We’ve been thinking a lot about this lately, one of the inevitable traps of aging, I guess.  But it’s harmless, and feels good; self-indulgent, but stimulating.

I’ve always been a reader, the first step in being a writer.  Growing up, our house was full of books, and music.  More on music in another post.  My father was a great reader, and introduced me, by the proximity of the books, to his favorite authors.  It should be no surprise that they were the literary hero of his generation, Faulkner, Steinbeck, and Hemingway.  He read The Old Man and the Sea aloud to us when it appeared in serialization in Life Magazine, so there you go.  That one counts as probably the finest piece of fiction I have ever read, but it is a novella, or better, a long short story, so it doesn’t make this list.  I got to all of them in time, but my first immersion in reading was through books given to me, or acquired by me, from a great-uncle, my grandmother’s sister’s husband, a pipe-smoking, extraordinarily interesting man, who had a massive collection of early twentieth-century novels.  They were, for the most part, books written for boys, and they opened the door.  First up was a series of books by one G.A. Henty, (1832-1902), a prolific British writer, who wrote historical adventure novels.  Under Drake’s Flag was my first.  Then came several Horatio Alger books, rags to riches stories of plucky lads who mad it by perseverance and pluck.  I also loved a series by Archibald Lee Fletcher, about heroic boy scouts, written in the early years of the twentieth century. Boy Scouts in the Everglades, or The Island in Lost Channel was my favorite.

From age 12 to about 16, when the demands of school somewhat curtailed my independent reading, I devoured books.  I would take a bus to the library by myself to check them out.  Between the classics, War and Peace, Anna Karenina, A Tale of Two Cities, Moby Dick, and others, I made discoveries of my own which more directly satisfied my boyish tastes.  My first independent discovery was a series by Clair Bee, a successful college basketball coach, about a young gifted athlete named Chip Hilton.  Chip was a three sport star in high school, who decided it better to work his way through State college by working in a drugstore than take a scholarship.  His exploits on the gridiron, basketball court, and baseball diamond, were infused with both heroism and humility.  He made me want to be a quarterback, which I did, if briefly.  And then, in my mid-teens, before the world became aware through Sean Connery and the movies, I found Ian Fleming.  I got hooked on James Bond, and the original On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, remains one of the greatest spy thrillers of all time for me.

Many more great books were interspersed and followed, but here are my top five.  Remember, if you will, that any listing like this relies on a wholly subjective experience, contingent upon a host of irrational feelings.

At number five we have a tie.  I know, I can’t do that, but they are so closely related I beg indulgence.  They are both impressive tomes, and I still refer to them for inspiration and comfort.  They are: The Oxford Book of English Verse, and The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry.  Anyone who has written verse in the English language, from Anonymous to Leonard Cohen, are included.  All the heavies; Donne, Shakespeare, Byron, Wordsworth, Keats, Yeats, Stevie Smith, (“Not Waving, but Drowning”); you name it. Should be a go-to standard on any bookshelf.

Number four is a memoir; the memoir, as far as I am concerned.  A Movable Feast, Hemingway’s posthumously published account of his Paris years, is both a manual on how to write, and the most controlled, poignant and exquisite use of language to evoke a very focused depiction of love for people and place, romantic but sparsely rendered.

Which segues to number three, The Sun Also Rises, Hemingway’s first novel, written during the Paris years, which, in the many years since its publication, has stimulated the ridiculous proclivity for (mostly men) to prove their manhood by running with the bulls. Despite that, it is an extraordinary novel, with perhaps the absolute best last line in literature, “Isn’t it pretty to think so.”  Geeze!

Number two was difficult.  There are so many.  I had to dig deep into what moved me, not necessarily what I knew to be great story-telling.  That elevated All the King’s Men, by Robert Penn Warren, (beating out The Light in August, by Faulkner.)  I am, quite naturally, a sucker for southern fiction, and Penn Warren’s story of the rise and fall of a southern politician, told with such grace and accuracy, along with his spot-on telling of life down on the Gulf coast, moved me in a way no other book has.  It demonstrated a way to write that both dug the depths of emotion, and sold with great authority, a moral imperative.

OK, the novel that shook me the most was One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.  How to explain.  The breadth; the scope; the narrative risk.  The standard for magical realism.  I admit to a profound influence that greatly influenced my own writing for many years.  This book, and the Marquez short stories, “An Old Man With Enormous Wings,” and others,  and the exquisite novel Love in the Time of Cholera, solidified Marquez, in my thinking, as one of the greatest of all time.  But One Hundred Years of Solitude, moved literature into a wholly new space.  Everything pointed to it, and pretty much everything after, in an experimental sense anyway, imitation.

Honorable mention:  Rabbit Boss, by Thomas Sanchez. Seek it out.  A voluminous account of the Washo indians.  What an extraordinary read.  And Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, by Robert Persig.  It’ll set you free.

These are books that have meant a lot to me, as a life-long reader.  I highly recommend them, and reading everything.