Last year I was re-reading some favorite books, including Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities, always, for me, one of the most durable of the classics. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times . . . Such a fine setup for a novel of upheaval and social injustice, a warning by Dickens against the flaws in European society. Somehow, maybe because I once read them in consecutive weeks, it is a book associated in my mind with Walker Percy’s Love in the Ruins, in which the protagonist, Dr. Thomas More, a psychiatrist and mental patient in the same institution, is contemplating the possibility of anarchy.
Now in these dread latter days of the old violent beloved U.S.A. and of the Christ-forgetting Christ-haunted death-dealing Western world I came to myself in a grove of young pines and the question came to me: has it happened at last?
Two more hours should tell the story. One way or the other. Either I am right and a catastrophe will occur, or it won’t and I’m crazy. In either case the outlook is not so good.
Once again, not a bad beginning for a book.
I was subsequently talking about these things—favorite books and why they move us—with my friend, Jay Lamar, director of the Caroline Marshall Draughon Center for the Arts and Humanities at Auburn University. Jay is, and has been for years, one of the most important figures in the Alabama literary scene, a writer and editor who also plays a catalytic role. For some years now, through her programming at the center, she has brought writers and readers together in college classrooms, community centers, libraries, and other venues to talk about the things that matter to us all.
In one of my conversations with Jay, I mentioned that I had always wanted to write a book about books, those that had brought me the greatest delight through the years. I wanted to offer a reader’s tribute, but more than that, a kind of reader’s memoir, a recounting of exactly why and when these volumes had mattered. I think I may have mentioned The Plague by Albert Camus, a book that I found to be curiously inspiring, given the dismal subject matter. For the narrator and central character, Dr. Bernard Rieux, there is meaning on the other side of suffering, and when I read the book as a college freshman I remember clinging to that glimmer of hope.
I’m sure that I also mentioned William Faulkner, not a writer that I always enjoyed, but one who provided the very definition of art—the human heart in conflict with itself—and a reason to consider why reading mattered. Jay encouraged me to go ahead with the book, while she and other members of her staff developed programming to go along with it. In the pages that follow are eleven essays featuring thirty-odd books, both fiction and non, that have had a major impact on my life. This list (it was supposed to be a Top 25, but it grew) is not my estimate of the thirty best books ever written, but simply those that have mattered most to me.
Some conspicuous names are missing. There is no Shakespeare, no Dostoevsky, no Hemingway or Thomas Mann, or for that matter, no Barbara Kingsolver. It is also true that some of these selections are personal indeed. I doubt if most such lists would include Larry L. King’s The Old Man and Lesser Mortals, or Jacobo Timerman’s The Longest War, or Lillian Smith’s Killers of the Dream, as beautifully written as these books are. And most fans of David Halberstam would be more likely to choose The Best and the Brightest over The Unfinished Odyssey of Robert Kennedy. But there are some books that I suspect would make a lot of lists: To Kill a Mockingbird, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, perhaps The Grapes of Wrath or All the King’s Men—none of these are especially original selections, but they come from the heart.
My hope is that those who read this book, or participate in the programming that is scheduled to follow (either regional or national, under the auspices of the Caroline Marshall Draughon Center for the Arts and Humanities) will be moved not to adopt these selections but rather to create an equally personal list. I have to say that in more than forty years as a writer, I’ve never been involved in a more satisfying project, or one more fun, and I’m happy now to let it go forth, hoping, expecting, that those of you who thumb through the pages will be moved to contagious ruminations of your own.