Today, I finished my fourth book of 2010, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years by Donald Miller, the same affable fellow who wrote the bestseller Blue Like Jazz. He claims that the book is about his efforts to try to turn Jazz into a movie, and what he learned about his life while he was editing it for a screenplay.Of course, that's really not the case at all. The book is, like Jazz, a collection of personal stories, all tied together through the common thread that is Miller's unmistakable style and trademark humor.
I'm also struck by Miller's strange habit of naming the book after a single memorable phrase* that happened to be contained in its pages, even if the phrase has little to do with the crux of the book.
* I suppose it would be like me naming my book A Moment of Restrained Euphoria. It's a random phrase from a random post, and I'll give a dollar to the first person who can identify it.
It also has a picture of a bicycle on the front, so I had to read it.
Thousand Years reminds me a lot of what my blog might be if I turned it into a book and found creative ways to tie together stories about riding bikes, hitchhiking, adventures in coffee shops, and a series of stories in which I wasn't wearing pants. Come to think of it, this book is my blog, were I a better writer and in poorer shape.*
* This would be Miller's concession, not mine.
It was a good book, but it was a frustrating book. In short, it was the book I should have written over the course of the last three or four years. In fact, it's the book I always intended to write over the course of the last three or four years. And of course, now that Miller's written it, I can't.
I would feel sad about it, but instead I'll try to find ways to differentiate my own writings from those of Donald Miller, and I've got at least one thing going for me that he doesn't*:
* And I swear to Mohamed, if Donald Miller's next book is about ferrets in sweaters, I'm suing him for identity theft.
