One of the things I love about communicating with authors through email is that you just never know what might land in your inbox. Sometimes an email leads to a conversation, and sometimes it leads to a book you might never have discovered otherwise.
That is how Straw Shoes found its way to me.
I received an email from Mathias B Freese asking if I would like to read his book and reminding me that he is not getting any younger. Mathias is 86.
Of course, I told him I would love to read it. I also told him that I had just heard about a 91-year-old man who had finished the Appalachian Trail, so I was hopeful that perhaps Mathias still had another book in him.
He sent me a PDF of Straw Shoes, and I opened it. I even emailed him back to tell him I was beginning the book. There is something I really enjoy about that little connection between an author and a reader. A book can begin as an email and, a few minutes later, you are holding someone's words in your hands.
I started reading.
Then I got to page six.
I read the top lines once.
Then I read it again.
“If I could wrap up this slop I call my life…”
And I stopped.
Maybe it was because Mathias is 86. Maybe it was because I am 60 now, and I find myself thinking about some of these things more than I used to. What have we done with the years we've been given? What have we lost along the way? What will we leave behind? What does a life amount to when you begin looking at it from the other side of middle age?
I don't know if those were all the questions Mathias intended to make me think about. But they were the questions that came to me.
And that is what I love about a great writer.
A great writer doesn't simply tell us a story. A great writer makes us stop. Makes us reread a sentence. Makes us sit with a thought for a moment before turning the page.
Sometimes the best passages are the ones we want to read again and again, as if by reading them one more time we might somehow etch them into our memories—as if they were our own words and our own experiences.
I haven't finished Straw Shoes yet, so this isn't a review. It is simply my first impression.
But six pages in, Mathias has already made me stop and think.
And I'm curious to see where he takes me next.
Maybe that is the best recommendation I can give a book at this point:
I want to keep reading.