All the best things about Doyle’s extreme joy and wonder, boiled down.

I'm not crying, you're crying.

There are no straight paths in reading Doyle. This collection of some of his finest essays, gathered by his friends and family after his death in 2017, are funny, full of love, sad, breathtaking, and poignant. Make sure you read the forward by his good friend and author, David James Duncan, and the afterword by his wife, Mary Miller Doyle. I'm not in the habit of picking favorite words, but two are humility and grace. Doyle writes about these as well as any, better than most.

Forgive me for a couple of longer quotes.

From his essay titled "The Final Frontier" - "But you cannot control anything. You cannot order or command everything. You cannot fix and repair everything. You cannot protect your children from pain and loss and tragedy and illness. You cannot be sure that you will always be married, let alone happily married...

"All you can do is face the world with quiet grace and hope you can make a sliver of difference. Humility does not mean self-abnegation, lassitude, detachment; it's more a calm recognition that you must trust in that which does not make sense, that which is unreasonable, illogical, silly, ridiculous, crazy by the measure of most of our culture. You must trust that being the best possible you matters somehow. That trying to be an honest and tender parent will echo for centuries through your tribe...That being an attentive and generous friend and citizen will prevent a thread or two of the social fabric from unraveling."

And, finally, from Mary Miller Doyle's afterword: "[This book] was made of admiration, altruism, awe, diligence, extension, generosity. It is a promise and a prayer. It is living proof that we are wise to hold compassion as our Lodestar and to believe that energy never ever is lost and that Brian James Patrick Doyle stirred up so much love in this world that his companions gave of themselves to gather his far-flung brilliant essays from the corners of the world and tuck them in between these covers so you might now know him more as we do, with his capacious humble heart, his soaring spirited stupendous mind, his tender copious humor, his feisty unfailing faith...His greatest joy was using his to delight you."

In the face of so much negativity and divisiveness, one 2020 resolution I made is to be careful of what I let get in my head. Serendipity led me to pick up this book at our local bookstore, the Curious Iguana. What a wonderful kickoff for the 2020 reading year. A beautifully written book, it is poetic prose that is honest and relatable. Poignant, funny, thought-provoking, it is a celebration of the human condition in all its messiness, sorrow, joy, relationships. This is a great read, and one that will be revisited many times over.

I finished this book just a couple of days after finishing Ann Patchett's book of personal essays, so I'll do my thing of juxtaposing books. I'd say Patchett's book is very much a collection of personal essays by a famous novelist, while in this book, the essay seems to be the genre that Doyle is the most accomplished and fluent in. The difference is that Ann's essays tell us about Ann, while Doyle's essays are little works of art all in themselves. He really does put together sentences like no one else. Doyle died young (60) a few years ago, so the book has a poignancy as well, when I consider the beautiful essays that were never written.

It is Brian Doyle, and so it is perfect. That's all. I could put endless quotes from these essays here, but I won't, so you'll just have to read it!

This is a collection of Doyle's work that was put together after his tragically early death - so if you've read a bunch of his essays, be aware these are also in previous collections of his. It's lovely to have this "best of" all in one place though.

I love and miss BD. A beautiful collection of grateful essays.

Doyle manages to combine humor and poignancy in many of these essays such that you're not sure whether to laugh or cry. He was a master at being able to do this. It's sad to think of all the writings that would have been produced by this underappreciated Oregon author had it not been for his untimely passing a few years back. But at least we have these.

The essays weren't all my cup of tea, and for some reason I was expecting more outdoorsy nature-inspired topics, but most were beautiful and poetic and inspiring.