So the Facebook quiz/list thing came around to me: Name 15 books that "will always stay with you." (Or something of that nature.)
Of course, you were supposed to name them off the top of your head, but I lost too many brain cells in my 20s to think that clearly at any given moment. And even by going through my bookshelves, I couldn't really come up with 15 that are of a life-changing nature.
So here's my list of 11, in no particular order.
1. "Letters to a Young Poet" / "The Art of War," by Rilke and Sun Tzu: This is the pretentious part of my list. I don't go around quoting them at dinner parties, if that helps, but I've read both a couple of times and they stick with me.
2. "Cash," by Johnny Cash: Yes, I've read at least four biographies of Willie Nelson, but the Man in Black is both mysteriously bad-ass and capable of writing like he's mysteriously bad-ass. I once had a friend tell me he was going to try to seduce a woman by reading her the liner notes of Cash's "Unchained" album. I don't know how that worked out for him, but I wished it was my idea.
3. "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy," by Douglas Adams: I'm not gonna say I write like Adams, but this was the first thing I read where I thought "I want to write like this." I tried to do just that for awhile, but I think by my mid-20s I fell into a style that was my own.
4. "Lonesome Dove," by Larry McMurtry: I don't know if I ever will be as excited about reading fiction as I was back in my high school days, but this novel brought me back for at least as long as it took me to read the series.
6. "Death in the Long Grass," Peter Hathaway Capstick: I haven't read this in 20 years. I loaned it to a friend about that long ago, and never saw it again. But I can remember the passage where he talks about an elephant's willingness to "stomp you into guava jelly" pretty damn clearly.
7. "The Jungle," by Upton Sinclair: Well, not really. But I just wanted to say, one more time, "Poor little Stanislavos, got drunk on alcoholic backwash and was eaten alive by giant rats." Seriously, I read a lot of the classics in my first 20 years, but few really made a personal impact on me.
8. "Into Thin Air," by Jon Krakauer: This made me realize A) I should not climb mountains. B) I love to read about climbing mountains. I love most travel writing (Bill Bryson comes to mind), but if it's death at 24,000 feet, I'm totally reading it.
9. "Uncle Shelby's ABZs," by Shel Silverstein: Seriously, Silverstein wrote some of the best children's books of all time. Then he was a country musician and songwriter. And a cartoonist for Playboy. And then he comes out with this fantastic faux-children's book. Dude was a renaissance man.
10. "The Improbable Rise of Redneck Rock," by Jan Reid: The first edition, of course. My first edition is dog-eared and worn, splattered with Lone Star beer and Stubb's barbecue sauce. My second edition has been read once. Simply put, it's the bible of Texas music.
11. "Desert Solitaire," by Edward Abby: Cactus Ed is (was) sort of like the James McMurtry of environment/American West literature. No, I don't mean Larry McMurtry. I mean his son. The ornery and fiercely private and prickly songwriter. You could read and appreciate all you want, but if you were to try to get at the root of his genius (back when he was still alive), you were liable to pull back a bloody stump.
Recent Comments