THE OPEN ROAD

peace, love, happiness & understanding

 

 

March 10, 2022

 

Y’know how when you read a really good book, you want all your friends to read it? That’s the idea here.

 

I asked some friends (at the last minute) to write about some of their favorite books—books they read recently, or a long time ago, books that changed the way they see or experience or understand the world, books that they’ve read many times: their favorite books!

 

This can be a conversation between people outside and inside prison walls. Our next issue (March 24th) will feature some of the favorite books of friends who are “on the inside.” If you are an Insider, please write to me about some of your favorite books. And if you would like to read any of the books that are talked about here, let me know which books you’d like to read, and we should be able to send them to you.

 

Kim was the first to reply to my email. He wrote:

 

When I was seven years old, on a second-grade field trip to a local church, I stole a hand-sized New Testament someone had left on the pew where I sat in the back. The cover was black, pretend leather. I liked the feel of it in my fingers. The owner’s name was written on pale blue paper on the inside cover. I tore off the blue paper bit by bit until the book was mine. My own book. It fit in my pocket. I couldn’t read it yet, but I knew it was important. I knew my grandmother would love it. Her minister husband had died, but she still prayed sometimes. What I didn’t know was how to share it with anyone, show it to anyone. It had to be my secret until I was old enough to know what was inside.

 

—Kim Stafford

*

 

Hey Johnny;

 

Fun!

Here is my top 10. What’s yours?

 

10) Between the World and Me by Ta-nehisi Coates 

9) Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol 

8) The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion

7) Spring by Ali Smith

6) The Lonely City by Olivia Laing

5) No one belongs here more than you by Miranda July

4) Townie by Andre Dubus III

3) Zone One by Colson Whitehead 

2) The Powerbroker by Robert Caro 

1) Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishigurio

 

—Pat (The Dad) Walsh

*

 

A wonderful, thrillingly great book that is relatively under-read is INDEPENDENT PEOPLE by Haldor Laxness of Iceland. It weaves the development of Icelandic society into a story of hate and love between a daughter and a father. It is an intimate epic, good enough to hurt your heart, and then to heal it, but not without leaving a scar.

 

—Ken Margolis

*

 

Oh, so many books. How can I even choose? But of course I will, and then regret what has been left out. But such is life.

 

Current faves:

 

1. Circe by Madeline Miller

I just finished Circe, a retelling of the Greek goddess, mostly known as someone who captured and loved Ulysses on his way home. This new story of her life is monumental, mythic and utterly real. Years and aeons merge into one another, the stories are told from the women’s point of view, sidelined characters are given full lives and we find ourselves alive in a world of magic and beauty. I can’t even begin to say how much I loved it. When I finished Circe it wasn’t even possible to start a new book…how could I step out of this world of enchantment? Buy it, borrow it, read it–you too can participate in this meditation on the meaning of mortality and divinity.

 

 2. All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr 

All the Light We Cannot See creates a world deeply immersed in the one we live in and yet somehow it expands and deepens our knowledge of another world. It is the story of two children, one from Paris and one from Germany, during WWII. The quiet details in their interwoven stories lead into a world where people are haunted, as are we, by both love and violence. Long after finishing the book these characters will live with you, tell you stories, unveil secrets.

 

 3. An American Sunrise; Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings–both by Joy Harjo

Harjo is the current Poet Laureate of the United States, the first Native American woman to hold that position. Her wild, direct, illusive poems speak from another world to us, and they continue to stand firmly on the ground of the country’s original inhabitants. And yet she is utterly modern and relevant, creating poems you only wish you could write. 

 

4. New and Collected Poems by Czeslaw Milosz

Milosz won the Nobel Prize for Literature for his enormous and profound body of work. From a childhood in rural Lithuania through Nazi occupation, World War II, Soviet rule, and eventual exile and career as a professor in California, Milosz saw himself as a conduit for all the silenced voices he knew, and he recreated world upon world, all the time pondering the reasons behind what he experienced. Monumental and touching, this is a book you can never finish.

 

—xxoxo Deb Buchanan

*

 

Pretty short notice! So if I don’t have synopses and astute commentary on any or all of them, it’s because of…pretty short notice!

 

The numbering is not in any particular order of best to last.

 

1. Go, Went, Gone by Jenny Erpenbeck.  The novel tells the tale of Richard, a retired classics professor who lives in Berlin. His wife has died, and he lives a routine existence until one day he spies some African refugees staging a hunger strike in Alexanderplatz. Curiosity turns into compassion and an inner transformation, as he visits their shelter, interviews them, and becomes embroiled in their harrowing fates. Go, Went, Gone is a scathing indictment of Western policy toward the European refugee crisis, but also a touching portrait of a man who finds he has more in common with the Africans than he realizes.

 

2. Becoming Duchess Goldblatt by Anonymous is a nonfiction, ongoing story of a person who has had relative success in a career but has a difficult family past, including a mentally ill older brother and a father who cannot disavow his son, no matter how he hurts other members of the family. The protagonist also experiences a wrenching divorce with child issues, which lead her/him to seek out community on Twitter. Let’s call her ‘she,’ although that is never clarified. She finds that her difficult personal life translates unwittingly into a compassionate Twitter figure, and she develops a following who look to her for solace and advice. Her gentleness, wit, and compassion for others draws people from all over, including Lyle Lovett. This is all true!  MUST READ!!!

 

3.  The True American by Anand Giridharadas  (nonfiction).  Days after 9/11, an avowed “American terrorist” named Mark Stroman, seeking revenge, walks into a Dallas mini-mart and shoots Raisuddin Bhuiyan, a Bangladeshi immigrant, maiming and nearly killing him. Ten years after the shooting, Bhuiyan wages a campaign against the State of Texas to have his attacker spared from the death penalty. The True American is a rich, colorful, profoundly moving exploration of the American dream in its many dimensions. 

 

4.  Resurrection by Leo Tolstoy novel    A Russian nobleman takes advantage of a young woman, gets her pregnant and then deserts her. He forgets about her until years later when he discovers that she is in court for stealing, and she has become a vagrant and wastrel of a figure. He has a change of heart, mind and soul, and determines to save her by devoting his life to that purpose. His persistence and her resistance take them into uncharted waters. 

 

5.  Tortilla Curtain by T. C. Boyle.  An upper middle class Southern California couple encounters a Mexican undocumented man living in the arroyos near their gated house. The story deals with the husband’s run ins with the Mexican while on his (the husband’s) ‘nature walks.’  At first aghast and  uncomfortable, then curious, then understanding, and finally compassionate and a life saver, the husband finds his world changed.

 

6.  A Gentleman in Moscow  by Amor Towles  (fiction)

 

7.  Boys in the Boat by Daniel James Brown  (nonfiction)

 

8.  The Botany of Desire by Michael Pollan  (nonfiction)

 

9.  Nicholas and Alexandra, Peter the Great, Catherine the Great all by Robert Massie.  The most readable and fascinating history writing, from one who has always had difficulty reading history.

   

—Jude Russell

*

 

Here are five books that had high impact on me,

 

The Sacred Pipe, Black Elk—One of the first books that showed me how some people live a totally spiritual life without a distinct religion.

 

The Naked Ape by Desmond Morris—This was the first book that helped me understand our animal origins.

 

Lao Tzu—Still a faithful companion, one that doesn’t waste words but covers Life pretty completely.

 

On The Road, by Jack Kerouac—This put into words what a lot of us were starting to sense about life in modern America.

 

Ishmael, by Daniel Quinn—A broad perspective on how our human history has developed over the last few millennia, forging delusions of separateness and mastery and privilege in us.           

 

This brief list perforce needs to omit Mad magazine, the great Russian novelists, and many other wonderful writers like Shakespeare and Tolkien who have influenced or entertained me over the years, but these five are books I find myself still thinking about years after reading them.

 

love and peace,     

 

—Bill Faricy

*

 

Great question on books.  I decided to list those that, after several book purges, are still on my shelves and ones that I come back to over and over:  

 

Trickster Makes This World   Lewis Hyde

Memories, Dreams, Reflections   Carl Jung

The Water of Life   Michael Meade

Irish Fairy Tales  James Stephens

Coyote Was Going There   Jarold Ramsey

The Red Haired Girl from the Bog   Patricia Monaghan

Good Poems    Edited by Garrison Keillor

The Woman Warrior  Maxine Hong Kingston

Go Down Moses      William Faulkner

Irish Folk Tales   Edited by Henry Glassie

Returning to Earth    Jim Harrison

The Nutmeg’s Curse  Amitav Ghosh (I just read but it,  but it will be on my shelves a long time.)

 

Thanks for doing this, Johnny.  

 

—Will Hornyak

*

 

The two books that I have read/listened to on Audible are both by Isabel Wilkerson: The Warmth of Other Suns, which travels with the Great Migration from the South and highlights/follows the lives of three people who made the migration. While I intellectually had an understanding of Jim Crow, Wilkerson provided an emotional understanding in a very moving way. I also valued her later book Caste, which looks at how caste systems provide a powerful framework for understanding race and other social issues. This work is less personal than the earlier book but the tandem is quite compelling.

 

Cheers,

 

—Jeffrey Sher

*

 

I’ve recommended Of Water and the Spirit by Malidoma Somé to lots of my friends. When we think about different cultures, we have the idea that they do things a little differently than we do, they speak different languages, and they have different beliefs. But Malidoma’s Somé’s book gave me the feeling that he lives in an entirely different world than I do. He has seen things that I’ve never seen, and never will see. Even if I went to his village, I couldn’t see them. Each one of us lives in our own world—the world as we imagine it, as we describe it and explain it to ourselves. His book, more than any other book I know, shows me that there is not just one “reality”—there are as many realities as there are human beings. (And that doesn’t take into account the realities of moles, goldfinches, dogs, lizards, elephants, gnats, whales, et cetera.) A different culture is a different way of being in the world.

 

Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself” is a poem, not a book. Although it’s long for a poem (56 pages in my Signet edition of Leaves of Grass), I’ve memorized most of it. It changed my life, changed the way I see the world, changed the way I imagine who I am. It is, I think, the strongest expression in the world’s literature of the mystic’s feeling of being one with everything. Because it’s a poem, and not a lecture or an essay, it has the power to alter our sensibilities. It has made me a more joyful person, made me more free, given me the feeling of limitless love for everyone and every thing. The poem is a corrective to the ascetic and life-denying aspects of much religious literature. What saint or yogi would say?:

 

“I believe in the flesh and the appetites,

Seeing, hearing, feeling, are miracles, and each part and tag of me is a miracle.”

 

But he doesn’t stop there. He goes on to say:

 

“Divine am I inside and out, and I make holy whatever I touch or am touch’d from,

The scent of these arm-pits aroma finer than prayer,

This head more than churches, bibles, and all the creeds.”

 

Walt abolishes dualities, like body and soul, that are characteristic not just of most spirituality, but of thought and language. It is a giant YES! to Life. And to Death. And everything in between.

 

My two favorite short stories are Dream of a Ridiculous Man by Fyodor Dostoevsky and Tenth of December by George Saunders. I read the first one a long time ago, and realized that the narrator had the same ridiculous dream that I have—the dream that we could all love each other. I’ve performed a version of this story from time to time. Jason Beito recommended the George Saunders story to me. Thank you, Jason!

 

I’m always reading more than one book at a time. At the beginning of each day, I usually read from certain inspirational texts. These are books that I read again and again. When I get to the end, I start at the beginning. My current repertoire includes Zen in English Literature and Oriental Classics by R. H. Blyth, A Year With Hafiz by Daniel Ladinsky, The Poetical Works and Centuries of Meditations by Thomas Traherne. Your True Home by Thich Nhat Hanh and The Only Revolution by J. Krishnamurti. Alan Watts is another stalwart early morning companion. I’m currently reading Eastern Wisdom, Modern Life: Collected Talks 1960-1969.

 

I love to re-read Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass from time to time. And Huckleberry Finn.

 

I learned a lot from Woman and Nature by Susan Griffin, and For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Childrearing and the Roots of Violence by Alice Miller, and Magical Child and Evolution’s End by Joseph Chilton Pearce, and from many books by Ken Wilber. Joseph Campbell is a personal favorite. I like his lectures best, especially as audio books.

 

William Shakespeare is my favorite writer. He’s the greatest poet in the English language, and the greatest playwright in any language. Endless delight! My favorite companion volume to the works of Shakespeare is Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being by Ted Hughes.

 

Three of my favorite novels: The Storyteller by Mario Vargas Llosa, The Zoo Where You’re Fed to God by Michael Ventura, and Borgel by Daniel Pinkwater.

 

Although Ralph Waldo Emerson and William Blake are wondering why I left them out, that’s enough for now!

 

—Johnny