My Year of Reading: Every Book I Read in 2019

111.

Three slashes, like a prisoner scratching the number of days in his prison cell; in my case, however, I was liberated by the one-hundred-and-eleven books I read in 2019. Not all of them were great, or even good; but the vast majority of the classic and contemporary literature I read was enough to tip the scales on the side of brilliant rather than blasé.

And how do I know exactly how many books I read over the course of the past year? Like many diehard readers, I obsessively track everything in a book log which I have kept since 2005, noting author, title, the number of pages, and—lately—indicating if it’s a library book or an audiobook. I also log everything into my Library Thing account as a way of keeping my shelves sane and orderly (though, with the Great Book Purge of 2019, I no longer own the bulk of that list; nonetheless, I’m not deleting anything on my LT page, partly out of sentimental reasons).

For the statisticians in the group, here’s a breakdown, by the numbers, of my decade of reading (with links back to some previous by-the-numbers blog posts:

2010:  54
2011:  55
2012:  56
2013:  81
2014:  105
2015:  114
2016:  130
2017:  119
2018:  93
2019:  111

The longest book on my 2019 reading log clocked in at 1,144 pages (The Complete Poems of e. e. cummings); the shortest were two children’s books by Margaret Wise Brown (Goodnight, Moon and Little Fur Family) at 30 pages each. I didn’t read as many classic books as I’d hoped: only two on the list (three short novels by Gustave Flaubert and one long novel by Anthony Trollope) were published prior to 1900. Most of my reading this year was released in the twenty-first century. As someone who is especially fond of older books, that surprised me somewhat. I hope to do more literary time traveling in 2020.

You can see the picks for my favorite books published in 2019 here, but that only represents a small slice of the whole pie of my reading year.

[A Personal Interlude with some Big Breaking News: Things got kuh-razy busy for my wife Jean and me, starting in mid-summer and continuing until this very minute. After living in Butte, Montana for eleven years, we decided this 4,000-square-foot Craftsman house was just too big for these empty-nesters, so we put it on the market. I’ll spare you the details of all the ups and downs we suffered while riding the real estate rollercoaster—and I eventually stopped sharing the blow-by-blow account on Facebook because things never turned out the way we’d hoped—but at last I can pull the sheet off the Big Reveal: at 11 a.m. yesterday in the Year of Our Lord 2020 we signed the documents (for the fifth offer on the house!) at the title company, thus ending our mostly-happy era of living on Argyle Street. That afternoon, we signed a lease on an apartment (considerably less than 4,000-square feet, yo!) in Helena, an hour north along the interstate. One U-Haul, two days, and many sore muscles later, we are settling in to our fresh new life in a fresh new city.  I’ll still keep my day job with the federal government since my boss has graciously allowed me to telecommute, so little will change in that regard. As for the three cats...? Well, I’m sure they’ll be stressed at first, but Jean and I are pretty sure they’ll love the new place on the fourth floor of the apartment building since it has plenty of windows where they can watch “Bird TV.”]

Back to the books and my year of reading: Until I sold the bulk of my 10,000-volume collection this year (which you can read about here), I was keeping steady pace in 1,000 Books to Read Before You Die, James Mustich’s excellent list of must-reads. Once I no longer had the physical books in my hands, I stopped posting “1,000 Books photos” to social media; and, regrettably, I halted on my journey through Mr. Mustich’s book. I plan (resolve!) to re-embark on that voyage in this new year, starting with the E section of the book. I hope to make 1,000 Books posts a regular feature of this blog in the coming days. You can see me reading the Jennifer Egan entry (A Visit From the Goon Squad) in the photo above; Goon Squad was the last of the 1,000 Books books I read this year. That photo, taken yesterday morning, is also the last time I’ll be sitting in that breakfast nook in the Argyle Street house, seated at the table my son-in-law built for us many years ago. I will miss that table, that lamp, that cushioned bench seat. I have spent so many happy reading hours there, drenched in lamplight and sunlight. I’ll miss it, but I look forward to finding a new reading space in the Helena apartment.

Looking back over the list below, I note a number of good books I read for the first time, based on Mustich’s 1,000 Books recommendations, among them: Watership Down, Fun Home, The Outermost House, How Buildings Learn (perhaps the most delightfully-surprising one on the list because I didn’t expect to love a book about architecture as much as I did), The Worst Journey in the World, and Rebecca.

Were there disappointments along the way? Of course. No big, eclectic list like this could be all-perfect all-the-time. The ones that let me down included the following: Flaubert’s Parrot (just meh-kay for me), The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody (probably knee-slapping funny when it was published in 1950, but not so much today), and My Family and Other Animals (maybe I wasn’t in the right frame of mind at the time, but I found it less endearing and more tedious to get through).

I made it through a good chunk of my unread Stephen King shelf this year, prompted by the downsizing of the collection which brought these previously-unread early books of his bubbling to the surface. I read all the ones published under his Richard Bachman pseudonym (save for The Running Man, which I’ll get to soon in 2020), as well as the collection of short stories The Bazaar of Bad Dreams. I also, regrettably, read Cycle of the Werewolf. It was terrible and I should have shot my copy with a silver bullet to put it out of our collective misery.

I also read a few really good books about dying, starting with Cory Taylor’s beautiful, intimate account of her last days on earth. Near the end of the year, I picked up Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal which gives good insight into how we treat the elderly and the dying. And, finally, I want to make special note of a book—a chapbook, really—which none of you have heard of: The Comfort Pathway by O. Alan Weltzien, which describes the final days of his mother and how the family gathered in her hospital room handles their individual and collective grief. I strongly urge you, in the loudest and most insistent of voices, to get a copy of The Comfort Pathway. It’s very short—less than 40 pages—but it will stay with you forever. As Weltzien writes in the opening pages: “I’ve always believed, and often taught, that when we try and write about the dead whom we loved, they come back in some ways and leave lasting traces. They don’t stay as far away.”

Other random highlights of the reading year:
*  Mary & Lou & Rhoda & Ted by Jennifer Keishin Armstrong took me back to the nights I sat in front of the TV in the 1970s watching Mary Tyler Moore and the WJM-TV crew;
*  several of Alan Bradley’s Falvia de Luce mysteries put an infectious smile on my face as I drove the highways and byways of Montana listening to the audiobooks narrated by Jayne Entwistle;
*  I finally got around to reading one of Ann Patchett’s novels, State of Wonder, and boy was I blown away by her storytelling prowess;
*  ditto with Elizabeth Gilbert (City of Girls);
*  a dreamy week spent on the crew of Wim Wenders’ short film about Edward Hopper, shot here in Butte, led me to explore more books about the American artist (Wenders’ film was for a museum installation of Hopper’s works opening this month in Switzerland);
*  I did a deep dive into the works of Adam Braver and re-confirmed my opinion that he is simply one of our greatest contemporary writers who doesn’t get as much attention as he deserves; if you have never read one of his novels, I highly recommend you start with Misfit or November 22, 1963;
*  I don’t normally read self-help books, but You Are a Badass by Jen Sincero filled me with superpowers and helped give me confidence for this life-changing move to Helena;
*  and, finally, I ventured back into the works of Virginia Woolf and found she wasn’t as dreadful as I’d thought during my grad school days.

And now on to the list, which I’ve arranged in alphabetical by author’s last name, rather than in chronological reading order:

Adams, Richard: Watership Down
Alexievich, Svetlana: Voices From Chernobyl
Armstrong, Jennifer Keishin: Mary & Lou & Rhoda & Ted
Atwood, Margaret: Cat’s Eye
Atwood, Margaret: The Handmaid’s Tale
Baldwin, James: Notes of a Native Son
Barnes, Julian: Flaubert’s Parrot
Barnes, Kate: Where the Deer Were
Barrett, William E.: Lilies of the Field
Bashaw, Molly: The Whole Field Still Moving Inside It
Bechdel, Alison: Fun Home
Beckerman, Ilene: Love, Loss and What I Wore
Beston, Henry: The Outermost House
Blake, Sarah: The Guest Book
Bradley, Alan: A Red Herring Without Mustard
Bradley, Alan: The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie
Bradley, Alan: The Weed That Strings the Hangman’s Bag
Bradley, Ryan W.: The Memory of Planets
Brand, Stewart: How Buildings Learn
Braver, Adam: Crows Over the Wheatfield
Braver, Adam: Divine Sarah
Braver, Adam: November 22, 1963
Braver, Adam: The Disappeared
Braver, Adam: What the Women Do
Brown, Margaret Wise: Goodnight Moon
Brown, Margaret Wise: Little Fur Family
Brunhoff, Jean de: Babar and His Children
Burns, Charles: Sugar Skull
Carey, John: Eyewitness to History
Carr, J. L.: A Month in the Country
Chast, Roz: Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant?
Chauvet, Jean-Marie: Dawn of Art: The Chauvet Cave
Cherry-Garrard, Aspley: The Worst Journey in the World
Christie, Agatha: Ordeal by Innocence
Christie, Agatha: Thirteen at Dinner
Clarke, Brock: Who Are You, Calvin Bledsoe?
Collins, Billy: Sailing Alone Around the Room
cummings, e. e.: Complete Poems
Cunningham, Michael: The Hours
Cuppy, Will: The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody
Dahl, Roald: Matilda
Delaney, Edward J.: The Big Impossible
Denby, David: Great Books
Desai, Anita: Clear Light of Day
Du Maurier, Daphne: Rebecca
Du Maurier, Daphne: The Apple Tree
Durrell, Gerald: My Family and Other Animals
Egan, Jennifer: A Visit From the Goon Squad
Farres, Ernest: Edward Hopper
Fish, Kathy: Wild Life: Collected Works
Flaubert, Gustave: Three Short Works
Fox, Wendy J.: If the Ice Had Held
French, Tana: The Witch Elm
Gaskell, Elizabeth: The Old Nurse’s Story
Gawande, Atul: Being Mortal
Gilbert, Elizabeth: City of Girls
Hall, Donald, editor: New Poets of England and America
Healy, Luke: How to Survive in the North
Hernandez, Gilbert: The Troublemakers
Hughes, Anita: Christmas in Vermont
Hughes, Dorothy B.: In a Lonely Place
Jason: Low Moon
Jason: What I Did
Kaminsky, Ilya: Deaf Republic
King, Stephen: Cycle of the Werewolf
King, Stephen: Rage
King, Stephen: Roadwork
King, Stephen: The Bazaar of Bad Dreams
King, Stephen: The Long Walk
Klinger, Leslie S. and Lisa Morton, editors: Ghost Stories
Kusnetz, Ilyse: Angel Bones
MacLeod, Charlotte: Rest You Merry
Maizes, R. L.: We Love Anderson Cooper
Malden, R. H.: The Sundial
McCullough, David: The Pioneers
McMahon, Tyler: Kilometer 99
Michener, James: Hawaii
Nicolson, Nigel: Virginia Woolf
O’Brien, Tim: Dad’s Maybe Book
Obama, Barack: Dreams From My Father
Obama, Michelle: Becoming
Obreht, Tea: Inland
Olivas, Daniel: Crossing the Border
Oliver, Mary: Felicity
Olsen, Tillie: Tell Me a Riddle, Requa I, and Other Works
Olson, Justin: Earth to Charlie
Patchett, Ann: State of Wonder
Ray, Shann: Sweetclover
Reid, Taylor Jenkins: Daisy Jones and the Six
Rowland, Russell: Cold Country
Seth: Clyde Fans
Shapiro, Dani: Devotion
Shapiro, Dani: Inheritance
Sincero, Jen: You Are a Badass
Singleton, George: Staff Picks
Spawforth, Tony: Versailles: A Biography of a Palace
Strand, Mark: Hopper
Taylor, Cory: Dying
Taylor, Patrick: An Irish Country Christmas
Telgemeier, Raina: Guts
Tesdell, Diana Secker, editor: Christmas Stories
Trollope, Anthony: The Small House at Allington
Urza, Gabriel: The White Death: An Illusion
Weltzien, O. Alan: The Comfort Pathway
Wharton, Edith: The Age of Innocence
Wilder, Thornton: The Bridge of San Luis Rey
Williams, Diane: The Collected Stories of Diane Williams
Woolf, Virginia: Jacob’s Room
Woolf, Virginia: Mrs. Dalloway
Zalkow, Yuvi: A Brilliant Novel in the Works
Zindell, Deborah T.: National Parks History of the WPA Poster Art

Virginia Woolf writes

There is the art of writing, and then there is the act of writing. From one springs the other....though not always (ask any writer how many artless words she moves to the trash bin during the revision process when every sentence is weighed and balanced and sometimes found wanting).

When writers write about writing, both the act and the art, the intersection of the two can dance a beautiful waltz on the page. Take Michael Cunningham’s triptych of a novel The Hours, for instance. Skillfully weaving the separate stories of one day in the lives of three women, two fictional and one very real—Clarissa Vaughn, an editor in the late twentieth century; Laura Brown, a housewife in 1949; and author Virginia Woolf in 1923—Cunningham connects his characters in a style that bears distinct and purposeful echoes of Woolf’s own novel Mrs. Dalloway.

The Hours sat on my shelf for many years, unread. Finally, this summer, spurred in large part by James Mustich’s 1,000 Books to Read Before You Die, I opened it and dove into the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel.

Reader, I loved it.

I have a lot to say about why I think it works so brilliantly, but what I want to focus on today and share with the rest of you is one particular passage from one of the Virginia Woolf sections which captures the art/act of writing so perfectly. This comes from an early chapter in Cunningham’s novel and, to put it in context for those who have yet to read The Hours, mentions Virginia’s husband Leonard Woolf and the household cook Nelly. The most important character in this scene is, of course, Virginia herself and her wrestling match with the pen as she struggles to find a good opening sentence for the manuscript she was working on in 1923: the novel which eventually became Mrs. Dalloway. Cunningham perfectly describes how hard it is to push the art of words through the mind’s frequently “clogged pipes.” Reading this scene, I found my inner writer’s voice humming yes yes yes:

She gets to her study, quietly closes the door. Safe. She opens the curtains. Outside, beyond the glass, Richmond continues in its decent, peaceful dream of itself. Flowers and hedges are attended to; shutters are repainted before they require it. The neighbors, whom she does not know, do whatever it is they do behind the blinds and shutters of their red brick villa. She can only think of dim rooms and a listless, overcooked smell. She turns from the window. If she can remain strong and clear, if she can keep on weighing at least nine and a half stone, Leonard will be persuaded to move back to London. The rest cure, these years among the delphinium beds and the red suburban villas, will be pronounced a success, and she will be deemed fit for the city again. Lunch, yes; she will have lunch. She should have breakfast but she can’t bear the interruption it would entail, the contact with Nelly’s mood. She will write for an hour or so, then eat something. Not eating is a vice, a drug of sorts—with her stomach empty she feels quick and clean, clearheaded, ready for a fight. She sips her coffee, sets it down, stretches her arms. This is one of the most singular experiences, waking on what feels like a good day, preparing to work but not yet actually embarked. At this moment there are infinite possibilities, whole hours ahead. Her mind hums. This morning she may penetrate the obfuscation, the clogged pipes, to reach the gold. She can feel it inside her, an all but indescribable second self, or rather a parallel, purer self. If she were religious, she would call it the soul. It is more than the sum of her intellect and her emotions, more than the sum of her experiences, though it runs like veins of brilliant metal through all three. It is an inner faculty that recognizes the animating mysteries of the world because it is made of the same substance, and when she is very fortunate she is able to write directly through that faculty. Writing in that state is the most profound satisfaction she knows, but her access to it comes and goes without warning. She may pick up her pen and follow it with her hand as it moves across the paper; she may pick up her pen and find that she’s merely herself, a woman in a housecoat holding a pen, afraid and uncertain, only mildly competent, with no idea about where to begin or what to write.

She picks up her pen.

Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.

When My Father Fell in Love With Annie Dillard

In 1975, my father read Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard and fell in love with both the book and its author. At the time, the Reverend Dan Abrams of the First Baptist Church in Jackson, Wyoming spent a goodly, Godly amount of time on the rivers and streams which braided through Jackson Hole like tangled silver necklaces. He could often be found in his non-pulpit hours standing on water-lapped banks, or thigh-deep in a tugging current, or atop great boulders in mid-stream where with his fly-rod raised like a sword and the determined, concentrated pinch of his face, he could be the model for a Civil War statue or, at the very least, the pudgy-but-dapper male model on page 54 of the L. L. Bean catalogue.

In the 1970s, my father spent so many restless hours outdoors that I wonder now if he wasn’t in daily pursuit of his own peaceful Tinker Creek where he could find temporary shelter from the emotional and soulful demands of the ministry. All I know is, when he read Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, he closed the book with a sigh then sat down and wrote a love letter to its author. I was young then, but I can still remember the stir this caused in our house―not because of the word “love” (in my father’s line of work, love was the main commodity), but because he was corresponding with a famous person. Yes, once upon a time, writers were minor-league celebrities.

It was all in the guise of a proper book review which appeared in the weekly Jackson Hole News where, in fact, my father penned a weekly column called “Outdoors with Dan Abrams.” Over the course of nearly a decade, my father wrote about fishing, hiking, hunting, and conservation ethics. But mostly fishing. My father, the fisherman and, religiously-speaking, the “fisher of men,” was mad for piscatorial pursuits. In fact, if he’d been one of those original disciples on the beach who’d heard Jesus call to them, “Leave your nets and follow me!”, he might have been the last to drop his net and, with a final doleful look at the water, turn to go with the rest. I think it’s the simplicity of the water he loves: the languid glide over rocks, the rhythmic lap of waves, the determined, no-nonsense way a river cuts through a canyon of stone. He has always shared Annie Dillard’s “holy curiosity” for nature.

And so he reviewed her book.

And he sent her a tearsheet of the review.

And the author wrote back to the reviewer. And my father has rightly treasured that card with its quick-scrawled Thank You for years.

As I continue to make my way through James Mustich’s landmark 1,000 Books to Read Before You Die, I have arrived at the D section, specifically “Di-”, and just around the corner from Dickens and next-door to Joan Didion, there is Annie Dillard. The inclusion of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, has stirred the memory of the time my father fell hard for Annie Dillard. Though I haven’t yet read Pilgrim (or, truth be told, any of Dillard’s other books―I am such a filial disappointment!), I remembered my father waxing rhapsodic about the book across a dozen dinnertimes. And so, the other day I asked my father if he still had a copy of that review. It arrived in my inbox less than an hour later. He, it seems, has not lost any of his ardor for this book....

I’ve never met Annie Dillard. Never laid eyes on her. But I think I’ve fallen in love with Annie Dillard (with my wife’s permission, of course).

You see, Annie wrote a book which she entitled Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. It was published over a year ago, but I got around to reading it just last month.

I wish I had read it a year ago. In fact, I wish Annie had written it ten years ago and I had read it then. But I am grateful she did and that I stumbled across it.

At first glance Pilgrim appears to be a chronicle of a year’s hikes and observations of the plants, insects, birds and animals which inhabit the environs of Tinker Creek, an ordinary stream flowing near her home in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia.

But don’t let that fool you. Through the eyes of Annie Dillard, the ordinary becomes something special and the common things in nature give hints of the very essence of life and the universe itself.

She allows herself to become immersed in a sense of wonder at the intricacies and interrelationships of God’s creation. She thrills at each new insight of universal proportion as revealed through her windows opened toward the little world of Tinker Creek.

We walk and watch with Annie as she stalks muskrats, scares frogs, collects the eggs of a praying mantis, and sees a mosquito sinking its hypodermic stinger into the neck of a copperhead snake.

We sense her fascinated horror as she observes a giant water bug as it injects a frog with enzymes which dissolve the victim’s muscles, bones and organs. Then the heavy-bodied brown beetle sucks the frog dry of the resulting juices, leaving nothing but a formless skin floating in the film of the water.

Let me warn you, Annie’s imagination takes some strange leaps when you least expect it. She spends a night in a nearby meadow and somehow her thoughts wander to a phenomenon about eels described by Edwin Way Teale. [My father was also a big EWT fan; I have his books, too, but once again you should just go ahead and dip me headfirst in boiling oil because I haven’t read them.]

In one of his fascinating books, Teale tells how eels will sometimes crawl for a mile or more across dewy meadows to reach streams that will carry them to salt water. Annie’s stream of consciousness then flows along to consider the strange life cycle of eels. Not the ordinary stuff of thoughts to ponder as one whiles away the night on an inland meadow.

She has an insatiable thirst for kinky facts and quirks of nature. Annie sits under a sycamore tree near Tinker Creek and begins to contemplate the tremendous extent of life to be found in the top inch of soil on which her body rests.

There comes a consciousness of the fact that in the top inch of forest soil, scientists have found an average of 1,356 living creatures present in each square foot, including 865 mites, 265 springtails, 22 millipedes, 19 adult beetles and various numbers of 12 other forms. There could be upwards of two billion bacteria, and many millions of fungi, protozoa, and algae in a mere teaspoon of soil.

Such statistics tend to boggle the mind, but they keep Annie intensely aware of her surroundings and instills a refreshing sense of awe and wonder at finding herself in the presence of such variety and quantity of life.

In Pilgrim at Tinker Creek one receives new insights to the art of seeing, hints on stalking small wild creatures, and a treasure of interesting facts (ten percent of all the world’s species are parasitic insects).

Annie Dillard is a poet and it is a pleasure to read words strung together exquisitely as pearls on a delicate strand from Cartiers.

Her enthusiasm for life, her childlike sense of wonder and her aggressive curiosity seriously infect the reader. All of this has joined together in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek to produce a hymn of joyous praise to the Creator and His world.

Do yourself a favor and read this book. It will go a long way in honing your sensitivity to the natural world about you and thus tuning up your capacity to enjoy the moment at hand wherever you are. Be careful, though. You, too, will probably fall in love with Annie Dillard.

After all, who can resist a girl who plays “King of the Meadow” with a field of grasshoppers and who delights in knowing there are two-hundred twenty-eight separate and distinct muscles in the head of an ordinary caterpillar.

[...There is something endearing about that “Shucks.” I like to think of the author sitting at her table, the burble and babble of Tinker Creek riding to her on the breeze, reading this fawning review that arrived out of the blue from a preacher-man in Wyoming, feeling the pink bloom across her cheeks, searching her roomy writer’s brain for just the right word and finally finding it in the simple, charming Shucks.]

*     *     *

Postscript: When I visited Annie Dillard’s website after posting this, I learned just how rare and special that handwritten note has turned out to be. The Annie Dillard of 1975, still standing fresh and unknowing at the doorstep of her approaching fame, could afford the time to write to small-town pastors; now, however, it’s another story (and justifiably so; I may one day steal/borrow these words for my own0:

Like many other writers, I can no longer read, let alone comment on, the many books and manuscripts people send me. I am going to stop even acknowledging them, to my sorrow and the sorrow of many good writers. I’m merely overwhelmed. I can’t help get others’ writing published, not because I’m holding out, but because I don’t know any agents who are taking on new writers or even who handle “literature.” I lay low. Nor can I write introductions or forwards or provide comments or text or reviews. It’s a matter of time, not of heart. If I answered one-twentieth of the mail, I could neither read nor write, let alone take care of family.

1,000 Books: Don Quixote in Iraq

Don Quixote. In particular, this Modern Library edition, standing vigil today over my old battle-dress uniform. Oh, the memories of this book! Not necessarily the contents (though they are all well and good), but the experience of reading Don Quixote. Even now, nearly 15 years later, I can recall the stone-heavy feel of that sand-colored book in my hand. I remember the way it led my mind through the forest to the edge of an open meadow and said, “Run free!”

Like the day Reagan was shot and the morning the space shuttle exploded, I remember where I was when I met Don Quixote for the first time: in Iraq with the rattle-pop of gunfire less than two miles away.

It was the first of the major works of classic literature I set out to read during my year-long deployment to Iraq as an active-duty soldier in 2005. After my 14-hour work days in the public affairs office of Task Force Baghdad headquarters, I had nothing else to do but eat, sleep and read. This would be my “Desert Island Year” for books. I had brought an additional foot locker with me to Iraq, over and above my unit’s packing list. It was boulder-heavy with nothing but books. In one sense, I had loaded the canon.

All my life, Don Quixote had been one of those dauntingly-massive books I knew I should read, but never had—along with Ulysses, Proust and the Bible in toto. Frankly, in 2005, I found the expanse of desert and the expanse of time were the perfect marriage of conditions in which to crack open Cervantes. I revved into high gear and plowed (happily, happily) through the endless field of words. I made it to the windmills; I never made it to Bloomsday.

This morning, I recall my time spent with Cervantes in Baghdad as I continue my journey through James Mustich’s landmark volume of 1,000 Books to Read Before You Die. Today’s featured book is, of course, the 1605 and 1615 novel by Cervantes (it was published in two parts) and it deservedly receives a full three-page treatment in 1,000 Books to Read Before You Die. I highly recommend what Mr. Mustich has to say about Cervantes (as well as Shakespeare and Montaigne) in this essay: “Cervantes made fiction itself a tool of inquiry, letting stories intersect, interrupt, and reimagine each other in the lives of his characters—much as they do, really, in the course of our lives. He uncovered a new world for human endeavor as surely as the seagoing stalwarts of his time explored new continents.”

Reading James Mustich on reading Don Quixote immediately sent me down Sentimental Street (which intersects Memory Lane at Epiphany Square), and this ultimately led me back to the raw pages of my wartime journal. A couple of times, my reading of Don Quixote pivoted into some interesting real-life scenes, so I thought I would share those with you. This first entry begins with Don Quixote and ends with a full-scale enemy attack on our Forward Operating Base. Along the way, a pope dies....

Not Cervantes. Dickens, I think.
But this is a nice view of my reading room (which was also my living room, dining room & bedroom)

April 2, 2005: We are stretched thin over here. So, every now and then, even as a senior non-commissioned officer, I have to do some extracurricular work (known as “pulling a detail”), since I’m so strapped for soldiers. Today, I’m sitting in the Internet Cafe, monitoring the computer users—making sure people are able to get on to the sites they need to and that if there’s a great demand for seats that people move along after they’ve been online for their allotted 30 minutes. There are 18 stations in the place but only 14 of them work. Every two hours, all the computers lock up and I must tell everyone to save what they’re working on, then go push a blue switch on the surge protector and re-set the server. No, not tough duty at all. It’s actually a nice break to be able to sit in here and surf the internet and read my book. Today, I’m starting Cervantes’ Don Quixote. It’s a huge undertaking and this deployment might be the only time I’ll actually be able to find time to read it. The first part of DQ, though, is boring. I scrape the edge of the remaining 900 pages with my fingernail, trying to loosen the dirt underneath. I tilt back in my metal folding chair and prop the book on my knee. I want everyone in the room to see what I’m reading. Yeah, proud to be a bookworm.

I was talking to a guy here today who was going on and on about how we were stuck here for 18 months, but he didn’t see the sense of it. “The Iraqi Army’s got, what, 14 battalions and an entire brigade! That’s more than we’ve got.”

“True,” I said, “but I think it’s the quality not the quantity that everyone’s concerned about.”

“It doesn’t matter anyway,” he said. “Once we leave here, what’s going to happen? They’re gonna try our little democracy experiment for a while and when that doesn’t work, they’ll go back to the way they always did business for the last 30,000 years. Eventually, it’s going to dissolve into a civil war and some dictator guy will rise to power and they’ll be right back where they started from.”

In the afternoon, three Iraqis come in to work on the computers. Two of the men are bandaged—one guy has both arms in slings (he must do everything with his elbows or grunt at his co-workers to push buttons), the other one has a bandage wrapped around his head like a turban. There is a nasty-looking peninsula of blood on his forehead descending from beneath the wrap. He keeps dabbing at it with a handkerchief.

The Iraqis hang around for three hours, loading software, reconfiguring the “down” computers and generally doing lots of unplugging and re-plugging of power cords in an effort to get everything working. Fifteen minutes after they leave, everyone starts rapidly clicking on their mice and banging on their keyboards and groaning at the fact that everything’s locked up again. So, I fix it with another push of the blue button.

The Pope dies this evening. Around that same time, 60 insurgents assault Abu Ghraib prison from several different directions, simultaneously ramming suicide car bombs at the front and rear gates, and firing rocket-propelled grenades and AK-47s at the U.S. soldiers and Marines guarding the place.

The Internet Café shudders twice from the car bombs and it’s not until later that we realize it wasn’t a controlled detonation by one of our EOD teams. This is the real deal—a raging battle taking place right outside our gates (Abu Ghraib borders Camp Liberty). This was the Holy Shit! moment of my deployment.

A short while later, a soldier bursts into the trailer and tells everyone that the new uniform is flak vest and Kevlar helmet from now until 7 a.m. due to the heightened security. Later, after I close up the Internet Café and return to my trailer, I venture out for a shower. I feel silly wearing my tennis shoes, PT shirt and shorts and a flak vest and Kevlar, but at the same time I’m grateful this isn’t something we have to wear every day, like I’d been dreading before I arrived.

The next morning, the Pope is still dead and at Abu Ghraib the enemy insurgents have limped home, thoroughly defeated by the U.S. forces. We don’t know how many we killed, but we only sustained about 20 wounded, and only two or three of those were serious injuries. Still, it gives me pause to think about how well-coordinated the attack was. We can’t underestimate the enemy.

This is what Reuter’s reported the next day: Al Qaeda’s wing in Iraq said on Sunday seven suicide bombers spearheaded its brazen overnight raid on Abu Ghraib prison that wounded 44 U.S. soldiers. In a statement on Saturday’s raid on the notorious facility outside Baghdad, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s group said its fighters killed “dozens of Americans,” destroyed more than 15 vehicles and shot down an Apache helicopter, It said 57 fighters attacked watchtowers from four sides and “silenced them” as seven suicide bombers detonated vehicles laden with explosives around the facility, “Three martyrs were ... (killed) while infiltrating the infidels’ fortresses, and seven other martyrdom seekers went to heaven after they blew up the enemy...” said the statement posted on a Web site used by Islamists.

This, of course, was all bullshit.

They have doused most of the lights around camp now—for security reasons, I suppose—so it’s blind-black walking around the gravel and between the trailers. The moon is nothing but a toenail clipping. Tonight, walking back to my room in my PTs and flak vest, I heard a couple of unseen soldiers talking to each other while sitting at a picnic table in the dark.

One said: “You don’t think they’d ever try to attack this place, do you?”

Silence from the other guy.

“Well, do you?”

After a long pause, his companion answered, “Hard to say.”

June 6, 2005: Last night, while sitting on the edge of my bed reading Don Quixote, I suddenly felt the urge to start clearing my throat. Then I noticed it was getting harder to breathe, as if the air was thickening. I got up, opened my door, and was met with a wall of brown—pure brown air. It was a dust blizzard. I couldn’t even see the other trailers fifteen feet away from mine. At some point while I was deep in Cervantes, the wind had kicked up, stirring all the talcum-powder dirt around here. Now it was filtering through the vents in my air conditioning and laying a fine, powdery grit over everything in my room, starting with my nose and throat. I turned off my air conditioner and tried to go to sleep. But I woke up two hours later, burning up with the stifling heat of the heavy night air. I turned on the air conditioner, figuring I’d take my chances with the dust storm. In the morning, my throat was raspy and there was mucus flaking in the hollows of my eyes.

I hope this doesn’t last. It’s putting a damper on everything here on the Forward Operating Base. Everyone is going around clearing their throats and rubbing their eyes. Like we’re all grief-stricken and trying to hide it.

June 16, 2005: Yesterday, I turned the final, 1000th page of Don Quixote. What a journey it was, what a wonderful odyssey. Truth be told, the book only came along with me on this deployment because it got swept into the duffel bag along with a load of other classics. At the time, it was pretty far down on my list of priorities. But six weeks ago, as it sat there on my shelf, thick as a tree stump, something moved me to pick it up and crack it open. I was hooked from the start (....okay, after I got over the initial speed bump of the preface and royal certifications and printer’s edicts—the boring stuff). I don’t have the energy or the time here in this scribbled journal to delve into everything I loved about this book (I will say this: the sidekick Sancho Panza turns out to be infinitely more interesting than DQ). Suffice to say, it’s a buoyant narrative that also parodies writing and publishing. It’s must-reading for anyone serious about pursuing this lovely and damned profession of writing (and reading).

So, after DQ, I’m left somewhat bereft. What next? Knowing that nothing could begin to approach the thousand-page journey, I decided to pick up something new and light: the 128-page Snakes and Earrings by Hitomi Kanehara. Very disappointing. If Don Quixote was a feast of prime rib and lobster, then this little book was a bag of Skittles. If you’re in the mood for a poorly-written and ultimately meaningless novel about sex, booze and body piercing in contemporary Japan, then by all means grab this little Zirconium diamond. Otherwise, re-read Don Quixote.

Now, it’s time to turn my attention back to Charles Dickens. American Notes is next.

*     *     *

You can read more about my wartime reading habits HERE

Friday Freebie: 1,000 Books to Read Before You Die by James Mustich

Congratulations to Lisa Murray, winner of last week’s Friday Freebie: And So We Die, Having First Slept by Jennifer Spiegel.

I’m pleased to announce this week’s giveaway is for my current (and long-lasting) reading obsession: 1,000 Books to Read Before You Die by James Mustich. I have two signed copies to give away to two lucky readers. This week’s book is subtitled A Life-Changing List and I can vouch for that to be true: 1,000 Books to Read Before You Die has already begun to improve my life in the four months I’ve been reading it. More on my love for the book below....

From the first of what I hope to be many blog posts about 1,000 Books to Read Before You Die (but I have to admit, I have a pretty poor track record so far), here are a few words about my trip through the book....

Another book telling us what books to read? Sigh. Yes, yes, yes, we live in a list-obsessed Buzzfeed culture these days, and certainly there are already plenty of “books to read before you die” lists floating around out there (How many have you read? Take our quiz now!), and I am hardly the last one to preach about the saintliness of not wasting time on obsessively counting how many books one has and hasn’t read. Hell, this blog is, in one sense, an ongoing summation of my reading habits. I love to tally. And then, too, there is an undeniable authoritarian nature of lists in general: you must read these! We feel sadly incomplete if we don’t score at least 90 on those quizzes. Or maybe that’s just me.

Having said all that, I have happily embraced falling into the thick-paged delights of 1,000 Books to Read Before You Die. On October 31, 2018, I embarked on the kilo-volume journey, working my way, one book per day, through Mustich’s list. That puts me at a target date of July 27, 2021 for finishing this book (Note to Future Nitpickers: please don’t hold me accountable to that exact date; I need a little wiggle room for the interruptions of life, as well as the potential for burnout around the letter F). There is also the possibility that I’ll die before finishing this book. C’est la vie, shrugs the reader who, as he gets older, has found himself accelerating his reading speed in order to, impossibly, Read All the Books before he hits the grave.

I am four months into this 1,000 Books project (which you can follow on a daily basis on Instagram and Facebook) and I can say, unequivocally, that it is a pleasure to learn. Every day, I discover something new, or am reminded of the pleasures of books I’ve already read.

1,000 Books to Die Before You Read is organized alphabetically by the author’s last name, starting with Edward Abbey (Desert Solitaire) and wrapping up 900 pages later with Carl Zuckmayer (A Part of Myself). There are 948 books which get individual entries; the other 52 are mentioned in the endnotes “More to Explore” and “Booknotes.” Selecting the titles could not have been easy: a combination Herculean and Sisyphean task, to be sure. As Mustich writes in his Introduction:

A book about 1,000 books could take so many different shapes. It could be a canon of classics; it could be a history of human thought and a tour of its significant disciplines; it might be a record of popular delights (or even delusions). But the crux of the difficulty was a less complicated truth: Readers read in so many different ways, any one standard of measure is inadequate. No matter their pedigree, inveterate readers read the way they eat: for pleasure as well as nourishment, indulgence as much as well-being, and sometimes for transcendence. Hot dogs one day, haute cuisine the next.

Haute dog challenge accepted, Mr. Mustich!

Click here to read more of that blog post, which includes mention of my own Reading Essentials list.

You’ll be just as happy as my cat Ember to get 1,000 Books in the mail

If you’d like a chance at winning 1,000 Books to Read Before You Die, simply e-mail your name and mailing address to

thequiveringpen@gmail.com

Put FRIDAY FREEBIE in the e-mail subject line. Please include your mailing address in the body of the e-mail. One entry per person, please. Despite its name, the Friday Freebie remains open to entries until midnight on March 7, at which time I’ll draw the winning name. I’ll announce the lucky reader on March 8. If you’d like to join the mailing list for the once-a-week newsletter, simply add the words “Sign me up for the newsletter” in the body of your email. Your e-mail address and other personal information will never be sold or given to a third party (except in those instances where the publisher requires a mailing address for sending Friday Freebie winners copies of the book).

Want to double your odds of winning? Get an extra entry in the contest by posting a link to this webpage on your blog, your Facebook wall or by tweeting it on Twitter. Once you’ve done any of those things, send me an additional e-mail saying “I’ve shared” and I’ll put your name in the hat twice.

1,000 Books: Edward Abbey to Louisa May Alcott

In this season of gratitude, I have 1,000 reasons to be thankful for James Mustich. As the co-founder of the legendary mail-order catalog A Common Reader, Mustich knows a thing or a thousand about books. (Full disclosure, Jim was an early editor of mine when we worked together on a now-defunct blog about Agatha Christie, as well as the un-defunct Barnes and Noble Review). Those of us who have felt his influence in the literary world for decades already know this, but the rest of the un-Mustich-minded population can now welcome his excellent taste to their coffee tables with the publication of the massive, and massively-entertaining, 1,000 Books to Read Before You Die, now out from Workman Publishing. If you are waffling about what to buy that book-obsessed person on your holiday gift list, then waffle no more: go buy this handsome volume and you can plant a big fat check next to that name on your list. I’ll save you an unhealthy dose of seasonal anxiety: this is the book to buy. Wrap it in paper as colorful as Oz’ Emerald City and tie it with bows that are as gilded as the edges of those fancy unread volumes of the Great Books in your father's library and place it it under a tree whose ancestors perhaps once gave their lives for this very book. Christmas = Done!

But...another book telling us what books to read? Sigh. Yes, yes, yes, we live in a list-obsessed Buzzfeed culture these days, and certainly there are already plenty of “books to read before you die” lists floating around out there (How many have you read? Take our quiz now!), and I am hardly the last one to preach about the saintliness of not wasting time on obsessively counting how many books one has and hasn’t read. Hell, this blog is, in one sense, an ongoing summation of my reading habits. I love to tally. And then, too, there is an undeniable authoritarian nature of lists in general: you must read these! We feel sadly incomplete if we don’t score at least 90 on those quizzes. Or maybe that’s just me.

Having said all that, I have happily embraced falling into the thick-paged delights of 1,000 Books to Read Before You Die. On October 31 of this year, I embarked on the kilo-volume journey, working my way, one book per day, through Mustich’s list. That puts me at a target date of July 27, 2021 for finishing this book (Note to Future Nitpickers: please don’t hold me accountable to that exact date; I need a little wiggle room for the interruptions of life, as well as the potential for burnout around the letter F). There is also the possibility that I’ll die before finishing this book. C’est la vie, shrugs the reader who, as he gets older, has found himself accelerating his reading speed in order to, impossibly, Read All the Books before he hits the grave.

I am about a month into this 1,000 Books project and I can say, unequivocally, that it is a pleasure to learn. Every day, I discover something new, or am reminded of the pleasures of books I’ve already read.

1,000 Books to Die Before You Read is organized alphabetically by the author’s last name, starting with Edward Abbey (Desert Solitaire) and wrapping up 900 pages later with Carl Zuckmayer (A Part of Myself). There are 948 books which get individual entries; the other 52 are mentioned in the endnotes “More to Explore” and “Booknotes.” Selecting the titles could not have been easy: a combination Herculean and Sisyphean task, to be sure. As Mustich writes in his Introduction:

A book about 1,000 books could take so many different shapes. It could be a canon of classics; it could be a history of human thought and a tour of its significant disciplines; it might be a record of popular delights (or even delusions). But the crux of the difficulty was a less complicated truth: Readers read in so many different ways, any one standard of measure is inadequate. No matter their pedigree, inveterate readers read the way they eat: for pleasure as well as nourishment, indulgence as much as well-being, and sometimes for transcendence. Hot dogs one day, haute cuisine the next.

Haute dog challenge accepted, Mr. Mustich!

Lest you think I am just some literary lemming following one man and his recommendations over a cliff formed by an already too-high To-Be-Read pile, I can assure you that: a) I trust Mustich’s taste to the fullest degree; b) I love a challenge where my reading boundaries are pushed to classic works I might ordinarily shy away from (Hello, Aristotle?) ; and c) of the books he’s recommended and I have already started to read, I am reaping the promised rewards (I’m looking at you, Half of a Yellow Sun).

Truth be told, I need this 1,000-book list like I need an extra hole in my head (unless said hole was carved for an extra pair of eyes). As long-time readers of The Quivering Pen know, I already have a Reading Essentials list of my own. I first posted my Five-Year Plan to this blog on November 22, 2014. This means I have one more year left on my ticking clock (with every tock of the pendulum, I cringe in regret for time wasted on lame-ass books). As of today, I have read only 26 books on that 236-book list. I’ll never make it. So, I’m going to discard the five-year calendar and just say “before I die” at this point. Not only that, but since 2014, I have added just a couple more books to that original list:

Barth, John: Lost in the Funhouse
Barthelme, Donald: Sixty Stories & Forty Stories
Bender, Aimee: The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake
Brooks, Geraldine: March
Burgess, Anthony: A Clockwork Orange
Burnett, Frances Hodgson: The Secret Garden
Canin, Ethan: The Palace Thief
Dahl, Roald: The Collected Stories
Dana, Richard Henry: Two Years Before the Mast
Defoe, Daniel: Robinson Crusoe
Heinlein, Robert A.: Stranger in a Strange Land
Hitchens, Christopher: And Yet...
Jackson, Shirley: The Haunting of Hill House (read since adding to this list)
Johnson, Adam: The Orphan Master’s Son
Lovecraft, H. P.: The New Annotated Lovecraft
Lowry, Malcolm: Under the Volcano
Mansfield, Katherine: The Garden Party and Other Stories
Morrison, Toni: Song of Solomon
Muir, John: The Mountains of California
Norris, Frank: McTeague
Rhys, Jean: Wide Sargasso Sea
Roth, Philip: Portnoy’s Complaint
Salten, Felix: Bambi
Sayers, Dorothy L.: Gaudy Night
Shelley, Mary: Frankenstein (read!)
Smith, Alexander McCall: The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency
Stegner, Wallace: Big Rock Candy Mountain
Steinbeck, John: The Grapes of Wrath (read! er, “listened to” on audiobook this year)
Stoker, Bram: Dracula
Turgenev, Ivan: Fathers and Sons
Turow, Scott: Presumed Innocent
Walker, Alice: The Color Purple
Wharton, Edith: The Custom of the Country
Wouk, Herman: The Winds of War
Wright, Richard: Black Boy
Zola, Emile: Germinal

Like I said, just a couple of books to add to my quote unquote burden. As I began reading 1,000 Books to Read Before You Die, I merged Mustich’s list with my own. To paraphrase Roy Scheider in Jaws, I needed a bigger boat.

Over the course of the next nearly three years, I will be documenting my checklist here at the blog and on my Facebook and Instagram feeds. I will briefly highlight each book, and include a few words from Mustich (in bold) about the title and as well as a photo of the book in my collection, when appropriate. As widely-read a person as I think I am, I’m finding several books and authors I’d never even heard of before Mustich introduced us. That, if nothing else, is one reason to give thanks for 1,000 Books!

Desert Solitaire
by Edward Abbey

Desert Solitaire evokes the paradoxical loveliness of the harsh, hostile landscape with awestruck exactitude and visceral intensity.

I first read DS in grad school too many years ago (my copy has vanished, but it was the same as the stock photo above which I pulled off the web). I loved Abbey’s rascally humor as well as the rich descriptions of nature. Methinks it’s time for a re-read.

Flatland
by Edwin A. Abbott

A novel of mathematical whimsy...

Written in 1884, Flatland is a satirical novel about math. As such, since it’s all about numbers and geometry and I absolutely sucked at those subjects in high school, this is a book I would normally run away from, screaming and bleeding at the eyes. Nevertheless, enough people weighed in on it after I posted it to Facebook that I am convinced to give the numbers a try.

Things Fall Apart
by Chinua Achebe

It is as rich in human substance as Greek tragedy, and just as mysteriously powerful in its effect.

Another one I’ve read. Thanks, Graduate School Syllabus!!

My Dog Tulip
by J. R. Ackerley

When first published in England in 1956, Tulip was considered shocking because of what one reviewer called its “scatological and gynaecological detail.” But while the messy details are certainly present in abundance (Chapter Two, for example, is entitled “Liquids and Solids”), to be put off by them is to miss the forest for the trees. For it is precisely J. R. Ackerley’s frank, unashamed, and often hilarious discussions of his beloved Alsatian’s bodily functions, her insistent animality, which bring this particular dog to such vivid and unforgettable life.

As a longtime lover of “a boy and his dog” books (See Where the Red Fern Grows), I was surprised to learn about this memoir for the first time from Mustich’s book. Pleasantly surprised, I might add. I went online and ordered it right away, not in the least influenced by that marvelous cover from the 2009 animated movie (which I have also never seen). I can’t wait to be paws up on my back with this book.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
by Douglas Adams

Cleverly, brilliantly, gloriously, ingeniously, and at times profoundly silly.

This is where the 1,000 Books To Read Before You Die list starts to get a bit embarrassing. No, I have not read The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, but it’s been on my mind for years. And, hey, I knew enough about it to pose my copy of the book with some towels in my bathroom. Mustich says the novel is like P. G. Wodehouse in outer space. My kind of book! (Though, yeah yeah yeah, I also need to read Wodehouse himself...)

The Education of Henry Adams
by Henry Adams

A work of extraordinary eloquence and discernment.

I’ve read Henry Adams’ novel Democracy (pictured in the background), but not his Pulitzer Prize winning autobiography. As you can see, I have a vintage Armed Services Edition (given to troops during World War Two to carry in their pockets during combat) which I picked up in an antique store a few years ago. I have a bunch of those ASE titles, but have yet to read any of them. When I do, I’ll pretend hunkered down in a foxhole in a French forest somewhere. Because I’m weird like that.

Watership Down
by Richard Adams

One of the most phenomenal international bestsellers of the 1970s, Watership Down is an immersive saga that traverses great themes and feelings--courage, frailty, community, ecology, responsibility, love--while holding readers on the edge of their metaphorical seats. And oh, yes--it’s a 500-page novel about rabbits.

This book has been a part of my life since at least 1977, five years after it first came out, when I was constantly shelving it and checking it out to patrons at the Teton County Library in Jackson, Wyoming, back when I was a teenage librarian who was so in love with books that I dreamed of, among other things, concocting a men’s cologne called Pages (notes of rosemary, woodstove, and dust). I remember that hardbound copy of Watership was spine-broke and grimy from a thousand readers’ fingers, but still it circulated steadily until it was as limp and weak as sun-baked lettuce. And then came the movie, which I must have seen three or four times in my life. And, oh my!, don’t even get me started on the sentimental pleasures of Art Garfunkel’s song “Bright Eyes”! I don’t know where or when I got this battered paperback you see here (photobombed by Kindle the kitten), but it was before I started keeping track of my collection on Library Thing in 2006. All that being said, I’m sorry to report I haven’t actually read the novel.

Half of a Yellow Sun
by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Set in Nigeria during the decade culminating in the 1967-70 Biafran war, a secession conflict that left more than a million dead from violence and famine, Half of a Yellow Sun is at once a historical drama and a tale of family struggles and romances gone right and wrong.

After reading Mustich’s summation of the novel, I got so excited, I immediately marched myself up the hill to check out a copy from the Butte-Silver Bow Public Library. I was swept up in the story by page 3 and happily plunged onward. Unfortunately, previous readers had loved Half of a Yellow Sun half to death and a chunk of the first 30 pages, loosened by readers who like to spine-break, kept falling out into my lap. That is no way to enjoy a book. Undaunted, I returned the book to the library and downloaded a page-intact version onto my Kobo. Now I can hold Adichie’s massive, Dickensian world in the palm of my hand.

The Oresteia
by Aeschylus

If you seek between covers an education in the trials and tribulations, the hopes and fears, the terrors and triumphs of the human spirit, the majestic tragedies of the ancient Greeks are the place to begin, and perhaps the place to end as well.

The Oresteia is the trilogy of plays by Aeschylus, seen here in Volume 8 of the Harvard Classics “Five-Foot Shelf of Books” which I found in a garage sale here in Butte, Montana nine years ago. I should say “rescued” rather than “found" because most of the 51 volumes were water-damaged and rotting with mildew. I spread them out around the basement and for the better part of a week, the house smelled like an old tweedy English professor who’d been left out in the rain for too long. (Sadly, I was unable to save Volumes 7, 47 and 48.) As for the Greek plays, I’m marking these as “read” because I’m sure they were on my syllabus when I was a Theater major at University of Wyoming back in the early 80s and I’m pretty certain I read Agamemnon at the very least (though, truthfully, my memory is also a little tweedy and rain-soaked).

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
by James Agee and Walker Evans

Agee invests simple realities--and the struggling lives of sharecroppers--with beauty and moral gravity.

I had a Penguin Classics edition of Agee’s novel A Death in the Family perched on my own To-Be-Read list, but Mustich started twisting my arm in favor of Famous Men; and then on Facebook, fellow reader David Surface completely wrenched my elbow up toward my shoulder blades with this summation and I cried “Uncle!”: “This book is Agee’s Apocalypse Now, in that (like Coppola) he went into the jungle and wouldn’t come out. What was supposed to be a magazine article on sharecroppers turned into this huge, sprawling, genius mess of a glorious work of art that touches on politics, class, poverty, race relations, and (like all his work) human beings and our relationship to the holy. It’s unclassifiable, literally––walk into any B&N and try to find it; I’ve found it under Literature, Sociology, History, even Memoir and Biography (and, thanks to the other genius involved, Walker Evans, even Photography). There’s much in it that your eyes and brain won’t want or be able to deal with. It also contains several of the most heartbreakingly beautiful, angelic pieces of writing in the English language.” Pictured: my Library of America volume of Agee’s books.

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
by Edward Albee

Fear and Loathing in the Living Room

Thanks (again!) to my early thespian training in Wyoming, I am not afraid to say I’ve read this play time and time again, until my brain was as hoarse as George and Martha’s voices yelling at each other over late-night drinks. Albee’s play is incredible in the way it treats the human condition. It stings, it burns, it insists we not look away from the mirror.

Little Women
by Louisa May Alcott

It is among the most cherished and popular children’s books of all time. Within its comfortable domestic compass, many readers first discover the import of the largest questions: Who am I, and who do I want to be?

I don’t remember where or when I got this 1924 copy of the novel--and it’s not the edition I read a few years ago when I realized I better see what all the fuss was about--but it’s in great shape after all these years and is a cherished member of my vintage books shelf. Ember (Kindle’s likewise photobombing brother) told me it has notes of oak and cherries in its aroma. I then turned and splashed him with a fingerful of my Pages cologne to show him what a real book should smell like.