I love Michael Chabon's writing. As a fan of his work -- and a husband, father, and son -- I couldn't resist picking up a copy of his collection of essays, Manhood for Amateurs, The Pleasures and Regrets of a Husband, Father, and Son.

It's actually one of the most impulsive book purchases I have ever made. I saw it on the "New in Paperback" table at Barnes & Noble, read "Michael Chabon" and the title, picked it up, and went straight to the checkout line. That's some devil may care book buying.

Reading Manhood for Amateurs I felt as if I was sitting next to Chabon at a bar, each of us (well, mainly him) telling each other stories about our lives as husbands and fathers -- talking to your kids about drugs, our relationships with women, geekdom, being handy around the house, and so much more.

These lines ring especially true, for some guys more than others:

This is an essential element of the business of being a man: to flood everyone around you in a great radiant arc of bullshit, one whose source and object of greatest intensity is yourself. To behave as if you have everything firmly under control even when you have just sailed your boat over the falls.

But what really makes Chabon's essays shine is when he hits on our human condition, not just as men, but as parents and people who care about things.

We are accustomed to repeating the cliché, and to believing, that "our most precious resource is our children." But we have plenty of children to go around, God knows, and as with Doritos, we can always make more. The true scarcity we face is of practicing adults, of people who know how marginal, how fragile, how finite their lives and their stories and their ambitions really are but who find value in this knowledge, even a sense of strange comfort, because they know their condition is universal, is shared. You bring your little story to the workshop, and sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't; and then you're gone, and it's time for somebody else to have the floor.

That's the thing that always gets me about Chabon's work, be it in these essays or the magnificent The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay: it's the experiences we share, not those we own or keep to ourselves, that make us who we are.