Sarah Vowell Writing Style

At first when I was told I had to read a book about Puritans over the summer, I was bummed. I do for the most part enjoy history, but not so much the Puritans and Pilgrim part.

I opened the book. It seemed to take far to long a time to reach the first page. Once I did I read the first line, "The only thing more dangerous than an idea is a belief." My mind has been in a vegetative state due to the lack of school over summer vacation. Even through that very first line in Sarah Vowell's book, my brain stayed unresponsive. Almost as if saying, 'don't even try to comprehend whatever she is trying to say.' So as my mind skipped any meaning in the first sentence of the book it went on to follow my eyes to the next two sentences. "And by dangerous, I don't mean thought-provoking. I mean: might get people killed." This sentence made my brain want to crawl into a little hole and just die. But I knew I had to conquer this woman Sarah Vowell, so I read on!

The first bit, meaning about ten pages were very boring and took me ages to read. Once I passed them I discovered a new part of the book. The actual Sarah Vowell part of the book. Where Ms. Vowell's own reflection, and opinions come into play. It seemed to me she took the history part and turned it into a 'my opinion on the whole matter is' dot, dot, dot. This part intrigued me. I feel like so far in my school career I have been forced to read far too many history books (more than the number of years I have lived) written by people, for people with no opinion of the author. The whole stack of pages is just blah about history (at which time my brain checks out to La La Land and comes back when I am done with however many pages need to be read that day).

However as I began reading the Sarah Vowell opinion part; as I like to call it, something caught my attention. She was funny. The first time I noticed this was when I found myself laughing, not in my head but out loud at some woman I thought to be boring a few meager minutes beforehand. I was astonished at how much thought she put into the book that was raw. That was her own. To me she took the blah out of the part about history I just read and went on some tangent about Puritans and today, and walking though feet of snow in just her flats so she could learn about historic houses for the reader to then read about. Now this part, this part I could deal with.

While I still find the history chapters boring most of the time however I love it when I come up to a Sarah Vowell chapter, that's all her own opinions written out on paper. I feel like I am having a conversation with Vowell about the blah part of history I just read. And she is turning that blah part of history into a pearl, a gem, an easily understood take on the history. Such as these lines (which I have read to far to many people, who could probably care less)Reagan is being interviewed on Good Morning America and makes a statement saying people were, "homeless, you might say, by choice." This alone made me outraged. This terrible thing that he said. But I soon found myself laughing yet again as Vowell says "He couldn't be more right- I have this fantasy that someday I'll throw off the shackles of my clean sheets and pillow-top mattress and curl up on a subway vent in the rain." This made me laugh my head off. Vowell seemed to share so much in common with my opinions I had to read about her. So I read about Vowell in the back of the book and realized why I agreed with her. She is a contributing editor of This American Life. I listen to NPR and VPR and then I realized that Sarah Vowell and I are in the same boat. The same boat sailing across the Atlantic Ocean to Boston Mass. But we aren't going there in search of anything new. Instead it's a journey through a book, of opinions we share.