Blue Like Jazz

I finally started to read Blue Like Jazz. It has been hard to read the book and forget about all the good reviews and hype I heard about it in the last two years. Every once in a while it seems like a book in the Christian community is so popular, it is obsessed over, it is treated as something just short of the Bible. Wild at Heart, The Purpose Driven Life, The Prayer of Jabez, and now, Blue Like Jazz have all been treated this way, not by me, but by the majority. I admit, when I first read Wild at Heart it was the second best book ever written. I never read The Purpose Driven Life. I never read The Prayer of Jabez. I don't know why exactly, except in the case of The Prayer of Jabez, the idea of that book is dumb to me, but with The PDL I could not read it and expect honest change in my life because of the book. I might get to a chapter that I would find particularly challenging, but then I would think, ah, that sly Rick Warren, he would say that and try to get me to change. Well, I am not falling for it because the book and the effect it is known to have on people cannot move me anymore.

I always wanted to read Blue Like Jazz, but I waited this long in order for the hype to die down. I was afraid of reading it just because it was the book to be read among Christians. If I had read it earlier it would have been too trendy for me. The time is right now, and I am loving Miller's words.