The Wishing Year: The Wishing Year: A House, a Man, My Soul

A great book that exceed my expectations. If you are looking for an intimate and thoughtful memoir about that most human of desires--longing--this is a perfect choice. The writing is moving and smart and achingly beautiful, and the book will change the way you think about making wishes and changing your life. Really great, highly recommended. Kudos to Oxenhandler.

We live vicariously through reading all kinds of books, but memoir truly gives readers the sense that they understand the writer's inner experience of life. Every once in a while a memoir appears that makes you fall in love with the author's mind. That's how I feel about Noelle Oxenhandler's The Wishing Year. At so many points in the book I found myself appreciating not just her humor and her intelligence but her entire way of being in the world. For example, when I read the account of how the author sat with her dying friend, I felt I was witnessing something essential about simply being with a dying person, about meeting those who are dying on their own terms and not ours. The other people in the memoir are presented with complexity, not as a cast of flat characters. The Wishing Year is a memoir that, among other things, shows us a person who knows how to live life with compassion, openness and grace. It's good to soak up the details of such a life.

Having tried to read Eat, Pray, Love and found it so sadly lightweight, I couldn't finish, I was hesitant about picking up The Wishing Year. But, Oxenhandler's book surpassed all expectations. Readable, intelligent, thought provoking, authentic, without going into useless or irrelevant details. It's a wonderful book for starting a conversation about self-limiting beliefs, core religious values (no matter what your religion is), and coming back after a huge disaster -- that you yourself caused and feel the devastating weight of still. This is the book you want to give ALL your book-loving friends this holiday season.

I spent the whole day yesterday reading this wonderful book. It is the kind of book I've been waiting for for quite some time. It's a book for people who have read all the Law of Attraction, intention manifestation, or even magic books. If you've manifested a few things here and there, but still have some concerns about how it all works or how you can be both spiritual and materialistic, this book is a great start. It's great to finally read a book that goes deeper into the act of wishing (as the author calls it) and provides its readers with an in-depth real life example of what happens when you take that first step. It's amazing what starts to happen when you take that first step: the Universe responds. I have had experiences like the author and I felt her excitement when things started to happen, seemingly out of nowhere. That being said, I had a few minor issues with this book. The author herself complains a lot about how her spiritual community fell apart. That's fine and all, but I think it's perfectly clear that she was one of the reasons that happened. She had an affair with a married man (the spiritual mentor of her community) while being married herself. She glosses over this in a couple of sentences in the book. I feel that if she really wanted to grow as a spiritual individual, she would acknowledge that she played a huge part in why her spiritual community fell apart. She should face her own darkness and take some responsibility, instead of always complaining: "Oh, my spiritual community fell apart, and now I don't know who I am." I don't know, maybe she has dealt with those issues. Maybe she is reluctant to share it with the world, and that's understandable. With that being said, that was a very minor detail I had trouble with. I actually enjoyed 99% of this book, hence the five star rating. It was fun to read her reactions to books that I've read myself, like "It Works" and "The Science of Getting Rich" or that ever-popular movie, "The Secret." (I had a similar reaction to hers.) Overall, this is a very worthwhile book for anyone who is interested in intention manifestation, The Secret, magic, or whatever. I can't recommend it highly enough. If you feel like all the books you've been reading sound too good to be true or extremely filtered of real human experience (a whole book of "you can do it, think positive!" gets kind of annoying when you have real life problems to deal with), then I definitely recommend picking up this very interesting memoir. -Ater

"The Wishing Year," by Noelle Oxenhandler, is the kind of book that I am always wishing for--absorbing and lovely to read, and at the same time provocative and intellectually engaging. Along the lines of literary non-fiction like Jonathan Franzen's "How to Be Alone" and Rebecca Solnit's "A Fieldguide to Getting Lost," this memoir stages the existential predicament of how to approach one's own longings and ambitions, with grace and authenticity, while also acknowledging the pressures and realities of our consumer-based society. The comedic pace of the narrative is note-on, populated with wide-ranging geographical adventures, winsome characters, and deeply funny everyday moments. Waking up one January morning, Oxenhandler confronts several absences in her life and decides to embark upon a yearlong quest for very specific objects. Halfway through the book, she refers to her quest as an "experiment in desire," and this phrase seems to embody the underlying ambition of the book itself--to enter into the terrifying quandaries that genuine passion brings with it, while at the same time relishing the wonderful angst, even dread, of wishing. Oxenhandler's experiment gives rise to profound and timeless questions: what do our desires reveal about ourselves? Is it possible to seek spiritual wholeness, or romance, or even financial prosperity, and still retain skepticism towards superficial success, pop psychology, and ego-based desires? Like books by Franzen and Solnit, Oxenhandler's memoir demonstrates what, in my experience, the best kinds of texts ask of their reader--to share in the spiritually intense comedy of human life and to take real risks in the questions that we pose and the desires that we wish for.