Best Book Anne has ever done.

Where does Small Victories rank among all the audiobooks you’ve listened to so far?

I love memoirs read by those who wrote it and lived it. Anne is incredible at this.

What did you like best about this story?

This book will have you laugh out loud, cry tears of sadness, and leave you with a sense of the profound grace of God in our lives and relationships.

What about Anne Lamott’s performance did you like?

Anne intentionally does not "ham it up," but reads the script of her life and shares her heart with such warmth and honesty that it takes your breath away, She is a professional writer, not a professional reader, so I only give her 4 stars for performance.But she is still great.

If you were to make a film of this book, what would the tag line be?

I would not do a film of this book. Films are not the evolutionary goal of writing books.

Any additional comments?

I do not agree with Anne in her politics at all. As one person said,"I find them abhorrent." But I do not have to agree with Anne to love her. And I do. I have listened to or read almost all of her books. This one I have enjoyed the most. If you have followed Anne and thought her better days were behind her,,,,well you are so wrong, This book is her best, most honest, enjoyable and uplifting book yet.

10 people found this helpful

Stories of Recovery Told with Rigorous Honesty

Eleanor Roosevelt, Bill Wilson, Dorothy Parker and Martin Luther King Jr. walk into a bar and the bartender says: "Who are you? Anne Lamott's spiritual grand parents?"

Probably no other living literary essayist is as hard to pigeon hole as the author of Small Victories: Spotting Improbable Moments of Grace. What do you say about a super liberal, recovering alcoholic, darkly witty solipsistic, Christian activist?

Most people with her mixed bag of viewpoints would end up writing letters to the editor that never got printed. But Lamott is an author has great gifts. She writes honestly and sometimes scathingly about family and friends, but unlike most bloggers she manages to make her rants and raves entertaining and insightful.

She has a two-part essay here about her struggles with her mother, who despite being a Bay Area leftie intellectual lawyer was also a nightmare as a parent. Despite being 20+ years sober in AA and a liberal version of a born again Christian, Anne was in a rage about her mother even after the old woman died. It took Anne two years using every trick in the AA and socialist Jesus books to come to any terms with her mother at all.

Anne LaMott does not engage in the kind "podium talk" where a recovering alcoholic gets up at an AA meeting and says how wonderful their life is now that they are sober. Ditto for getting up in a pulpit and extolling the amazing and cool things that have happened to her since she found Jesus.

Listening to Anne read her essays, you wonder how she can stand to live her own life filled with horrid politicians and nasty PTA mothers, dying and trying family members and friends, and the author's own foibles and personal failures.

But her writing is redeemed by wit as when she refers to turning 60 as entering "extreme middle age." And it graced by those minor miracles, which make a troubled life bearable.

6 people found this helpful

Narrating is so monotone!!

I could not finish this book because the author is so monotone that I cannot focus on the text. I think that's unfortunate because the text could be received better with a better narrator

5 people found this helpful

Lamott at her best

If you don’t know Lamott’s voice, you may find it a little off-putting at first. But let yourself become absorbed in her ordinary and remarkable stories and the voice will take you over. Lamott’s self-revealing honesty, her doubts, her quest for faith and love are too humanly familiar and too wise to be ignored. A reader who can’t learn something from this book just isn’t listening.

4 people found this helpful

I really tried to get through it but the narrator was awful

I really really tried to get through this. I couldn’t take her voice and narration anymore. I was bored out of my mind. The stories I heard just weren’t interesting to me and I don’t know if it was the content, the voice, or both. I have listened to hundreds of books and this was the worst narrator so far.

4 people found this helpful

Narration okay, stories recycled

I love Anne Lamott's writings! They make me feel more sane. If you haven't read any of Anne Lamott's books, this is a good one to start, but know that it is a kind of "Best of" Anne Lamott. There is a lot of recycled material here. I would have liked to have known that at the start, which is why I gave it 4 stars instead of 5. Also, while I became used to the author's reading, I so enjoyed Susan Bennet's reading of Bird by Bird and would love to hear her read future books.

4 people found this helpful

Really a "best of" -- so every one of them excellent

I'd read some of these essays before -- but then I've read practically everything the woman's written, including columns in the early days of Salon.com and her Twitter feed. But I was loving this one so much (both via audiobook, in Anne's own voice, and Kindle) that before I was 2/3s through, I gave a hard copy edition to a friend who I felt needed it like a warm hug. And then I got the hug! Grace.

4 people found this helpful

Listen to this Over and Over

Other than the fact that some of the stories she tells are repeated from other books, this literary treasure is one I keep on my Audible app all the time. I think I've listened to it a dozen times already.

4 people found this helpful

fab

loved it. you get used to her slightly awkward reading style and her stories are such soul food.

2 people found this helpful

You Have to Like Anne Lamott

If you are familiar with Anne Lamott's writing you will enjoy this book because it is more of the same. Yea! I think I have read everything she has written. If you are not familiar with her writing and see that she is a Christian author, just be prepared for some unorthodox viewpoints and the occasional use of the "F" word.

3 people found this helpful