Donald Miller, a bestselling American author and public speaker, lives in Portland, OR. He focuses on Christian spirituality. Despite its subtitle, this book is about his journey to his views of Christian spirituality. My church’s Roundtable group discussed this book at four monthly meetings in Fall 2009.

When I first posted my partial review of this book I said "Since we are currently reading it, this is NOT a full review of the book. I've read it all, but I will delay my full review until we finish discussing it." Brian McLaren (The Secret Message of Jesus: Uncovering the Truth That Could Change Everything – book 170) has some intriguing words about Donald Miller's book: “I can think of no better book than Blue Like Jazz to introduce Christian spirituality (a way of life) to people for whom Christianity (a system of beliefs) seems like a bad math problem or a traffic jam. Donald Miller writes like a good improv solo – smooth, sweet, surprising, uplifting, and full of soul and fury and joy. When I finished the last page, I felt warmed, full of hope, and confident that this great book will echo with beauty in many, many lives just as it is doing in mine.” Now for my review of the book.

Unlike Brian McLaren, whose book I mentioned above I gave a very positive review, I could not see Donald Miller as a good improv solo. He was at times, but more often, to stick to a musical analogy, many times he seemed like a musician during his warmup period when tuning his instrument - more noise than music. But I felt that, instead of a solo warmup period, his prose often seemed more like the warmup period of a large musical group - that is, cacaphony. Returning to literary terminology, Donald Miller's writing is often stream of conciousness. For a great writer of this style, it can carry you along as if you were experiencing what the writer was describing. I felt this way about Miller only on a few occasions, but most of the time I had difficulty trying to figure out what he was trying to get across. Far too often he simply seemed too confused to explain his feelings well enough. Since he is the age of my son, perhaps our generational difference could explain my difficulty, but I have far less difficulty with my son and his friends, so I don't believe our generational difference is an acceptable explanation.

Three episodes stand out for me in this book. One is when he speaks of how important it is to be "cool" to his friends. As one might expect, appearing cool can depend upon which friend or group of friends he was with, but having "being
cool" as one's primary concern doesn't fit well with trying to live like the good Christian he wanted so much to be. Ch 11 - Confession: Coming Out of the Closet - was an unexpected positive aspect of his Christian experience at the very liberal Reed College of Portland, Oregon. During an annual festival at Reed that Miller called pagan, he had the idea of setting up a confession booth. Some of the small group of his friends that formed Reed's youth group of Christians were opposed, but enough went along with the idea. But they weren't sure what they would do if and when someone went into the booth. The great surprise was that instead of hearing a confession, Miller confessed one-on-one and told of the many ways in which he failed to behave as he thought a Christian should. This led the person to which Miller confessed to reassure him that he wasn't a failure but that he expected too much of himself and that it was very good that he recognized his inability t always act as he thought he should have acted. The third episode was the next to last chapter, Ch 19 - Love: How to Really Love Yourself. My first reaction was that his tendency to think negative thoughts about himself (which he made clear albeit in his inconsistent writing style) should have been in a much earlier chapter, as that would have made much easier one's attempt to understand what Donald Miller was going through in his spiritual journey. To me, this failure to place this critical chapter early in the book greatly reduced the value of this book. But perhaps learning how to love yourself didn't come to him until later in his life - this would explain his many failures in love, but eventually (it's not clear when) he realized that it was necessary to know how to love yourself before you can truly love anyone else. Had this book been better organized and with less stream-of-consciousness writing, I could have rated it higher.