on the other hand, am an instant-message type."
"When you pray, you are not starting the conversation from scratch, just remembering to plug back into a conversation that's always in progress."
"If you haven't already, you will lose someone you can't live without, and your heart will be badly broken, and you never completely get over the loss of a deeply beloved person. But this is also good news. The person lives forever, in your broken heart that doesn't seal back up. And you come through, and you learn to dance with the banged-up heart. You dance to the absurdities of life; you dance to the minuet of old friendship."
Last words
(Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)
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Biography & Autobiography. Nonfiction. HTML:From the New York Times bestselling author of Hallelujah Anyway, Bird by Bird, and Almost Everything, a spiritual antidote to anxiety and despair in increasingly fraught times.
As Anne Lamott knows, the world is a dangerous place. Terrorism and war have become the new normal. Environmental devastation looms even closer. And there are personal demands on her faith as well: getting older; her mother's Alzheimer's; her son's adolescence; and the passing of friends and time.
Fortunately for those of us who are anxious about the state of the world, whose parents are also aging and dying, whose children are growing harder to recognize as they become teenagers, Plan B offers hope that we're not alone in the midst of despair. It shares with us Lamott's ability to comfort and to make us laugh despite the grim realities.
Anne Lamott is one of our most beloved writers, and Plan B is a book more necessary now than ever. It is further evidence that, as The New Yorker has written, "Anne Lamott is a cause for celebration.".

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