Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

Boots!

Where would we be without booms?

Where would we be without good?

No, Timberd.

It's a rhetorical question, sir, but where would we be without books?

From KCRW and KCRW.com, I'm Michael Silverblatt, and this is Bookworm.

You know, in recent weeks, I've had the thrill of being able to recommend a book.

One friend told me that the book by my guest, Rebecca Solnit, the far away

nearby, is captivating. I was at breakfast just this morning, and the person who was waiting

on the table told me he was reading Rebecca Solnit 2 and that he loves her.

I found this book, the far away nearby, to be such a useful healing procedure for me

that I fell in love with its author. I feel, although we spoken before that I hadn't known her, and the book seems so fresh

and original, it seems to be about the process of structuring growth.

Wow.

I hadn't thought of it quite that way. For me, it's a book about how we make stories out of our lives and how our lives are

made out of stories, and how important it is to liberate yourself by becoming the storyteller

of your life rather than letting stories tell you what to do, which is how a lot of us muddle

through our lives, stories about

whether we're worthless or always right, or what a life should consist of where happiness lies,

etc. So it's a book of stories about stories. This is Rebecca Solnit, reading from the opening of her new

book. We tell ourselves stories in order to live or to justify taking lives, even our own, by violence or by numbness and the failure to live.

...