Melody Murray's Books

1/2012 This one is a touchstone for me, and I'm not sure exactly why. Perhaps because it is so very gentle, so loving, so open. Ostensibly, it's a few days in a commune in some mythical world that used to have beautiful, man-eating, talking tigers. A world where everything is made from watermelon sugar. But it's always struck me as a meditation on the art of the possible. It helps me to remember how to live, in the words of Annie Dillard, "yielding at every moment to the perfect freedom of single necessity." It's an imperfect science, embracing the given, but one I try to improve at. This book also tastes like my late childhood and early adolescence, when all the world was in love with love, or so it seemed to me. We were all going to be hippies and live on communes and everyone was going to take a turn doing dishes. This review makes almost as little sense as the book. I'm okay with that.10/2005 As much as Brautigan repelled me in person, this book is a transcendent thing. It glows softly in my hands, the pages made from watermelon sugar. On the face of it, it's some hippie post-apocalyptic nonsensical rantage. But it is lyrical, and sweet, and good.