MY TEN FAVORITE BOOKS by Seamus O'Connor
Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
Set in the background of the French Revolution, this is a tale of love and unrequited love. Reading this as a ten-year-old boy, I was mesmerized by the cast of colorful characters: Jerry Cruncher, porter and part time “resurrection” man; the Manettes and Charles Darney; Madame Defarge and her knitting; Marquis St. Evremonde and many more. But most appealing to the romantic in me was Sydney Carton, the brilliant but bedeviled barrister who makes the ultimate sacrifice for love. “’Tis a far, far better thing I do…” I love it still.
Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh
The story is told as the nostalgic recollections of Charles Ryder – now an army captain in World War II – of his undergraduate days in Oxford and the golden youth and the loves he shared with the aristocratic Marchmain family of Brideshead Castle. What appealed to me particularly was the agnostic Ryder’s fascination and bewilderment at the deep – even irrational – attachment each of the Marchmains retained to Catholicism even as their aristocratic lives disintegrated.
Never Go Back by Lee Child [or any of the Jack Reacher novels]
This is a good novel to start with – as a Jack Reacher sampler. Reacher is a former army major who has elected a way-of-life that avoids attachment but inevitably leads him from one troublesome situation to another. It appeals to my latent desire to hit the open road with only the clothes on my back. Lacking the nerve to do this, I turn to Jack Reacher, my avatar. The novels are satisfying in the way classic Western movies were satisfying – a guaranteed comeuppance in the last reel.
Rum Punch by Elmore Leonard
One of Leonard’s best and most intricately plotted novels. It has all the snappy dialog we expect from him and a cast of colorful characters. [It was made into a movie, Jackie Brown, by Tarantino]. The central character is an aging flight attendant reduced to working for a third-rate airline while supplementing her income by smuggling. In the course of the story she has occasion to use an over-the-hill ex-cop bail bondsman. The two find they are not too old to be attracted to each other as they devise a clever scheme to provide her with a retirement income. Why do I like it? There is a touch of larceny in all of us, they say.
A Book of Hours by Rainer Maria Rilke
[Translated from the German by Anita Barrows & Joanna Macy]
A soul’s longing and searching for its God. Reflections on life, on “The Darkness” from which all life comes, and on the many hints of the imminence of the Mystery:
“Don’t you sense me ready to break into being at your touch? My murmurings surround you like shadowy wings. Can’t you see me standing before you cloaked in stillness? Hasn’t my longing ripened in you from the beginning as fruit ripens on the branch?
A Field Guide to Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit
This book hooked me with a question posed originally by the mythical Meno: “How will you go about finding that thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you?”
For someone fascinated by transformational paths – geographic, spiritual, or intellectual – that was an irresistible invitation. Tolerating the anxiety of being lost; of being out beyond what one’s headlights illuminate, requires courage and a sort of humility I was not trained in.
Sapiens – A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari
Interesting perspective on our place in the planet and in its history. I was fascinated by his thesis that our strain of hominid owes its success and dominance largely to its capacity for fiction.
From its fictions and speculation came our concept of states, of such values as patriotism and human rights, of currency, and even of theologies. These agreed-upon fictions – which are nowhere evidenced in nature – became the matrices that knit us together and enabled people, who do not know each other personally, to work together for commerce, defense, justice, consolation and worship.
Nobody’s Fool by Richard Russo
A simple story beautifully told of a man named Sully; a man who never realized his potential who lives in a New England town that has itself failed to live up to earlier expectations. Though a failure by many standards, Sully has a life rich in friendships and love. Under his compassionate microscope Russo reveals fully realized characters; their aspirations and disappointments, their loves and losses, guilts and resentments. Great writing makes this addictive reading.
Nature by Ralph Waldo Emerson [An Essay]
As a young man this essay did more for my theological education than had four years of divinity studies.
“Crossing a bare common, in snow puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky… I have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration. I am glad to the brink of fear.”
“Standing on the bare ground… all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God.”
Christine Falls by Benjamin Black [pseudonym of John Banville – Irish novelist]
This the first of his seven novel featuring Quirke, a brilliant but conflicted pathologist in Dublin of the 1950. With his jaundiced view of human nature and the Catholic church, he helps an equally jaded detective solve a series of murders. Written in the fluid style of a master craftsman (winner of the Man-Booker prize) and set in the prosperous southeast quadrant of Dublin, the Quirke novels vividly capture the hypocrisy and affectations of the city’s upper crust and the brooding shadow of His Grace, John Charles McQuaid, Archbishop of Dublin. Quirke, well worth sampling – you may become addicted.
