Searching for God Knows What – Donald Miller

I usually have a number of books that I’m working through depending on what’s going on in my life and which books I happened to get excited about this very minute. My shelf of books-I’m-about-to-read has grown to ridiculous proportions and I accumulate new books at a faster rate than I actually read the ones I’ve got and I have bookmarks in a half dozen of them. It’s a sickness.

But I did manage to actually finish a book on the plane home from Philadelphia this week: Donald Miller’s Searching for God Knows What. Having read and enjoyed Blue Like Jazz, I was really looking forward to seeing if the quirkiness of that book could be carried over to another. The answer is a qualified ‘yes.’

Miller’s very engaging writing style is still present in no small measure but Searching is, I believe, trying much harder to make a point than Blue Like Jazz. And while that point is a perfectly good one and Miller does a nice job of tying things together to get there I found it a bit more tedious. What I liked about Jazz what that you literally never knew what you were going to get. The book was filled with Miller’s weird friends and unique situations where they are more like occasional guests in Searching.

Miller’s point is well taken and some of his analogies along the way caused me to think about human relationships and about our relationship to God in new ways and I'm glad I read it. But I was spoiled by the freewheeling fun of Blue Like Jazz and, if asked to recommend a Miller book to someone, will go with that rightfully more popular book.