I hope to start a regional conversation in the Gazette about books. I love books. They are my favorite thing and they always have been, since the moment I was sitting outside on the neighbor’s smooth concrete steps in the sunshine with a picture book on my lap studying the letters, and all at once I could feel the puzzle pieces in my brain light up, and shift around and then click into place. Ta-da! Quite suddenly, I could read! It was an awesome, unforgettable experience. There should have been fireworks. It felt like fireworks in my mind. It was thrilling. I ran home and told my mom, “I can read! Mom, I can read!”

She said something like, ‘Oh, that’s nice Honey.’ I don’t remember exactly how old I was, but it was before I started school, so she can be forgiven for doubting me. “Mom, I can read!” I insisted, “Watch me!”

I opened the book and read it to her, every word, and I could feel her surprise and her wonder and her pride. It felt miraculous to me.

In a very real way I have been chasing that feeling ever since. From that summer day in the 1960s when all the cylinders in my brain fired simultaneously, I developed a voracious appetite for books. I read all the time, and the books I’ve read get loosely filed in mental categories; top-ten fiction for the year, top ten for the last ten years, and so on.

My favorite book of 2011, and quite possibly for the last 10 years, is The Instructions, by Adam Levin. It is a brilliant 1000 page novel that reads like a combination of Joyce and early Philip Roth. In fact, Philip Roth makes a guest appearance late in the book as a hostage negotiator.

It is Joycean in the use of stream of consciousness prose; in The Instructions we spend four days with the young protagonist, Gurion ben-Judah Maccabee, and we hear practically every thought that goes through his mind.

Luckily for us, Gurion has an extraordinary mind. Levin has written a hero for the ages, a ten year old genius, Torah scholar and revolutionary who suspects that he might be the Messiah.

The Instructions gallops along at a breakneck pace and immerses us in a cast of excellent, colorful young characters, many of whom feel like kids I have known, struggling with most of the big questions in life.

The novel is not realistic. Gurion is far too smart for any 10 year old; and outrageous and sometimes holy things take place in the plot that we are not meant to take literally.

However, it is the emotional truth of this novel that staggered me. Levin remembers what it felt like to be a precocious boy with a huge mind who aspires to greatness, while he still cares deeply about what his mom packed in his sack lunch. Levin invents descriptive words that the kids in the book know and use, which reminded me of the private language my brother and a neighbor boy invented when we were young. He lets us in to the hidden lives of children, which is it all too easy to forget about as we age.

I love this book. Perhaps not everything about it; there were places that my editorial mind objected. But on the whole, it is amazing, miraculous, thrilling and original. It made me laugh out loud repeatedly. While I was reading it, there was nothing else I wanted to do, and when I was done, I wanted to start over.

I purchased a copy of The Instructions and donated it to the Cannon Beach Library this week. I hope that you will go and check it out. Read it, and then come and tell me. I’ll buy the coffee, and we can talk about this incredible book.

Let’s share our book lists! Send me reviews of your favorite books. I will print them. The only gift I would rather receive than a book, is someone else’s list of favorite books. Please, tell us yours.