Johnny Cash makes me want to be a better person

There, I said it.

First off, public thanks to Derek for the book. Derek read my poorly written bit about the movie "Walk The Line" where I stated I wanted to read as much as I could on the guy. Derek said, "I can do something about that. I work at Borders. Christmas is coming." And he did, in fact, do something about that. He bough "Cash: autobiography", and now I love this dead man.

The book is just a really good, earthy read. Good storytelling. Good American music history. But overall, this guy was just a really good guy and I'm reading about his sense of family, and his love for his friends and his value of people and it's saying a lot to me about how to live a good life. And I don't mean it in a "well we just all live a good life and the world will be nice" sort of way, but I mean "good" like, just really saturated with the concept of good as "goodness" was meant to be back when things really were. Like, way back to the garden, before we tripped and fell.

I don't know. I'm not good at book reports, and if your read my post on the movie, clearly not good at movie reviews either, but I'm just really loving this book. I read the Bible for a lot of reasons because I think the Bible is a lot of things, but one of the things it is is an anthology of lives and biographies that are important to read - people's lives that have things to hear about and emulate, or chalk up, understatedly, as a bunch of really bad ideas of "things I should not try at home" for valuable reasons as well. But as that stands, then stories that carry on the faith thread through people's lives and legacy's should continue to be read for those reasons too. I think I put this book in that category.

It's just a really good story about a person's life and I've been moved to be something more which is ok. I didn't expect that when I picked it up. I didn't expect to want to read it again. I didn't expect to walk away thinking, "I hope I can be that... kind, loving, generous, open, hospitable, wise, able...", etc. I just didn't. But I do.

So, there's my attempt to "sell" the book to you. I would recommend that you read it. You can tell me what you think. See if your attempts are as riveting as mine.