New Year, New City, New Apartment, New Writing Space

“Oh, wow,” I said as we took our seats at the large table in the back room of the title company.

“What?” Jean said.

“This is the same table and the same chairs we sat in eleven years ago.”

My wife took stock of the room. “You’re right. That is weird.”

“Full circle,” I said as I reached for a pen to start signing the papers.

It was the end of a decade-long chapter in our lives, a long chapter full of ups and too many downs for the both of us. It was the longest either of us had lived in one place in our entire lives, but now it was time to leave Butte, Montana and put it in our rear-view mirror as we drove an hour north along the interstate to Helena. I held the pen lightly in my fingers and swirled my signature across a couple dozen papers, closing the sale of the house we’d bought in February 2009. In California, a gentleman we’d never met would be doing the same thing at roughly the same time. And then, our separate inks drying, the deed was done. The house was out of our hands.

Oh, Argyle Street House, I have loved you so over the years and my throat is soggy with tears at the thought of leaving you, but I think you and I both knew it was time to go. We made a lot of memories together, you and I.

This 4,000-square-foot Craftsman home, built in 1920 has housed many families over the years: the Martins, the Duttons, the Archibalds, the Casebeers. The hardwood floors and the narrow winding staircases creak with the voices of ghosts; the huge, immovable safe in the basement holds its own secrets; the hardwood bar has been polished by generations of drinkers’ elbows. Over the years of our ownership, the whole house shone with beauty, particularly after Jean finished adding her own beautiful design touches to each room—a vintage-white look that was prominently featured in the nationally-circulated magazine Cottages and Bungalows (you can see the sexy-gorgeous photo shoot here).

This was the house where I finished the final draft of my first novel, Fobbit, and wrote the entirety of my second novel, Brave Deeds. There, in the upstairs bedroom I converted into my writing space, is where this very blog was born. Many writer friends have stayed overnight in the spare bedrooms, and polished the basement bar with their elbows (along with a few tipsy slops of gin and tonics). This is the house where I have read more than a thousand books and which, until recently, I kept ten times that number on the tall white bookcases lining the basement. This was the house of Thanksgivings and Christmases and birthdays and anniversaries and epic video-game tournaments. It has been home to five cats and the occasional visiting dog (whose departure was always greeted with wary feline stretches and sniffings). It has ridden unharmed through several earthquakes, been battered by wind and snow, and has seen its walls drenched more than once by burst pipes. But it was always kind to us and never said a word during our multiple interior renovations (“Mrs. Abrams,” I said, trying to sound Reagan-esque as we re-did the kitchen several years ago, “tear down these walls!”). And during two Christmases, and two Christmases only, Argyle Street House endured in silent suffering the ignominy of my talentless attempts to string lights around the front porch.

Goodbye, good house. We will always hold you in our hearts with love and appreciation.

Not so much with Butte itself. I have feelings about the city and they’re....complicated. Soon after we moved there, Jean and I were full of hope and optimism for Butte, a once-great mining town whose glory days are crumbling in the past but whose renewal seems to always be on the menu of conversation at the local coffee shops. “It’s on the cusp of revitalization,” we told ourselves. “Any day now, it’s gonna turn the corner and really be something.” The city’s motto is “The Richest Hill on Earth,” and we hoped we could help the place cash in on that promise. But our payday never came and we eventually realized we were fools for waiting on the town to turn a corner.

Butte has been punched to the ground time and time again by the economy (and the occasional corrupt city leadership), but it’s always managed to stagger woozily to its feet and continue the fight. Over the years, we’ve heard it all. Butte is quirky, Butte is a hard nut to crack, Butte is beautiful, Butte is fugly, Butte is Butte and don’t, by God, try to change it. About two years ago, Jean and I realized that the town was starting to drag us down emotionally and physically. And so, eighteen months ago, we started to plot our escape.

At first, we thought we would literally escape in an RV, roaming the country like nomads in our 26-foot Thor Vegas; but one evening of sober math and writing a list of pros and cons made us realize that wouldn’t be financially feasible. And so we started planning for other options. Around this time, I got a new boss at work and I screwed my courage to the sticking point by going in to ask her if she thought telecommuting would be a viable possibility. To my surprise and overwhelming gratitude, she said yes. And so, starting this week, I am officially telecommuting from Helena, driving the hour south to Butte to my office just one or two days a week. The rest of the time, I’ll be working from our apartment in the state’s capital city.

The Blackstone in the 1930s

Ah yes, the apartment. Let me tell you about this place we found: we have fallen in love with it as surely as any high school geek fell in love with Molly Ringwald by the final reel of an 80s movie. The Blackstone is an old-school apartment building, built in 1915 (yes, we like to date older men—what of it?) and still going strong today with twenty-eight units for rent among its four floors. It has the atmosphere, as someone said on my Facebook page, of an apartment building from an 80s sitcom. I tend to liken it to apartments from noir films from the 1940s and 50s. I mean, it even has an old timey-time manual cage elevator.

Our apartment is also less than one-quarter the size of the living space than what we had at Argyle Street House.

We are not complaining, we are adjusting.

The Blackstone is located just off of Last Chance Gulch, Helena’s historic district, and we’re within easy striding distance of a dozen good (and gluten-free-friendly!) restaurants, two movie theaters, several banks, the post office, two yoga studios, art galleries, antique stores, the civic center, and not one but two independent bookstores. There is even a community theater kitty-corner from the Blackstone for goodness sake! The public library is less than half a mile away. It’s a tread-worn cliche, but I’ll say it anyway: Life is good.

We’re in a two-bedroom, one-bath on the fourth floor—the entire east side of the building—and, to our joy, we still have hardwood floors (with a whole new playlist of creaks). Here are a few photos of the decorating magic Jean has already performed in our new small space (with many more tweaks and changes to come, she assures me), complete with the typical feline photobombs....

The Entryway

The Living Room

The Dining Room

The Bedroom

The spare bedroom is taken up with a bed (go figure), so I have settled on a different location for my writing space: a sun porch near the back of the apartment which looks out onto the backside of the Blackstone and the opposite sun porches and neighbors’ windows. There is a strong Rear Window vibe going on here. I expect to gather new stories every time I glance out the window. A plastic owl perches on the top railing of my fire escape and I still do a startled double-take when I walk into the office. It’s not a huge writing space, but why should that matter much when all I need is a laptop and a place to set my coffee mug? I managed to get a metal shelf loaded with about two hundred of the books that are on my immediate to-be-read list (it’s only the tip of the TBR iceberg—the real list goes on for fifty single-spaced pages on my computer).

But even in this cold and drafty room, I find pleasure and comfort. I have my reading chair, I have a large folding table that works well as a desk, I have some companionable books smiling at me, I have my three cats that take turns curling like soft fuzzy heaters on my lap, I have the sound of my wife listening to YouTube videos in the next room, and, by walking a few short steps out to the dining room, I have a beautiful view of dawn breaking behind the spires of the Cathedral of Saint Helena a few blocks away. I’ll say it again: Life is damn good and I’m glad I’m here in this moment in this new town in this new life at the dawn of a new decade. Turn the page, begin a new chapter.

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

Where the Books Went

The books had become a burden.

That’s not a sentence I would ever have dreamed of writing when I was younger. “Younger” meaning eighteen months ago. Until recently, I went around saying things like “There’s no such thing as too many books, only too little time in which to read them.” I declared I would measure my coffin according to the number of volumes I could squeeze inside its piney confines. Part with my books? You might as well cut my arm off with a rusty saw.

And yet, the timbers of my Craftsman home in Butte, Montana groaned under the weight of paper and ink. The shelves lining the walls of my basement had long since been filled, and over-filled—like a corpulent guest at Thanksgiving dinner who, after the turkey and the stuffing and the sweet potatoes and the cranberry sauce and the gravy, greedily cuts just One More Slice of Pumpkin Pie. With whipped cream.

The books were every-frickin-where in the 4,000-square-foot house: there were piles in the bathroom, stacks in the breakfast nook, and a haphazard litter of titles to be shelved weighing down the polished-wood bar in the basement. My collection, which had been built and curated over the past thirty years of my life, was out of control. It was the literary version of The Trouble with Tribbles.

Books came into the house, but none went out. I was saturated and oversaturated. By my estimate, and according to my Library Thing catalog, my shelves were stuffed with more than 13,000 books. The real “trouble,” of course was the fact that I could not stop buying books. I am, I guess, part magpie: I cannot resist a new, shiny object. I was a bookaholic in much the same way that many people struggle with grape and grain; I had to start avoiding bookstores like twelve-steppers vow never to step foot inside a bar again. As an author who frequently goes on book tours, this was impossible. But I tried to control myself. I tried, I really tried.

And failed.

It was a slowly-dawning awareness, but eventually, I reached—and passed—my breaking point. Long ago, I had crossed the line when I had more books than I could possibly read in my lifetime (in truth, more books than the most secluded hermit could ever read). A speed-reading course wouldn’t even make a difference. The tipping point came when my wife and I made the decision to put the house on the market and move into smaller quarters. The original plan was to live in our new 25-foot RV. We would travel the country and Live Small. We’ve since tapped the brakes on that idea—not entirely ruling it out, but not committing to that miniaturized lifestyle, either. (Plus, the house in Butte still hasn’t sold, so we’re biding our time here in Montana for now.) We had an estate sale and sold more than 80 percent of our worldly goods; we’re now living in this oversized house with just a sofa, a bed, two nightstands, and just a few sticks of furniture. Our three cats spend their days chasing dust bunnies and listening to the echoes of their meows bounce off the bare hardwood floors. (And no, before you ask, we’re not marching to the beat of Marie Kondo and all those decluttering books which currently clutter the aisles of bookstores; this is a long-brewing, personal decision which has nothing to do with popular trends.)

Everything, from the camcorder bought in 2010 to the massive antique wardrobe in the upstairs bedroom, was sold. If my wife could part with her pewter salt-and-pepper shaker collection, I knew I, too, needed to make my own hard sacrifices. The books had to go. But where?

For the past year, I had been carting fat bookbags to Second Edition Books in Butte where the owner, Ann, bought somewhere around 1,000 books (and God bless her for her generosity and patience with my bi-weekly trips into her store where I continually ask, like a scratched record, “Can you take any more off my hands?”).

But off-loading at the used bookstore was just one slice of the Thanksgiving-feast pie. After separating out the ones I wanted to keep—

[Oh, excuse me, did you think I would get rid of all the books? If so, you obviously don’t know me. It was an emotionally-difficult culling process, but I picked and I chose, I sorted and set aside, I boxed and then unboxed and re-boxed indecisively. Eventually, I preserved about 1,000 of my most treasured volumes. I kept all of the Flannery O’Connor; ditto with Dickens, Hemingway, Richard Brautigan, Lewis Nordan (you can have my Nordan collection when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers) and Raymond Carver, along with a handful of my favorite living authors—though I won’t name names to avoid any hurt feelings from someone who didn’t make the cut. I saved my Dell mapbacks collection and my Big Littles. I held on to a small shelf of beloved children’s books. I kept my Penguin Classics and all my Library of America volumes.]

The survivors of the Great Book Culling of 2019

I carried The Keepers to an upstairs bedroom and though they lined an entire wall, removing them from the basement only made a minor dent in the overall collection. How, and where, could I possibly unload a lifetime’s worth of books? The answer came in the most unexpected of ways.

My friend Christine Martin, board director of the local non-profit organization The Root and Bloom Collective, was at my house in late summer to buy several of my bookcases (the ones which had been recently emptied of their contents) and, knowing of my book “burden,” she looked at the rows and rows of spines and said, “You know, we might be interested in buying some of these from you...”

“We?” I said.

“The Root and Bloom. We’re in the early stages of building our own library and some of these books would make a good start for what we want to do.”

“Some?” I said, teasingly (but also seriously). “What about all? Would you be willing to take all of them?”

“Oh.” She stared at the two hundred tons of paper, ink and glue. “Well....Let me talk to our board and directors and see what they say.”

*     *     *

They said yes.

And so, the next week Christine returned with empty boxes and a few volunteers from the Root and Bloom to help pack what she later estimated were 180 boxes. “No one had to go to the gym that week,” she told the local TV news station.

For several days, the basement of my house was noisy with the rumble of heavy books dropping into cardboard boxes and the shrieks of packing tape sealing the flaps. Christine and her small army, the Book Brigade, arrived early each day and spent hours pulling, sorting, and cramming. I popped in on my lunch hour to check on their progress and I always went away feeling a little bad: my burden had become their burden. The sheer number of books was overwhelming and I felt sorry for the Book Brigade and their sweat-damp faces and sore muscles.

But eventually, everything was boxed up and carted off. I felt only relief.

That soon turned to joy when Christine told me of her plans for the books: “These will be the start of a new library we’re establishing at the Jacobs House. We’re going to call it the Edwin C. Dobb Memorial Peace Library.”

I had to turn away for a minute. Suddenly, there was a lump in my throat and tears in my eyes.

*     *    *

Before his all-too-soon death this past July, Ed Dobb was one of the best word-slingers to ever come out of Butte, Montana. His articles about the troubled history of this copper-mining town, “Pennies From Hell” and “Dirty Old Town,” are revered as masterpieces of journalism; they’re the yardstick against which everything else written about Butte is measured. Ed was also the co-producer of the terrific documentary film Butte, America. The blood that flowed through Ed’s veins was the color of pennies.

Ed emailed me out of the blue one day in 2010, one year after I’d moved to the Mining City and shortly after my interview with Tom McGuane appeared in New West magazine. The subject line of the email was “Comparing Pens” and it opened like this:

Hey, David, I enjoyed your interview with McGuane in New West. Also noted with delight that you’re living in Butte. Clearly you’re mad....What sort of unspeakable crimes would condemn you to such a desolate place?....Doubtless you’ve now heard the old joke: One of the best things about living in Butte is that Montana is close by. I think how a person responds to the quirky, often forbidding island ruin of Butte says a lot about a person’s character and sensibility.

I leaned closer to my laptop screen. I’d found a kindred spirit, someone who removed his rose-colored glasses before sweeping his eyes across the scraped and scarred landscape of this town. Ed loved Butte, but he also understood its complexities: the ugly and the lovely.

Ed sent me more essays to read, including this one about cold-water swimming which began:

Although I had been swimming on and off since moving from southwest Montana back to San Francisco in mid-January, my new season officially started on April 17th, the day I turned 60. It was a bright afternoon, the sun partially obscured by high thin clouds, gusts churning the surface of Aquatic Park, a manmade cove bounded by curved piers on the waterfront. That’s where I swim, along with others whose notion of a swell time is plying chilly San Francisco Bay while wearing nothing but a cap and a Speedo. And chilly it was that day—water about 55 degrees, or 30 degrees cooler than the average municipal pool. Whatever pleasures await the cold-water sea swimmer—and they are incomparable, even, at times, transcendent—reaching them entails a certain amount of discomfort. Every swim begins with a double leap—the physical act of plunging into the water, the mental act of deliberately submitting to pain.

Going back over that article now, half a year after Ed died at 69 of complications from a heart condition, I read it as metaphor. Ed was writing about swimming, yes; but—and I hope he’ll forgive me for stretching his words—he could easily have been writing about the process of shedding my beloved books: the icy shock of the decision to rid myself of what I’d once held so dear, deliberately subjecting myself to the pain of loss.

But now, as Christine told me of Root and Bloom’s plan for the books, I realized it wasn’t loss and grief I should be feeling, but happiness and comfort. My 30-year library would have a new life and find new readers and, best of all, it would carry my friend’s name and legacy with it into the future. I couldn’t have planned a better fate for the books.

*     *    *

Two months after the last box was packed and carried out the front door, I paid my books—my former books—a visit at the Jacobs House. Many of them were still in their cartons, stacked like a small mountain range in the middle of the floor; but enough had made their way onto the shelves—my old bookcases—for me to browse. I tilted my head and ran my eyes across the familiar spines. “Hello, old friends,” I whispered. “It’s good to see you again.”

I restrained myself: I did not shake the shelves and sweep the books into my arms and carry them out the door. Instead I felt a pang of guilt for holding them in a miser’s grip for all those years, knowing I could never read even a fraction of the collection—no, not even a snowflake on the tip of the iceberg’s worth—before I died. Now, other visitors to the Edwin C. Dobb Memorial Peace Library would have the chance to read what I built and saved over the decades.

I went back to Ed Dobb’s article on swimming in the icy waters near Alcatraz and his words took on fresh meaning:

How long it takes for the body’s internal heat to counteract the penetrating cold varies widely, depending on several factors—metabolism, conditioning, overall acclimation, how hard one swims. But whether the interim is measured in seconds or minutes, a kind of alchemy is at work, converting the forbidding into the ecstatic. What makes the shift possible is conviction, the belief that eventually the sting will recede, the shock replaced by something that cannot be experienced anywhere else.

What I once feared most—losing my books—had been converted to joy. A new refrain ran through my head: It is better to share than to hoard.

I was at peace with my loss.

Ed Dobb swimming toward Alcatraz

Tuesday Tune: “Town Underground” by Christy Hays

As anyone who has pranked around with interstate mileage signs will tell you, Butte, Montana is frequently the butt of jokes. Sometimes it deserves to have the “e” removed, and sometimes it doesn’t. When traveling on the interstate between Bozeman and Missoula, it’s easy to bypass this city, but those who pull off the nearest exit will find a place worth a linger...if only long enough to drive past the large mansions built by mining tycoons, eat a greasy pork chop sandwich, or stare into the emerald depths of a toxic lake. Once a glorious metropolis and now mired in depression, Butte can be a puzzle and a befuddlement and a reminder that things don’t always turn out the way we’d hoped.

Butte is a boomtown gone bust when the last of its copper mines ceased production decades ago. Now, a little more than 30,000 scrappy souls still stubbornly cling to the memories of its glory days, back when it was the largest city between Chicago and San Francisco around the turn of the 20th century. Though it’s fallen onto economic hard times and many of the once-grand buildings in its historic district are empty brick shells painted with pigeon droppings, there are some people here who refuse to let it die. They steadfastly paint rouge on the cheeks of the corpse every day. I don’t blame them, for I, too, want to believe Butte will someday rise from its coffin and dance an Irish jig in the streets again—maybe not in the same way it did back when Charlie Chaplin performed live matinees in the theaters uptown and Charles Lindbergh landed the Spirit of St. Louis on a dirt runway south of town, but perhaps there’s a chance a re-animated Butte could boogie in the 21st century with renewed vigor.

I’ve lived here for eleven years—the longest my feet have ever been planted in one place—and I’m still trying to figure this city out. Psychologically and physically, it’s a mess of contradictions (and, yes, I’m braced for a wave of hate mail from those who can only see the rouge and not the dead cheek). I swing both ways on the love-hate scale nearly every day.

No one has captured the yin-yang of Butte in as compact and poetic a manner as singer-songwriter Christy Hays and that’s why I’m briefly reanimating Tuesday Tune (my own corpse of a blog feature) today in honor of her song “Town Underground.”

Hays is a newcomer who divides her time between Austin, Texas and Butte, where she purchased the family home of the late Edwin C. Dobb, a Butte native who went on to write for National Geographic and Harper’s Magazine before his untimely death this past summer. Hays is in the midst of turning the old miner’s cottage into an artist residency (visit her Instagram account here) and though I can’t speak authoritatively about the afterlife, I’m pretty sure Ed Dobb is smiling at the thought. For starters, his spirit hovers like mist over the lyrics of “Town Underground” (more on that in a minute).

Dobb’s tour de force of creative non-fiction was “Pennies From Hell,” a clear-eyed portrait of Butte published in Harper’s in 1996. Dobb opened that essay with the sad-but-true story of the snow geese that landed on the city’s toxic lake, the Berkeley Pit, which is full to the brim with deadly mining waste a half-dozen blocks north of my house:

Rust-colored, reeking of sulfur, and surrounded by corroded earthen terraces so sterile they appear incandescent in strong light, the 600-acre lake that rests within the man-made cavity known as the Berkeley Pit looks nothing like a refuge, though it must have seemed like one to the ill-starred flock of snow geese that stopped there while passing through southwestern Montana last November. It is uncertain how many birds eventually rose from that bitter pool and flew over the rooftops of Butte, the town that borders and embraces this former strip mine, continuing their winter migration from Arctic Canada to California, but at least 342 of them did not. That is the number of carcasses Pit monitors found drifting in the lake and washed ashore in the weeks following the flock’s stopover.

I have often stood (safely) on the rim of the Berkeley Pit and marveled at how it glows when the right slant of light falls on its terraced slopes. I can see why it was a magnet pulling the geese to its surface. It is gorgeous and it is gross. It was the source Butte’s economic life for decades, and it was the pool of death for hundreds of birds.

Christy Hays, channeling the spirit of Ed Dobb (as well as that of another “Ed from Butte,” poet Ed Lahey) bottles all of Butte’s ironies in her lyrics to “Town Underground” when she sings:

There’s a town that I found
It’s empty and proud,
It’s filthy, it’s grand, and it’s boring.

When I first heard her sing those words, I was driving down the snow-cluttered streets of Butte, past the pawn shops and the pot shops, tucked ass-to-elbow among the casinos and banks. An elk head peered over a pickup truck’s tailgate, tongue lolling as it winked at me with dead eyes. Just ahead, the orange terraces of the Berkeley Pit shone in all their terrible beauty.

Hays’ voice (which reminds me of Emmylou Harris and Patty Griffin in their finest, gentlest moments) continued to pour through my speakers as she reached the chorus and I turned into my driveway:

Maybe I’m wrong to love it so much,
It’s bound to disappoint me like love does

All I can say in response is “Yes, yes, yes.”

I have only love, and no disappointment, when it comes to “Town Underground” (the rest of her 2018 album, River Swimmer, is just as great). Christy Hays has written a pitch-perfect love/hate/tolerate letter to this crazy mixed-up town and I will be pressing repeat on her song as often as I can for as long as I live here, still breathing and still above-ground.


Visit her website to learn more about her music.

A Ghost of an Autumn

Here in western Montana, climate change robbed us of our Fall.

An early snowstorm on September 29 left us punched and reeling from an icy fist. In many parts of the region, snow levels were measured in feet, not inches. I woke to see my three cats staring out the living room picture window, stunned and purring nervously.

Instead of blazing with yellows and oranges, the leaves on the trees carpeting the hills around Butte curled up and died on the branches, turning a sickly dull brown overnight. They looked like pennies left too long in a miser’s pocket—a fitting sight for this mining city which built its wealth and reputation on the copper dredged from its soil, but a sore sight for eyes like mine which always look forward to the color-symphony of autumn. Fall has always been my favorite season. Not this year.

Thankfully, I have some good books at hand to distract me from the dead landscape outside my window.

My annual Halloween list this year consists primarily of three books: Ghost Stories, edited by Lisa Morton and Leslie S. Klinger; The Bazaar of Bad Dreams by Stephen King; and Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier. I’m still floating somewhere in the middle of each of them, but here are some of the highlights of my favorite spooky parts so far....

Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.

We all know the familiar opening line to Du Maurier’s 1938 Gothic novel, etched permanently in most of our minds by Alfred Hitchcock’s film. But there are chilling delights that creep up my spine the further I go in the book and read about how Maxim de Winter’s new wife (who remains unnamed throughout the novel) must contend with the memory and reputation of his first bride, Rebecca, who drowned after taking their boat out alone for an evening sail around the cliffs below Manderley. For instance, there is a scene when the “skull-faced” housekeeper Mrs. Danvers confronts the new Mrs. De Winter in Rebecca’s old bedroom and asks: “Do you think the dead come back and watch the living?” Apparently, Mrs. Danvers’ favorite hobby is keeping Rebecca alive by tormenting the second Mrs. De Winter. She proves that undying devotion to someone is not always a good thing.

Of course, having seen Hitchcock’s film countless times, I know how all this ends, but I’m enjoying my journey through Du Maurier’s novel which is so rich in imagery I often find myself reaching up to wipe away the ocean-dashed salt spray off my face. I’ve been listening to Rebecca on audiobook, narrated by actress Anna Massey sometime before she herself passed away in 2011. Massey expertly captures the, um, spirit of both Hitchcock’s movie and Du Maurier’s original words.

Stephen King has a way of turning ordinary, everyday objects into talismans of horror. Before reading The Bazaar of Bad Dreams, I never would have thought a cookie jar could be haunted. Or that an obituary could lead to a person’s death, rather than reporting it. Oh, and if you ever see a six-year-old boy with orange hair, green eyes, and a beanie, you should know bad things are about to happen: very, very bad things at the hands of a “Bad Little Kid” (one of the creepiest stories in these pages).

I’ve read some of these stories and novellas before—including Blockade Billy and Ur—but a return trip to King’s wicked prose did not disappoint.

As King himself says of the twenty-one tales (and a scatter of poems) gathered here, “The best of them have teeth.” Indeed they do, and they bite like vampires.

I busied myself to think of a story—a story to rival those which had excited us to this task. One which would speak to the mysterious fears of our nature, and awaken thrilling horror—one to make the reader dread to look round, to curdle the blood, and quicken the beatings of the heart. If I did not accomplish these things, my ghost story would be unworthy of its name.

Thus writes Mary Shelley in the introduction to Frankenstein and which is quoted in a footnote to Ghost Stories: Classic Tales of Horror and Suspense. This new anthology edited by Lisa Morton and Leslie S. Klinger is completely worthy of its name and might just be the favorite of this scary trio of books I’m currently reading. Morton and Klinger have assembled a blood-curdling array of stories here whose authors include Charles Dickens (this marks the fourth or fifth time I’ve read “The Signal Man” and I’m still freaked out by what happens at the mouth of that lonely railroad tunnel), Henry James, M. R. James, Edith Wharton, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Sir Walter Scott, Wilkie Collins and Edgar Allan Poe. If that sounds like a dusty, musty line-up to you, then you’d be wrong, dead wrong. Klinger and Morton expertly show how these ghost stories laid the foundation for the likes of Stephen King, Paul Tremblay, and Victor LaValle and serve as guideposts for any writer who wants to learn how to scare the hell out of readers.

Most of these tales also make us look at the genre of ghost stories in a fresh way (weird to say that about “dusty, musty” classics, eh?).

For instance, “Since I Died” by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, first published in 1873, is narrated by a ghost who longs to reach out and touch her lesbian lover but can’t. It is as poignant as it is morbid (and surprisingly ahead of its time). Here’s a passage that is especially sad:

     I hold out my arms.
     You lift your head and look me in the eye.
     If a shudder crept across your figure; if your arms, laid out upon the table , leaped but once above your head; if you named my name; if you held your breath with terror, or sobbed aloud for love, or sprang, or cried—
     But you only lift your head and look me in the eye.
     If I dared step near, or nearer; if it were permitted that I should cross the current of your living breath; if it were willed that I should feel the leap of human blood within your veins; if I should touch your hands, your cheeks, your lips; if I dropped an arm as lightly as a snowflake round your shoulder—

Reading “Since I Died” made me think about my own afterlife to come and how horrible it would be if I couldn’t reach out to hug my wife with my light-as-snowflake arms. It’s enough to bring a cold, dead tear to my eye.

“The Last of Squire Ennismore” by Charlotte Riddell published in 1888 was another favorite story of mine and describes things that go bump in the night as well as anything I’ve seen or heard since I sat in a movie theater watching Poltergeist and Kubrick’s The Shining in the early 1980s. It opens with a fisherman recounting the strange goings-on in the titular squire’s house, which has now fallen into ruin:

There used to be awful noises, as if something was being pitched from the top of the great staircase down in to the hall; and then there would be a sound as if a hundred people were clinking glasses and talking all together at once. And then it seemed as if barrels were rolling in the cellars; and there would be screeches, and howls, and laughing, fit to make your blood run cold.

So there you have it: three ghostly reads for your Halloween list. They’re scary enough to freeze the sap in the trees around my house, even if a September snowstorm hadn’t gotten there first.

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.