2019 Book Nook Reading Challenge: 06

Title:  What Falls from the Sky 

Author:  Esther Emery

Info:  Copyright 2016:  Grand Rapids:  Zondervan.

Rating (on a scale of 1-4 stars):  ✮✮✮

Where Acquired:  Library Checkout

Category:  Recommended reads.  My sister-in-blog Annie, read this book a while back and recommended it.


Synopsis:  Emery, a former stage play director in California and social media addict, made the drastic decision to cut ties with her former life, especially the internet, for an entire year.  She chronicles her experience with withdrawal, finding community, and the spiritual changes resulting from this paradigm shift.

Favorite Quotes:

Only someone who has lost the spiritual power to be at leisure can be bored - Josef Pieper, quoted on p. 31.

In December, before the snow came, I thought it was possible to avoid being alone with myself.  Now that seems ridiculous.  Now I  am alone with myself all the time, sometimes for hours at a time.  In all those gaps grows a craving for the sacred, a wind that builds on itself like cataclysmic weather.  The more it is satisfied, the more it grows.  And so I read the Bible, like food for a hungry person like Braille for the blind, starting with the end of the world and working backwards toward creation. - p. 78

We talk about how weird and crazy it is that the loneliness could happen in the heart of our most vibrant cities--Boston and New York--that anybody could feel so abandoned and so alone.  And yes we do.  And we're not the only ones.  So many people speak of this  and feel this in our strange time.  It is the era of hyper-connected isolation.  p. 143

The Positive:

• Sounds odd coming from me, I know, but I really loved the domesticity of her adventure.  Her descriptions of baking bread, cooking meals, nursing her daughter, playing with her son, and other everyday family activities made me smile.  Once she finally embraced and started to enjoy the domestic life, I was totally enthralled. 
• Reading this gave me insight into a true social media/internet addiction.  My experience is that I try to use social media to supplement, rather than replace, face-to-face relationships.  I applaud her for being able to give it up completely.  I'm also a little jealous that she had so much built in community that made the transition possible.  Though I don't believe that I'm addicted to the internet or social media, I do feel somewhat overwhelmed by it and have a need to occasionally get completely off the grid. 

The Negative:

• The author's constant lamenting over the supposed life she lost.  For example, on page 60, she's actually upset that her husband suggested that taking care of him and their children gave her purpose in life.  Also, she actually gets angry at her husband for complementing her on how well she mothers their children.  In a society that values wives and mothers above all women, it seems crazy the someone in that coveted position would regret it.  Quite frankly, it ticked me off; she's in the best societal position possible and she's bitter about it?
• The book contains some rather confusing passages.  For example, after traveling to Nicaragua and hearing stories of the natives who trying to decide whether to immigrate to the United States, she decides that her best course of action is to stop buying bananas.  OK, how is refusing the buy the fruit that pays the salaries of many of the immigrant workers who pick the bananas helping them?  Yes, they should be paid better wages, but refusing to purchase makes no sense to me.

Conclusion:

Emery does an exceptional job of exposing the perils of using social media as a substitute for face-to-face interaction and projecting and unrealistic portrayal of life outside the internet to make it more appealing to the internet.

When I started the book, I hated it.  The tone at the beginning was like that of a Gretchen Rubin self-help tome: a pretentious dilettante who's attempting to come down to "peasant" level to briefly live "their" lives, write a book about it, make a crap-ton of money, then go back to life as usual.  Yet, I kept reading and was drawn deeper into her story.  Emery was no dilettante; she was chasing love and validation through cyberspace, not realizing she had it all along with her husband, children, and church.

Yes, the book was a little disjointed and confusing in places.  No, I don't agree with everything the author said, but this volume was beautifully written.  Once the story drew me in, I couldn't put the book down.

I'll most likely purchase a copy, or at least check the volume out of the library again in times when I feel that sense of "hyper-connected isolation."