Books, books, books. Our house is bursting with them, and for better or worse, when we visit our children there's reason to think it might be hereditary. I love getting lost in a good book, and could effortlessly recommend several hundred. The book challenge is seven. That seems cruel. I haven't counted these, but there might be more than seven.
Part 1 covered books that had an impact on my childhood. When I was collecting photos for this post, I gathered them to a folder named "Adult books" and then decided that was not such a good thing to have on my desktop. But here are books that continue to be favorites. Many of them are on my phone, and when I have unexpected idle time, I sometimes read a chapter or two.
I was forced to read "Walden" in high school, and was caught off guard by its purity and focus. There are times when I think old Henry was a fraud, and other times when I think he's a visionary. But it was the first book of thoughts that had a major impact on me, and it stays on my shelf. I went to look for it in a Waldenbooks store decades ago (they populated every mall in America) and couldn't find it. The clerk said he would be very embarrassed if they didn't have the book the chain was named after – and he did emerge from the back room with this copy.
When I lived in Montana, a magazine editor named Herman Hoeh came up from California to interview a young man who was working as a builder in the Kalispell area. Mr. Hoeh and I met at church, and he remarked that the young man shared a last name with me, and that there was a physical resemblance as well. (He also met another family of Grahams with six children the same trip. He said he didn't know what the significance of that was, but he was pretty sure the universe was trying to tell him something!) The interviewee's name was Robin Lee Graham, and of course I knew of him – I had followed his round-the-world sailing trip in the pages of National Geographic. Mr. Hoeh and I became friends, and before he left Montana that trip he gave me this book. I loved it from the moment I first opened it.
It's actually the children's version of Robin's adventures. I did read the book he wrote for adults, called "Dove" after the name of his boat, but I like this one better. Mr. Hoeh had me write a song for Robin, which was the first song I ever had published. Coincidentally, a young woman named Thea Clay came up from California that same week and met Robin Lee Graham, and I've been married to her for 41 years now.
Before I went off to the University of Montana, I spent my freshman year at the College of Wooster in Ohio. One autumn afternoon I was out for a walk and bought this book for a nickel at a garage sale because I liked the cover. It turned out to be one of the great bargains of my life – the writing is exquisite. with a folksy style all its own. Ms. Chute is an interesting person in her own right, starting out as a writer of sports stories for young readers and eventually branching out into fiction. I tracked down other novels and short stories of hers, but this is by far her masterpiece.
The book caused a bit of a stir in the 50's, and was made into a musical by the great Frank Loesser that starred Anthony Perkins, of all people. It has its fans, but to me it was a dud that never matched the tone of the book.
I learned music from listening and playing, not from formal education (although I had many years of piano lessons). One performer who had an immense influence on me, not just with her singing but more with the repertoire that she chose and the trajectory she followed over a 60+ year career is Judy Collins. I got her first song anthology in 1970, and the second years later.
Nothing takes me back to the folk music scene of the 60's faster than revisiting the first book. And there's another reason to treasure it.
She signed it on a trip to the Musicarnival stage in Cleveland, a venue that closed in 1975.
After leaving Montana, and getting married and raising children, the rest of these books fired my imagination at random times. One book can pull me back to memories of my Montana days faster and better than any other: "English Creek", the second book in a trilogy by Ivan Doig. Although the events unfold in 1939, the landscape dominates the story so much that it transcends time, and the fact that it's about a confused teenager trying to understand his Forest Service father and his family and his world helps.
I have a signed copy of Ivan Doig's autobiography "This House Of Sky", but sometimes fiction tells the truth better than fact.
Before we ever bought a house, I caught the gardening bug. Part of it was desperation to connect to the earth, but I just plain love plants. In 1983 Thea bought me the Crockett's Victory Garden book, companion to the PBS Victory Garden TV show that we enjoyed. I soon bought the indoor gardening book, and have found them to be my go-to resource for plant-growing info.
Jim Crockett was a good man and a master gardener. He's a little over-dependent on chemicals and pesticides for my taste, but his advice almost always works, to the point where I got rid of all my other gardening books.
I always thought Douglas Adams' "Hitchhikers' Guide To The Galaxy" was nonsense – inspired, genius-level nonsense with vignettes that stay in my memory, but still fluff. But Thea knew the name, and she brought this book home from the Lakewood Library in the late 1980's.
I devoured it in one night.
It may be the most perfectly-plotted book ever. That it intricately mixes time-travel, the spirit world, history, ecology, music, Mac computers, and Adams' usual irreverent wit made it irresistable to me. A second Dirk Gently book fell flat, and don't even mention the recent TV series. Douglas Adams is at the top of my "people I want to have over for dinner" list. The fact that he is dead (far too young, he and I were born in the same year) doesn't change that.
I remember in the early 1980's there was a heavy snow in Lakewood. I left the kids doing schoolwork and Thea reading, and walked to the Detroit Theater (now a McDonald's) to see a BBC movie "Enchanted April", with its advertisement of geraniums and wistaria [sic]. I walked back home beneath branches cracking under snow, with my heart transported, not just to a castle in sunny Italy as in the film, but to freedom of spirit. Later I read the book, and it's one of those rare situations where the book and the movie mutually excel each other. (Another is "The Princess Bride".)
I have the film on my phone, for emergency doses of sunny Italy.
Bookstores used to be small, dusty storefronts, with no coffee on the premises. I remember the four Grahams seeing our first mega-bookstore, Joseph Beth and Company in Lexington, KY. It was a vision of paradise! And not just every book you could imagine and millions besides, but gifts and toys and puzzles and mugs and chocolate and COFFEE, the natural companion to books. We could barely bring ourselves to buy anything, our brains were so choked on the splendor, but I remember David and Emily and I being taken with this book, that changed our idea of what art can be.
Andy Goldsworthy creates art in his native Great Britain and now all over the world, using found natural materials and only his hands and the most basic of tools. His stacked-stone works live on, but many of his creations are ephemeral, using flowers, leaves, and even snow and water. You have to see it to be awed by it, and this book opened the gate for us.
A friend Dan Weitzel told me I had to read Margaret Craven's book, "I Heard The Owl Call My Name", and indeed, it has taken its place in my heart. The sad, serene tale of a young but enlightened Episcopal priest living among people of the Kwakiutl tribe in coastal British Columbia, it offers beautiful descriptions of mossy, wet life amid the salmon and eagles and totem poles. With her spare use of words, Ms. Craven conjures a tale of caring and quiet accepting.
In 2000, with cataract-fogged eyes, I drove my son and two teen-aged friends to a camp in the mountains of Oregon and spent a week alone exploring the Oregon coast. It was a pre-smartphone chance to think and soak in the splendor of the ocean views. I brought along a book by the eminent astronomer Carl Sagan, thinking that even if he weren't a great writer, he couldn't help but be inspiring by accident.
I needn't have worried. This is a masterful tale of the search for life in the universe, and all I will say is, in the last pages you realize that the book isn't at all about what you thought it was. It has haunted me ever since. The film with Jody Foster isn't bad – there are some stunning scenes of space travel – but it has to streamline a plot that holds up well under the ocean of detail Sagan provides. This is the book that taught me the word "numinous", and somehow that seems appropriate. There are some books – Tolkien's "Lord Of The Rings" and Pullman's "His Dark Materials" – that I once enjoyed but will probably never return to. Not so with "Contact".
Its crowning sentence: "She had studied the universe all her life, but had overlooked its clearest message: For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love." Most of the world thinks of Carl Sagan as a man who brought them the stars. I remember him as a writer.
I had heard of "The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society" for a few years before I borrowed a copy. We now own two (you don't want to be too far from one). It is as close as the world has come to a perfect book, told through letters and other correspondence. We are looking forward to the upcoming Netflix adaptation, but regardless, we'll always have this little gem to enjoy. How I wish that Mary Ann Shaffer, who died near the end of writing it, could have left us more of her work, and I'm grateful to her niece Annie Barrows for finishing it.
Although there is evidence to suggest that I am an adult, I have never lost my love for young adult fiction and children's picture books. And of those, we own a trove, supposedly for when children visit, but at heart we know better. "The Maggie B", "Miss Rumphius", "Hamilton Duck", "Journey", "Harold and the Purple Crayon" – these will always have a beloved place on our bookshelves. But my favorite of all is "Grandmother's Pigeons", by Louise Erdrich. Yes, that Louise Erdrich, with lovely, exactly-right illustrations by Jim LaMarche.
It's a story of a family mystery set in motion by an absent matriarch, and it ends most satisfyingly. Or does it end at all?
Oh, this list could go on and on and on, and I would love to spend a day doing just that. You're welcome to come explore our extensive bookshelves, because in a way, that's our catalog. I feel a little bad that my list doesn't include great classical authors, but I know my own path to wonder, and these books were the guides. I should mention, for those who might scold, that the Bible is a most important book of constant inspiration and guidance, but I consider it in a class by itself and beyond review. However there is one book, or rather, series of books, that I love beyond words, but have never owned. I read them electronically, and although they are in print, somehow it seems right to have them not on a shelf but crackling in the air. Our daughter pointed me towards the first, and they have wrapped themselves around my spirit to the point where they might even be my favorite non-book books of all. (That can change in one reading, of course.)
Oddly enough, I cannot recommend them. They are crass and irreverent and elementally raw in places, and have the potential to offend my gentle friends. And yet, they have taught me things about myself through grand, rollicking story-telling that I would not have found any other way. The books are "The Magicians", "The Magician King", and "The Magician's Land", by former Time magazine book and consumer electronics critic Lev Grossman. They've been called "Harry Potter for adults", since they tell of a school called Brakebills and deal with the many paths to magic, but somehow that doesn't quite do it. The TV series made of them was a mess, with meanings and motivations changed beyond recognition, and I turned it off to preserve the story that speaks to my own life and dreams so powerfully. There is a strong correlation between magic and music, and I grew up both a gifted and stunted child, as did the hero (a word that gets dissected and trashed in the course of the story) Quentin Coldwater. (All right, I also envy his name.) In time we learn that Quentin has no great gifts; his discipline, which reveals itself later than most people's, turns out to be Minor Mending, which is not so different from piano tuning. But what he does with it... The transmutations that he and other characters go through on their journey echo and answer my own yearnings and desires, and if "Contact" was about our universe, this is about much, much more. For I am a believer in magic: not the magic of wizards or wands or spells or ways of doing things that cheat reality, but the magic of music and light and plants and animals and the earth and planets and stars, the magic of hearth and home and family, and the unknown magic of the spirit and of the future, of community and love and cooperation and creation, that lights fires under us to do the impossible things that we must find a way to do. Somehow these are all in Mr. Grossman's books, and when my well of such things runs dry, I often take refuge in his tales for a long drink of possibilities.
While there is life, this list will grow. In my retirement I aim to write another book and add to it myself. Stay tuned. Hey, that's not a bad title!