Top Ten Favorite Books
As a follow up to my Top Ten Films list, this is a list of my all-time favorite books (there will be another list exclusively for music biographies later). This list is a little more firm and would change less day-to-day than my film list would.
Again, in no particular order:
The Big Sky - A.B. Guthrie
I grew up in Indiana, but I have spent twenty years now in the West. I’ve been to the remotest places in the Lower 48, either sleeping in a tent, or just a bivvy. I’ve slept under the stars in almost every state west of the Mississippi, barring North Dakota and Texas. I’ve always been a student of American history, but in the last ten years I’ve been focused on the Early Republic, that period between the Revolution and the Civil War. The era of Western Expansion and Manifest Destiny. Guthrie, born in Bedford, Indiana, writes this story, the first of a trilogy that follows with The Way West and These Thousand Hills, in a way that puts me in the shoes of those men and women who risked everything, including their lives, to come west for whatever reason they thought was worth it. Incredibly thought provoking and historically accurate.
Jim Bridger - Stanley Vestal
So much has been written about Bridger and most of it has been myth. There is absolutely no evidence that the events of The Revenant are even remotely true, at least in regard to Bridger. I am about to begin another biography of Bridger that came out a few years ago and we’ll see if anything new has come to light since 1970, but Vestal’s book sticks as close to primary sources as possible at the time and puts things into historical context.
Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America - Jim Webb
Former Secretary of the Navy, United States Senator and Democratic Presidential Nominee Jim Webb does an incredible job of telling the history of our people, from pushing back Roman invaders to country music. We don’t always get the credit, we certainly don’t always win, but the influence is undeniable.
L.A. Confidential - James Ellroy
Another book that’s a part of a series, the L.A. Quartet (The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, L.A. Confidential & White Jazz), I read this book for the first time shortly after moving to Los Angeles in 2002. This book and the screenplay of Chinatown eventually led to a lifelong love of noir. The Los Angeles I love, the one I lived in for ten years, if only in my mind, was the Los Angeles that existed for Ellroy. I drank at Boardner’s and the Frolic Room. I ate at the Formosa and Musso & Frank’s. I drove down those east-west thoroughfares co-existing in the 21st century and the mid-20th centuries. I saw what used to be as clearly as I saw the eventual result of its demise.
The Road - Cormac McCarthy
I have read this book twice, though not since becoming a father. I think about reading it again every so often, but I’m not sure if I’m capable. “Horrible Things” is a descendant of this book, because while I write dark, there is no place like the place that exists where the power of love meets the power of evil head on. The cold reality of the man, the boy and the woman in this not-so-unrealistic dystopian landscape, is one I don’t think most people know how close they are to at any given moment of their lives.
Desolation Angels - Jack Kerouac
While less popular than his other works, I believe it paints the most accurate picture of the author. Part One requires some patience as he handles desolation, both in solitude and in the world. He muses about his life, his faith, his family and what could have been, amongst other things. He rarely stopped and slowed down like this and I wonder what would’ve happened if he’d done more of this. Part Two resumes his travels, though this time it’s not just road trips across the United States but includes trips to Europe and Africa as well. An excellent look at both sides of a person trying to find the balance in between and never really able to do it.
Complete Short Stories - Flannery O’Connor
As a songwriter, I love short stories. The challenge of telling a story in a relatively short space that is, when done right, life changing, is what I work for. She was capable of doing so much within the span of a few pages it really is astounding. I’ve read almost everything she has ever written, but I will read my favorite stories over and over again. If you’d like an introduction to these stories via film, Wildcat is a movie I’d recommend. Done by Ethan and Maya Hawke, it weaves her stories in and out of the story of her life with all the vignettes cast with the same actors as the main storyline.
Child of God - Cormac McCarthy
The subject matter of this book illuminates the boundaries of most people’s empathy, which is one of the points of the story. I love McCarthy’s earlier Appalachian work as much as I love his later Western work and he was never one to shy away from the darkest parts of the human experience. Much like in real life, there are no good guys in this story, only varying degrees of bad guys.
Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark - Alvin Schwartz
If you’re Gen X, this collection of folk tales and urban legends will not be new to you. It was one of the defining artistic influences of our childhood. Stephen Gammell’s illustrations were frightening and incredible. The 2011 version, no offence to the artist, but the attempt to make it less scary just made it lame. Nowadays we see these types of stories as just fun, but for most of human history, we used these stories to teach our children things in order to protect them. While I’m not advocating that fear should be our primary method of teaching kids, the attempt at alleviating fear and discomfort from our kids’ lives has proven to create many fragile and weak adults. A little bit of fear can go a long way, but a little bit of fear, I believe, is necessary.
Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger
This is the book that made me fall in love with literature. I was always a reader, but when I found this book in the 8th grade, it changed how I viewed the written word. There’s not much I can say that hasn’t been said about this book a thousand times before, but seeing the recent documentary, and knowing this book was started while he was serving on the Western Front in World War II, it just makes his artistry that much more real to me. He was an odd dude for sure, but sometimes it’s the odd ones, standing on the outside, that see what’s really going on a lot more clearly than those who are in the middle of things.
The Bible*
This isn’t in the Top Ten just because it’s too obvious. Everything flows from this source. Human nature, evil, redemption, poetry, prose, biography, it has everything you could ever want, both in life and in art. A lifetime of devotion only scratches the surface at understanding it, but a serious study of it can change everything.