It’s a good feeling being in the middle of a book. You look forward to passing time with it, plunging back in at the end of a long day. I don’t use my smart phone like other people do. When I have time to kill, a good book is my godsend.
At the moment, that’s Dave Barry’s hilarious memoir, Class Clown – How I Went 77 Years Without Growing Up, the ideal book when you’re stuck in a waiting room or an airport or the Emergency Room, the only drawback being that laughing out loud in an ER might not be appreciated.
A good read is different from a movie, theater performance or symphony concert. A book is a more intimate companion, functioning as armchair travel or as a time machine, taking you on deep dives or a shallow skim. It can make you feel something you’ve never felt before. You can escape your comfort zone, even as you’re sitting comfortably at home.
A good book can change the way you look at life. It can even change your life. It speeds time up or slows it down — or makes you lose track of time altogether. It relentlessly drives you toward the ending even as you hope it never ends. It can bring to mind the first time you read it, even as it reads like a completely different book the second time around. It opens new worlds, even as you shut off the current world’s oppressiveness. It is an antidote, sanctuary, and coping mechanism all rolled into one good read.
A book is a relationship, a short-term affair. You love ’em and leave ’em. I’m a serial philanderer, always on the lookout for the next leaf of my love. Easy come, easy go, but never forgotten.
There’s almost never a time during the year when I’m “between books.” And I’m always aware I’ve been granted the privilege of entering someone’s mind. A good book feels telepathic.
During my year-end review, I took inventory, stacking my reads on my cedar chest. The pile included six Michael Connolly mysteries — Harry Bosch, Renee Ballard, Mickey Haller (Lincoln Lawyer). There is no more entertaining education on how our system of “justice” works, when it works. And his paperbacks are an easy carry in a coat.
As the weather warmed last spring, I took refuge in Ray Bradbury’s summery summary of growing up in Waukegan (Dandelion Wine), then discovered his much later sequel, Farewell Summer. And just before leaving for Ireland, I came across Green Shadows, White Whale, billed as “A novel of Ray Bradbury’s adventures making ‘Moby Dick’ with John Huston in Ireland.” He proved a literary chameleon, capturing the essence of Ireland in the 1950s, composing it in brogue no less.
A sucker for books on baseball, I read Larry Tye’s Satchel – The Life and Times of an American Legend, to satisfy my longstanding curiosity about Satchel Paige. We rightly revere Jackie Robinson for breaking the Major League color barrier, but Paige, through sheer charisma and a portfolio of unhittable pitches, set the stage with endless barnstorming cross-country, playing against white major-leaguers and drawing large, racially diverse crowds. Satchel desegregated the sport. Jackie made it official.
I also can’t resist books on Lincoln and came across two good ones: Jon Meacham’s And There Was Light and David Donald’s Lincoln Reconsidered. Both extract “Honest Abe” from the idol worship that grew around him and firmly imbeds him within the political and cultural context of his times, making the man, minus the legend, stand out even more.
I enjoyed Percival Everett’s James, a powerful retelling of Twain’s Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of Huck’s travel companion, Jim, the runaway slave. And James McBride’s Heaven and Earth Grocery Store produced a fascinating fable about the interplay between Jewish and Black culture in Depression-era Pottstown, Pennsylvania.
Jesus Wept, journalist Philip Shenon’s raw history of “Seven Popes and the Battle for the Soul of the Catholic Church,” with a heavy focus on the mismanaged pedophilia scandal, should be required reading for every adult Catholic. The title hints, none too subtly, at how the battle went, but he dedicates the book to Pope John XXIII, indicating whose lead the Church needs to follow. I strongly agree.
Primal Intelligence – You Are Smarter Than You Think, by Angus Fletcher, argues that we should upend the lessons of the logic-dominant educational system in order to reawaken our inborn intelligence, using “intuition, imagination, emotion, and commonsense.” He discovered this, surprisingly, by studying how the U.S. military trains special ops personnel. I found it refreshingly unconventional in its thinking.
I haven’t exhausted my list, just my space. I can’t wait to get back to my current read, Walter Isaacson’s Benjamin Franklin – An American Life, a fine way to prepare for our troubled nation’s upcoming 250th birthday. If you read it, you’ll be amazed how one middle-class, 18th-century American printer came to be a highly influential champion for the common good.
Maybe we can all follow Big Ben’s lead.
