My friend Brenda Salter-McNeil mentioned Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston. When Brenda speaks I usually listen. Thankfully I did this time, and my heart and mind are richer for the experience.

Zora Neale Hurston was an amazing woman of the first half of 20th Century. As an African-American woman, her books were largely ignored and only a few were published. It took thirty years after her death in 1960 for her brilliance to be fully appreciated. Which is sad on almost every level.

Thankfully her books are finally being widely appreciated and Their Eyes Were Watching God is perhaps her finest work. I love the layers of insight and understanding about the fictional life of Janie Crawford. It starts with the brilliant opening line, “Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board” and continues with Janie’s growing up in the South, her arranged marriage, her running off with another man, and her finally finding true love only to … well, I won’t give away the story! Each chapter is filled with wisdom, humor and insight. I’ll forever remember such lines as, “Ah hope you fall on soft ground” and “There are years that ask questions and years that answer.”

This is not the type of book I would typically read. But it’s the perfect book for me to read because it stretches me in so many ways. Janie is a person who is so unlike me — she is an orphan, a woman, an African-American, in the South during a time of institutional racism. Her life is incredibly different from my own.

And yet the author brings out how she is like me in so many ways. Like all of us, really. Janie seeks love and affirmation, but will not compromise her sense of self to gain either. She perseveres through incredibly complex times, like we all do when we must. She doesn’t much care what others think of her, yet she deeply cares about truth and justice. She seeks the beauty of life and is irritated by the naysayers who want to bring her down. I get those things. You probably do too.

Look, I’m not a literary expert and can’t even begin to share how the layers of this story weave. Just trust me: it’s really really good. If you’ve read The Tortilla Curtain you’ll have some inkling of what it’s like.

Go buy Their Eyes Were Watching God. Right now. And read it. Then post something on Facebook expressing thanks to Brenda for mentioning it!