A Bookshelf of Inspiration

Reading has been a major inspiration for me throughout my life. Not only an inspiration for my own writing, but for life in general, for whatever philosophy I claim, for my career in academia, for the way I try to treat others. It would require many blog posts to list all the books and stories that have influenced me, but I can show you pictures of those works that have stuck with me the longest and which I continue to this day to pick up periodically and peruse.

First up are three books that reflect both my love of nature and of beautiful writing. All of these are nonfiction. The Snow Leopard, by Peter Matthiessen is my favorite work of all time.  I have multiple copies, and keep one at home and one at school. Arctic Dreams by Barry Lopez is hallucinogenically beautiful. And Walden, by Thoreau! Nuff said.

Next, I didn’t discover Fitzgerald’s translation of Homer until college but when I did, I fell in love and memorized long sections of it. Some of those I still recall.  I didn’t discover The King in Yellow by Robert Chambers until grad school, but when I started writing Chambers’ work was right there with me, particularly a section of flash pieces called “The Prophet’s Paradise,” sections of which I also memorized.

Inspiration comes for me from every kind of work and every type of writer. The opening to Jitterbug Perfume is just about the most perfect piece of writing I’ve ever seen. House Made of Dawn by N. Scott Momaday beings with another of those hallucinatory passages that fires my imagination. And Teot’s War by Heather Gladney is a gorgeously written fantasy novel.

Ernest Hemingway is the only writer with two books on my inspiration shelf. The Short Stories contains some absolute jewels of Hemingway’s work, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” “The Short Happy Life of Francis MaComber,” among them. But the piece simply headed by “Chapter V” on page 127 is a thing of beauty.  A Moveable Feast is not on my shelf because of particularly beautiful writing, but because it contains the best advice on writing and on being a writer that I’ve ever read.

Finally, we have two very different types of works. Charles Darwin’s “The Origin of the Species” is one of the best written scientific arguments ever produced, and it certainly helped inspire in me an interest in science and reason. The other book here, which you can’t see the title on, is a near polar opposite to Darwin. It is the Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas. I thought I disliked poetry until I read this book late in college. This made me realize that I wanted a sense of poetry to be at the heart of everything I did.

So tell me, what books have inspired you?

Beautiful sentences

I saw a post the other day on “50 of the most beautiful sentences in literature.” 

I liked many of these but this is a long way from any list I’d put together. For example, one choice on the list was: “She was lost in her longing to understand.” From Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s, Love in the Time of Cholera. The problem with this, for me, is that it’s obvious. There’s nothing profound. It seems almost cliché.

Another weak one, to me, was: “Once upon a time there was a boy who loved a girl, and her laughter was a question he wanted to spend his whole life answering.” From Nicole Krauss, The History of Love. This seems maudlin to me, and cliché. I don’t like it at all.

On the other hand, some that I did like were: “In our village, folks say God crumbles up the old moon into stars.” From Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. This is lovely. It resonates to me. It evokes a sense of history and place. It wouldn’t make my list of 50 favorites but it’s good.

I also liked “Isn’t it pretty to think so, by Ernest Hemingway, from The Sun Also Rises. But my favorite on this list was: “Let the Wild Rumpus Start,” By Maurice Sendak from Where the Wild Things Are. This was Josh’s favorite book when he was a kid and I loved, loved, loved reading it to him. This one would certainly make my list.

So what would be some of my other personal favorites? Well, many of them would come from Peter Matthiessen’s The Snow Leopard, which is my favorite book of all time. Here are a few:

“Figures dark beneath their loads pass down the far bank of the river, rendered immortal by the streak of sunset upon their shoulders.” 

“We have outsmarted ourselves, like greedy monkeys, and now we are full of dread.” 

“Left alone, I am overtaken by the northern void—no wind, no cloud, no track, no bird, only the crystal crescents between peaks, the ringing monuments of rock that, freed from the talons of ice and snow, thrust an implacable being into the blue.”

“In the gaunt, brown face in the mirror—unseen since late September—the blue eyes in a monkish skull seem eerily clear, but this is the face of a man I do not know.” 

“At dusk, white egrets flapped across the sunken clouds, now black with rain; on earth, the dark had come.”

“In the early light, the rock shadows on the snow are sharp; in the tension between light and dark is the power of the universe.”

“The mountains have no ‘meaning,’ they are meaning; the mountains are.”

“My foot slips on a narrow ledge; in that split second, as needles of fear pierce heart and temples, eternity intersects with present time.”

“In his first summers, forsaking all his toys, my son would stand rapt for nearly an hour in his sandbox in the orchard, as doves and redwings came and went on the warm wind, the leaves dancing, the clouds flying…”

Books that have Stayed with Me, Part 3

Here's the last installment of Books that have Stayed with Me:

9. Never Cry Wolf, by Farley Mowat. I was assigned to read this book in my college biology class and I still remember how irritated I was at the assignment. I read constantly, and always had a TBR pile ready to go. I didn’t want to have to read what someone else thought was good for me. I remember griping and growling about it until I set down with the book and started. Within moments I was laughing uproariously and totally engrossed. I later picked up and read almost everything Mowat has written. This particular tale is about Mowat’s study of Wolves in Canada, but it is nowhere near as dry as that description suggests.

10. The Snow Leopard, by Peter Matthiessen. Never Cry Wolf got me into reading stories of nature and this is another such tale. But it’s also much more. It’s the story of Matthiessen’s journey into the Himalayas to find the elusive Snow Leopard, but it’s also a spiritual journey and offers great insights into the human condition.  It also has some of the most incredible writing I’ve ever seen. When I want beautiful prose that resonates through me, I often go to this book.

11. Giovanni’s Room, by James Baldwin. This is also generally considered a classic and had I read it as a youngster I would probably not have liked it. However, since it deals with gay characters I would never have found this book in any high school curriculum in Arkansas in those days. I read the book in my thirties, after having already read and enjoyed a number of other Baldwin books such as The Fire Next Time and Go Tell it on the Mountain. The story is about an American Gay man living in Paris and about his relationship with Giovanni, an Italian fellow. I didn’t continue reading this for the adventure. It’s a character study and has great humanity.  It’s also impressive to me that Baldwin, an urban African American man, could write so well about white characters in France. Of course, Baldwin was gay and had lived in France for many years, but still I found this work well worth my study as a writer.

12. House Made of Dawn, by N. Scott Momaday. This book opens with gorgeous prose and is a very fine character study as well. I still pick it up from time to time for the prose. It was also memorable to me as an introduction to a Native American character with depth and a kind of humanity that I did not get from most of the reading of western genre fiction earlier in my life.

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My Trouble With Dialogue

I've been listening to some of the old "Shadow" pulps on my Kindle while I commute lately. They're interesting, although there's a lot of sameness about them. One thing did occur to me today on my trip in.

The Shadow stories are 'heavily' dialogue driven, probably because of their close relationship with the old radio serial format. As a result, they work pretty well as audio works. But one thing I've noticed is that there is hardly any "music" to the stories at all. Except for the rare descriptions of "The Shadow," the sentences and paragraphs fall leaden on the ears.

I believe it's largely the dialogue that is to blame, and that this is probably why I typically don't read books that begin with dialogue or are heavy with dialogue. Descriptive prose, or action-driven prose, can develop a rhythm, a kind of poetry in prose form.

"All morning the moon hangs frozen on the sky, and the wind-bell rings unheard on the hard east wind." (Matthiessen)

Dialogue seldom obtains even a fraction of this kind of poetry, and then only in the hands of true masters. And I'm realizing, from listening to the "Shadow" stories, that I need the rhythm. I need beautiful, poetic prose and imagery to fully lose myself in a story.

I understand that dialogue is a necessary evil. I try to write it as well as I can. But it'll always be a weak sister to me. Maybe I really am a poet at heart. Some form of a poet anyway.
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