Driving Back to Coeur d'Alene for My Brother's Recommendation

It’s about forty minutes from my place in Spokane back to Coeur d’Alene, which isn’t far as drives go, but it’s just enough time that I’ve come to think of it as its own kind of ritual, the transition between one version of my week and another. Colby still lives there, in the house about ten minutes from the one we grew up in, and every few weeks I make the drive out mostly because he’s put a book in my hands and wants to argue about it once I’ve finished.

Growing up around here, I mostly took the mountains for granted the way you take anything for granted when it’s just the backdrop to your actual childhood, more of an obstacle to getting anywhere than a view. I didn’t really start noticing the lake and the ridgelines as something worth looking at until I’d been living in Spokane a few years and started making this drive back on purpose instead of just because I had to.

The recommendations themselves have a pattern I only noticed writing about them here. Colby doesn’t read board game reviews, doesn’t play much himself beyond the occasional session when I bring something over, but he reads constantly, and everything he’s handed me over the past few years, Mistborn, The Sparrow, a couple others I haven’t gotten to yet, has come with almost no context, just a book and an instruction to trust him. I’ve learned to just take the book and start it in the car on the drive home rather than asking what it’s about, because his pitch is never as good as the actual reading experience turns out to be.

We sit in the same kitchen we ate dinner in as kids, which our parents still own, and argue about endings mostly, whether a book stuck the landing or fumbled it in the last fifty pages. It’s not really about the book by the end of these conversations, it’s about having forty minutes of driving on either side of it to think about something other than the warehouse, and having one person who’s known me long enough to hand me exactly the right thing to read without needing to explain why. I don’t make this drive as often as I mean to. But when I do, it’s rarely about the book by the time we’re done talking about it.