My favorite book, Part 32

For years, Wendell Berry has been one of my favorite writers. He is versatile, penning poems, essays, nonfiction, short stories, and novels. I like all of it. But perhaps my favorite of his works is Watch With Me: and Six Other Stories of the Yet-Remembered Ptolemy Proudfoot and His Wife, Miss Minnie, Née Quinch.

The stories are set in Berry’s fictional community of Port William, Kentucky. He has written several novels and lots of short stories about the place and its people, set from just after the Civil War till now, and their relationships to one another and the land.

Watch With Me: and Six Other Stories of the Yet-Remembered Ptolemy Proudfoot and His Wife, Miss Minnie, Née Quinch, stars Ptolemy “Tol” Proudfoot and Miss Minnie, who, later in life than is usual, become husband and wife. They are an unlikely pair—he an oversized and disheveled farmer whose slow and easy ways fool people into believing he is a bit dim upstairs, while she is a diminutive, prim and proper schoolmarm who is sharp as a tack. As their relationship develops over—roughly—the first half of the twentieth century, they learn to accommodate and appreciate one another’s ways and make a happy marriage.

Much of what the book recounts about Tol and Miss Minnie is humorous—some of it laugh-out-loud funny. There’s an incident in a country store featuring Tol and a basket of eggs that is one of the most amusing stories I have ever read or heard. In true Wendell Berry fashion, the book presents country folk as complex, layered characters rather than the hicks and bumpkins we so often see.

Wendell Berry’s writing has earned him the distinction of numerous literary prizes and honors, including receipt of the National Humanities Medal in 2010 and the Life Achievement Award from the National Book Critics Circle in 2016. In addition to a busy writing life, Berry practiced the old ways of agriculture he often writes about, farming with mule teams and raising crops on land where he and his wife still live. His way of writing is likewise old-fashioned—every one of the millions of his published words was written in longhand on paper with a pencil. You would be hard-pressed to find any author who has done more or better with the benefit of all the modern conveniences.

If you don’t know Wendell Berry, it’s time you met. Watch With Me: and Six Other Stories of the Yet-Remembered Ptolemy Proudfoot and His Wife, Miss Minnie, Née Quinch would make a fine introduction.

My Favorite Book, Part 28

Here’s a book that I had not heard of until the movie came out, but I did read News of the World by Paulette Jiles before I saw the movie. And, as is usually the case, even though I liked the movie when I finally saw it, the book is better.

The premise itself is an unusual one—a man, Captain Jefferson Kidd, wanders around the isolated settlements of Texas reading from newspapers he collects when possible, informing people—at a price—what is going on in the world beyond the borders of their limited experience. His life gets complicated when he agrees to take on a passenger, a young girl who has been held captive by a Kiowa band and has, for all practical purposes, become Kiowa herself. Kidd is to deliver her to her only surviving relatives, an aunt and uncle.

Along the way, among other adventures, they confront a trio of bad men attempting to steal the girl for nefarious purposes and violence ensues. The delivery to the girl’s relatives doesn’t work out, and the Captain’s and the girl’s lives take an unexpected turn leading to a satisfactory conclusion to the story.

The book is engaging and well written, and is one of the few Western novels nowadays to make its way to the big screen. I liked it. However, even in a novel from a major publisher and as well written and meticulously edited as this one, mistakes sneak through. As an inveterate nitpicker, I scoffed when one of the characters said, “This ain’t my first rodeo,” a phrase completely anachronistic to the time and place. And the author repeatedly refers to a part of a printing press as a paten (which is a little tray used in the Eucharist) when what she means is platen.

Picky, picky, picky.

But we all make mistakes, and News of the World is still a fine book.

My Favorite Book, Part 22.

Wendell Berry is, and always has been, more committed to doing things right than in doing them quickly, or efficiently. If he is still farming in Kentucky at his advanced age, he will be farming with horses, as he has done throughout his life.

And when he writes, he writes in longhand, with a pencil.

He writes poetry. He writes insightful and challenging essays. And he writes fiction. All of it is worth reading. Not quickly, but attentively, and thoughtfully.

Most of his fiction is about a made-up, but true, place called Port William, Kentucky. It is a farming community; a close-knit agglomeration of people, all with stories worth hearing. As much as his novels and stories are about people, they are about place, and how people and places are connected, and how those connections make our lives, and create the communities and world we live in.

A Place on Earth is but one of many novels about Port William, this one set during World War Two. In its pages, you meet—more than meet, become acquainted with—many of the families and individuals of Port William of that day; families and people whose pasts and futures populate other Port William novels.

There is one passage in A Place on Earth that seems to me to speak of the curious times we are living in today: “The life of the house will change, accommodate itself to the needs of the new life, and then in a few days the new will be learned, what once was unexpected will become a habit—and they will go on as before.”

My Favorite Book, Part 19.

It would be nigh on impossible for me, or any other voracious reader, to identify a lone, single, sole book as the one and only all-time favorite. There are simply too many wonderful reads, and, depending on time and place and emotional state and who knows how many other contributing factors, books can mean something different to a reader with each re-read.

But if you backed me into a corner, one book that would certainly clamor for the place at the top of the pile is The Meadow by James Galvin.

There are many, many reasons I admire The Meadow. And, for just as many reasons, it’s a difficult book to put your finger on.

It is, in part, a memoir of sorts, recounting aspects of the author’s experiences. It is part natural history, providing much detail about landscape and seasons and wildlife. Some of it is history, painting a picture of people and places over the course of 100 years. It is a biography, in a way, focusing on the life of one character in great detail, and telling the life stories of a number of other characters. It is fiction to some degree, as Galvin writes dialogue and puts words in people’s mouths that, while they may reflect truth, he could not have heard. The publisher categorizes The Meadow simply as “literature.”

As simply as I can put it, the book tells a century-long story of a mountain meadow and the surrounding countryside in the high country along the Wyoming and Colorado border south of Laramie. But—and this is one characteristic that I particularly like—it does not tell the story chronologically. Nor does it do so using the normal format of chapters.

Rather, the story is told in short bursts, with some entries (for lack of a better word) only a few sentences long, and with none occupying more than a few pages. Interspersed are extracts from the actual diaries of a couple of characters. I sometimes describe the book as a series of “snapshots”; vivid images captured to illuminate people and places and events.

Then, it as if the author took his stack of snapshots and tossed them into the air, gathered them up at random, and used that arrangement in the book. You will read a page about something that happened last week, turn the page and find yourself immersed in something that happened fifty years ago, turn another page to witness events of a decade ago, read on the next page something from a century ago, or perhaps last month, or some other time.

As you page through the images, a bigger picture forms, tying all the people and places into one, big, fascinating story.

Finally, James Galvin is a poet. Which means he uses language beautifully. It’s a pleasure to read, and a reminder that writing—real writing—is more than storytelling.

I can’t say how many times I have read The Meadow. A dozen, perhaps. Maybe twenty.

I think I’ll pull it off the shelf and read it again.

My Favorite Book, Part 16

It would be difficult, I believe, for any list of outstanding Western novels to exclude Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove. I have read several McMurtry novels, and the truth is I run hot and cold on his writing—some of the books I like, some do nothing for me, some I would not recommend.

But when it comes to Lonesome Dove, I am hard pressed to do anything but stand in awe.

The main tale, a trail drive from Texas to Montana, is simple enough. But the many intertwining subplots give the book depth and richness, with stories both intricate and complex.

But it is the characters that set the book apart from all others. Woodrow Call and Augustus McCrae are an unlikely pair, with well-developed personalities that are at the same time contradictory and complementary. And the supporting characters, the whole long list of them, are likewise realistic and representative of the depth and breadth of humanity.

To win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction—which Lonesome Dove did in 1986—is an accomplishment unrivaled for a novel. For a Western novel, it is almost unprecedented and, for a “cowboy” novel, I believe it is unique.

The film adaptation is well done, but it’s about time for me to dive back into the book for, I think, the third time.

My Favorite Book, Part 15.

Since the late nineteenth century, the American West has been an environmental battleground. At one extreme, rabid capitalists see the region as nothing more than a rich land to be exploited for personal gain, never mind the effects their profiteering has on the land and the people who live on it. At the other extreme are radicals who believe mankind has no place in the West; that it is best left to the elements and we humans should only be allowed to sneak in and take a peek every now and then, then leave.

Most folks, as is usually the case, are sandwiched somewhere nearer the center of those extremes and look to achieve some kind of balance betwixt and between. Even then, viewpoints are fervent and disagreements intense.

Although somewhat dated since its publication in 1971, Encounters with the Archdruid by John McPhee paints arguments between conservation and development in vivid colors. And, the fact is, the arguments have changed little since then—or ever.

The book sets the views of David Brower, outdoorsman and long-time leader of the Sierra Club and the titular “Archdruid,” against three powerful men with contrasting views. One of the encounters lies outside the West, featuring a real estate developer on Hilton Head Island off the South Carolina coast. Another concerns mineral mining in remote areas, specifically in a wilderness location in the Cascade Range. The third, and most engaging for me, pits government dam builder Floyd Dominy against Brower during a float trip through the Grand Canyon.

McPhee, a meticulous reporter and imaginative writer, allows each man to state his case during each encounter, and allows readers to take from the debates what they will. And, like all good art and literature, Encounters with the Archdruid asks a lot more questions than it answers.

My Favorite Book, Part 10.

Mountain Man by Vardis Fisher is the story of Sam Minard, a young man who leaves the settled parts of America to make his way as a free trapper in the West. Borrowing from both fact and legend of the era, Minard is loosely based on John “Liver-Eating” Johnston, and Fisher includes the disturbed widow for whom Crazy Woman Creek was named in the story.

Minard takes a Flathead woman for a wife and fathers a child, but while he is away trapping, Crow Indian warriors kill his family. The mountain man turns Crow hunter, tracking down and killing every man of the tribe he finds, which results in his being hunted by his Crow foes in an ongoing and bloody feud.

All that is well and good, and for the most part the story the book tells is not much different from other mountain man and fur trapper tales. What I like best about Mountain Man is Fisher’s lyrical language and rich imagery. I get cold and hungry every time I read the book; at other times I feel well fed and comfortable. He writes a romantic version of life in the Old West, but he romanticizes it beautifully.

The book was the basis (along with other sources) for a fine movie, Jeremiah Johnson, starring Robert Redford.

It’s a good movie. But, as is usually the case, it’s a better book.

My Favorite Book, Part 6

John McPhee is a name you will see here again. He is, without doubt, one of my favorite writers. Some of his books are collections of articles he wrote for The New Yorker, others address a single subject.

No matter the subject, if McPhee writes it I will read it.

Witness the fact that I have read his books (and many others) on raising oranges, building birch-bark canoes, Bill Bradley, the New Jersey Pine Barrens, the Swiss Army, cargo ships, and the geology of North America—subjects I have no particular interest in but enjoyed immensely reading about.

Among my favorite McPhee books is Rising from the Plains, one of five volumes that make up his Pulitzer Prize-winning compilation, Annals of the Former World.

The book is about the geology of Wyoming, as seen through McPhee’s travels with geologist David Love. You’ll find that reading about rocks can be fascinating.  But Love is also a Wyoming boy who grew up on an isolated ranch when the West was still wild, and those stories are just as engaging as the tales about traces of the Triassic on the landscape.

This is about high-country geology and a Rocky Mountain regional geologist. I raise that semaphore here at the start so no one will feel misled by an opening passage in which a slim young woman who is not in any sense a geologist steps down from a train in Rawlins, Wyoming, in order to go north by stagecoach into country that was still very much the Old West.

So begins Rising from the Plains by John McPhee. How can you not read on?

My Favorite Book, Part 5

Cormac McCarthy is, to say the least, a divisive author. I know many readers (and writers) who, like me, admire his books. And I know many equally capable readers and writers who do not like him, for a variety of reasons.

McCarthy has little respect for the conventions of punctuation. He’s big on ambiguity. He often circles around a scene and sneaks up on you rather than confronting you head-on. He is not easy.

But, to quote Kurt Vonnegut, another author I admire, “So it goes.”

Blood Meridian, Or, The Evening Redness in the West, is among my favorite books and my favorite by McCarthy. Professor, author, and literary critic Harold Bloom calls it “the ultimate Western, not to be surpassed.” This, despite the fact that he was so overwhelmed by the book’s violence he set it aside twice before finally finishing it.

And there’s no question it is a violent book. It’s based on history—the exploits of a band of murderous scalp hunters operating in the American Southwest and northern Mexico.

Whether it’s violence or just about anything else he’s writing about, McCarthy has a way of saying things that’s unsurpassed. His descriptions are so spare, yet vivid, they surprise you—forcing me, at least, to re-read passages for their beautiful language.

Bloom also has this to say about Blood Meridian: “The book’s magnificence—its language, landscape, persons, conceptions—at last transcends the violence, and converts goriness into terrifying art, an art comparable to Melville’s and to Faulkner’s.”

Not bad comparisons for a Western novel.

My Favorite Book, Part 1.

Readers—and writers—are often asked to name their favorite book. The question leaves most of us, it seems, struggling for an answer. Here’s why.

A friend sent me an article a while back in which a writer was asked to write about her favorite book. She concluded that there have been several books that were her favorites at various times of life.

That sounds right to me. And I would add that most of those favorites remain favorites. There are books I read decades ago that I go back to and enjoy all over again. There are others that stick in my memory that I haven’t re-read, but plan to someday. And there are books I enjoyed at the time, but not enough to be my “favorite.”

Back in my high school years, perhaps as early as junior high, I engaged in what we would now call “binge reading” the short novels of John Steinbeck. Of Mice and Men. Cannery Row. Tortilla Flat. The Red Pony. The Pearl. I read those, and others, back then and I have read them over and over since.

Later, I likewise enjoyed his longer books—East of Eden, The Grapes of Wrath, The Winter of Our Discontent, Travels with Charley…. I have read those and others more than once, and will likely read them again.

Steinbeck is, perhaps, the first writer I read whose way of writing I noticed. Beyond the stories, beyond the characters, I enjoyed the words he chose and the way he assembled those words into phrases and sentences that, despite what they said, were engaging all on their own and a joy to read.

They were then, and they still are.

Given all that, I guess my favorite book is Tortilla Flat. Or The Red Pony. Or something else by John Steinbeck.

Or maybe something else altogether. It all depends.