Anne Lamott
Help Thanks Wow: The Three Essential Prayers

Help Thanks Wow: The Three Essential Prayers

In this short memoir of sorts, Lamott distills everything she's learned from a lifetime of praying down to the basics. She wanders a bit, but there are so many gems in these pages.

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Stitches

Stitches

$9.10$1.99Audiobook: 4.45 (Audible)

I didn’t dog-ear this one to death like I did Help, Thanks, Wow. Despite that, I loved Lamott’s central metaphor about stitches and repair, and I used half a box of Kleenex.

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Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

In Anne's own words: "Thirty years ago my older brother, who was ten years old at the time, was trying to get a report on birds written that he'd had three months to write. It was due the next day. We were out at our family cabin in Bolinas, and he was at the kitchen table close to tears, surrounded by binder paper and pencils and unopened books on birds, immobilized by the hugeness of the task ahead. Then my father sat down beside him, put his arm around my brother's shoulder, and said, 'Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.'" A modern classic, and a must-read for writers.

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Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith

Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith

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From the publisher: "Anne Lamott claims the two best prayers she knows are: 'Help me, help me, help me' and 'Thank you, thank you, thank you.' Despite--or because of--her irreverence, faith is a natural subject for Anne Lamott. The people in Anne Lamott's real life are like beloved characters in a favorite series for her readers--her friend Pammy, her son, Sam, and the many funny and wise folks who attend her church are all familiar. Lamott's faith isn't about easy answers, which is part of what endears her to believers as well as nonbelievers. Against all odds, she came to believe in God and then, even more miraculously, in herself. As she puts it, 'My coming to faith did not start with a leap but rather a series of staggers.' At once tough, personal, affectionate, wise, and very funny, Traveling Mercies tells in exuberant detail how Anne Lamott learned to shine the light of faith on the darkest part of ordinary life, exposing surprising pockets of meaning and hope."

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Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son’s First Year
Small Victories: Spotting Improbable Moments of Grace

Small Victories: Spotting Improbable Moments of Grace

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The New Yorker describes Anne Lamott as "a cause for celebration. [Her] real genius lies in capturing the ineffable, describing not perfect moments, but imperfect ones...perfectly. She is nothing short of miraculous." From the publisher: "New and selected essays on hope, joy, and grace. Anne Lamott writes about faith, family, and community in essays that are both wise and irreverent. It's an approach that has become her trademark. Our victories over hardship and pain may seem small, she writes, but they change us—our perceptions, our perspectives, and our lives. Lamott writes of forgiveness, restoration, and transformation, how we can turn toward love even in the most hopeless situations, how we find the joy in getting lost and our amazement in finally being found."

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Almost Everything: Notes on Hope

Almost Everything: Notes on Hope

'I am stockpiling antibiotics for the Apocalypse, even as I await the blossoming of paperwhites on the windowsill in the kitchen,' Anne Lamott admits at the beginning of Almost Everything. From the publisher: "Despair and uncertainty surround us: in the news, in our families, and in ourselves. But even when life is at its bleakest--when we are, as she puts it, 'doomed, stunned, exhausted, and over-caffeinated'--the seeds of rejuvenation are at hand. 'All truth is paradox,' Lamott writes, 'and this turns out to be a reason for hope.' We must pledge not to give up but 'to do what Wendell Berry wrote: 'Be joyful, though you have considered all the facts.''"

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Hallelujah Anyway: Rediscovering Mercy

Hallelujah Anyway: Rediscovering Mercy

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Tag: Quick Lit

From the publisher: "'Mercy is radical kindness,' Anne Lamott writes. It's the permission you give others—and yourself—to forgive a debt, to absolve the unabsolvable, to let go of the judgment and pain that make life so difficult. Lamott ventures to explore where to find meaning in life. We should begin, she suggests, by 'facing a great big mess, especially the great big mess of ourselves.' Full of Lamott's trademark honesty, humor and forthrightness, Hallelujah Anyway is profound and caring, funny and wise—a hopeful book of hands-on spirituality."

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Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith

Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith

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From the publisher: "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."

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Somehow: Thoughts on Love

Somehow: Thoughts on Love

From the publisher: "'Love is our only hope,” Anne Lamott writes in this perceptive new book. “It is not always the easiest choice, but it is always the right one, the noble path, the way home to safety, no matter how bleak the future looks.' In Somehow: Thoughts on Love, Lamott explores the transformative power that love has in our lives: how it surprises us, forces us to confront uncomfortable truths, reminds us of our humanity, and guides us forward. 'Love just won't be pinned down,' she says. 'It is in our very atmosphere' and lies at the heart of who we are. We are, Lamott says, creatures of love. In each chapter of Somehow, Lamott refracts all the colors of the spectrum. She explores the unexpected love for a partner later in life. The bruised (and bruising) love for a child who disappoints, even frightens. The sustaining love among a group of sinners, for a community in transition, in the wider world. The lessons she underscores are that love enlightens as it educates, comforts as it energizes, sustains as it surprises. Somehow is Anne Lamott’s twentieth book, and in it she draws from her own life and experience to delineate the intimate and elemental ways that love buttresses us in the face of despair as it galvanizes us to believe that tomorrow will be better than today. Full of the compassion and humanity that have made Lamott beloved by millions of readers, Somehow is classic Anne Lamott: funny, warm, and wise."

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