What are your favorite books?
The problem I have with trying to answer that question is that my favorite book is frequently the book I am reading when asked that question.
But I will name a few.
The God Problem is one that persists high on my favorites list.
It’s by Howard Bloom who graduated from Reed College a long time ago and has never ceased being impressed by the intellect that that achievement implies.
Having read the book several times, I agree with his high self-esteem.
Howard takes his readers through a maze of history, science, math and physics and leads to the rational conclusion that things are as they are due to the inevitable facts of rules and mechanics rather than supernatural design.
At least I think that’s what he is saying.
Another book that comes to mind isn’t a book at all, but a long and deep friendship that holds together a story that is meted out in 20 volumes. The Aubrey/Maturin Epic is addictive because each time I enter it I’m back in the midst of my closest friends - Jack and Stephen drag a lot of people with them - and I can’t stop reading until volume 20 is read again. The only downside to that phenomenon is that at the end of volume 20 the story of that relationship is only beginning. Unfortunately, the epic’s author, Patrick O’Brian, dies after completing volume 20. I own the published draft of volume 21, but it’s pretty thin gruel.
The Great Rehearsal by Carl Van Doren is a good thing to read every five years. It is a minute-by-minute re-creation of the Constitutional Convention, May to September 1787. Having some idea about that morsel of United States history can help make one appear less foolish when talking Constitutional Law at cocktail events.
Adventures in Time and Space, published first in 1946, is a thousand-page anthology of the best science fiction of the first half of the Twentieth Century. I read it first in the summer of 1962. I finally found a used hardback reprint of it in 2020. It’s still untamed magic.
Speaking of magic, for me Amor Towles weaves a magic raiment in A Gentleman in Moscow. The plot is magical, so, to be consistent, the characters and their relationships are therefore magical and, in this book - I read The Lincoln Highway and the magic was missing - Towles’ prose often conjures magic. His description of vast miles and miles of Eastern Russia densely clothed with apple trees - an apple forest, he calls it - is one of the clearest pictures of a magic thing that I have ever seen.
Napoleon by Vincent Cronin comes to mind. I bought it on a whim while in the museum store at Versailles. That was my introduction to Napoleon. It’s the reason that I am a fan of Napoleon. It’s why I have read a number of other Napoleon biographies. Reading them has been interesting because biographers of Napoleon adopt one of two approaches: they are either all mayhem and battles, or they are all gossip and relationships. I prefer the latter. Cronin does a third thing: he gossips and battles and gets into the heads of his subjects. That’s why I re-read Napoleon by Cronin every now and then.
The Bears of Blue River by Charles Major is another magical thing. I read it fairly recently after not having read it for, perhaps, fifty years. It unleashed a phenomenon I had never experienced. I found myself reading a word or two and turning the page, time after time after time: I have the book memorized.
The rest of my favorite books reside on various shelves, in various locations. Some are even in boxes. Some I haven’t even read yet. They are all my favorites.
