Carnelian Coffee Book Club

Feel free to join us for the in-person version of the Carnelian Coffee Book Group, facilitated by the Pikes Peak Library District. Multiple copies, including the audiobook read by the author, are available through PPLD.

The very popular memoir Greenlights by the actor who played Guy #2 in My Boyfriend’s Back. The much-recommended audiobook is read by the actor who portrayed Vilmer Slaughter in Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation.

Here is a publisher's synopsis written by the author, who isolated himself in the desert for 52 days ot write the memoir.

I’ve been in this life for fifty years, been trying to work out its riddle for forty-two, and been keeping diaries of clues to that riddle for the last thirty-five. Notes about successes and failures, joys and sorrows, things that made me marvel, and things that made me laugh out loud. How to be fair. How to have less stress. How to have fun. How to hurt people less. How to get hurt less. How to be a good man. How to have meaning in life. How to be more me.
 
Recently, I worked up the courage to sit down with those diaries. I found stories I experienced, lessons I learned and forgot, poems, prayers, prescriptions, beliefs about what matters, some great photographs, and a whole bunch of bumper stickers. I found a reliable theme, an approach to living that gave me more satisfaction, at the time, and still: If you know how, and when, to deal with life’s challenges—how to get relative with the inevitable—you can enjoy a state of success I call “catching greenlights.”
 
So I took a one-way ticket to the desert and wrote this book: an album, a record, a story of my life so far. This is fifty years of my sights and seens, felts and figured-outs, cools and shamefuls. Graces, truths, and beauties of brutality. Getting away withs, getting caughts, and getting wets while trying to dance between the raindrops.
 
Hopefully, it’s medicine that tastes good, a couple of aspirin instead of the infirmary, a spaceship to Mars without needing your pilot’s license, going to church without having to be born again, and laughing through the tears.
 
It’s a love letter. To life.
 
It’s also a guide to catching more greenlights—and to realizing that the yellows and reds eventually turn green too.
 
Good luck.