Desert island dry-bag book stash
What'd be your baker's dozen you'd drag ashore from your shipwreck?
A reviewer of Brian Aldiss’ The Oxford Book of Science Fiction Stories opined how a better title would be “a few titles I thought of while lolling in the tub,” more or less. Lacking a bathtub in Echo Park, I can’t say my meditation time’s long enough in the shower of what might at least once in its century-plus existence been called a mother-in-law apartment. I guess like “master bedroom” it’s now relegated to the verboten real estate description blacklist. Still, as father if not (yet?) in-law to my son upstairs and his partner, where his mother and I met thirty-five years ago this autumn, proves a salutary lesson in mortality, as I tap out memories of my late wife’s garden spot here.
This is or was never our bathroom. Must’ve been on the road. I wrote in a recent post…
…about which books might benefit from an upgrade to cloth covers. Today I’ll expand on that, where I’ve already mentioned three titles that’d join a top-twenty: James Joyce’s Ulysses, John Dos Passos’ USA trilogy, and Philip Larkin’s Complete Poems. I’d recruit Cervantes’ Don Quijote (Burton Raffel’s translation); Dante’s Divine Comedy (Robin Kirkpatrick’s one-volume rendering to qualify among other multi-volume worthies). Plus the requisite Bible (RSV2E edition), a big student’s textbook of glossed Shakespeare, and J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. That leaves a lucky thirteen.
I’m angling for less-familiar catches, to introduce us to congenial companions that otherwise we’d likely never meet. Subject to mood shifts, tolerance, and patience.
Alphabetically…
Book of Taliesin, ed./tr. Rowan Williams + Gwyneth Lewis (medieval; 2020)
Its editors observe how perhaps the bard’s self-presentation may not be emanations of a Celtick New Age Paganish Spiritus Mundi but rather a savvy promotional pose. These manic, magical, incantatory selections at times fragment into shards. Being from the Middle Ages. They preserve amidst their lacunae and lore and legerdemain, nevertheless, a sense of the Welsh-Briton culture resisting steady Saxon onslaughts.
California: A Guide to the Golden State. (1940)
Dear friends of mine have this gracing their book-table under windows overlooking canopies of redwoods. When my wife and met, we discovered we both owned the 1984 reprint paperback, but it lacked this handsome dust jacket, and its elegant type. WPA’s contributions to Depression-era America often go unremarked now; my uncle and namesake cleared firebreaks as part of the CCC, faraway from where he met his end under fire in the invasion of Saipan, summer of ‘44. The descriptions of Clifton’s Cafeteria, of all places, in this guide made my eyes moisten, as they recounted the “pay what you can” policy surely welcomed by many down and out in Los Angeles who passed in and out its doors, probably which never closed. Certainly, thousands of sailors and soldiers among them. Uncle Jack at least was stationed in Hawai’i before being shipped out to sea, so one hopes he found aloha spirit, spirits, and hospitality.
Field Day Anthology of Irish Literature. (1991)
I had to do chores, in the same dwelling I now sit alone with Spotify, to earn the significant cash outlay for this. My then-bride got her money’s worth. Three volumes but slipcased so I sneak. I need some bilingual entries in Gaeilge to keep my Irish up. a vast treasure-trove of excerpts from the island’s much-scripted history and culture.
Ecuador: Nature + Man, ed. Hector Moreno Valencia. (1976)
Another pretty penny plus for this two-volumes totalling 12.5 lbs. But I need a reminder of my adopted second homeland. And from half a century ago, a look at what’s endured and what’s succumbed under relentless globalization and populating. It’s as if nobody can mention the second cause and effect, unlike ZPG 1970s, however.
Everything Must Change, Graham Davies. (2008)
Understandably obscure, from a small press in Wales, where its poet in his first novel translated his work from Cymraeg. A parallel narrative of Simone Weil during WWII and a Welsh-language activist post-Sixties. Both confront top-down domination, and seek within their fragile resources to withstand pressure always to conform, to give in.
Lao-Tzu’s Taoteching, tr. Red Pine. (4th c BCE; 2016)
I used to reckon the dharma-teaching suited me best. But it’s a companion approach, syncretically mixed often in its homeland and now abroad, which orients me better nowadays. Red Pine (Bill Porter) as a practicing poet-translator-hermit knows of what he speaks; he gathers centuries of commentaries to illustrate the dark, gnomic, and enigmatic shades of this famously spare, teasingly sparse, temptingly existentialist tract of what its composer supposedly jotted down in 5000 characters, from his ox-cart, as he left Warring States China for an inquisitive frontier guard. Glad he asked.
For more about the Dao/Tao as Englished: ”Six Types of Ambiguity: "straw dogs’”
Nothing to Be Frightened Of, Julian Barnes. (2013)
After the LAPL exhausted its postmortem pop-ups about books my wife had on hold that came in, the final one was this. I’m not sure if she knew it nestled in my top shelf. But I’d mentioned it more than once in her hearing to anyone sharing my lifelong dread-fascination with death and what may lie beyond that Shakespearean bourne from which no traveler returns. As a non-believer, Barnes examines family encounters with the Grim Reaper, preparing for his own, in engaging, disturbing, and brutal honesty. This remains, pun intended, a necessary confrontation with our terminus.
The Old Patagonian Express: By Train Through the Americas, Paul Theroux. (1979)
From the library, we’d also played this on audio on our penultimate trip, the one through Oregon for our older son’s wedding a year ago. I’d remembered this as a fun read back around nineteen, and the performance on tape is great. I’ve been immersed in Theroux’s travelogues on and off for years, and they never fail to reward. Yeah, he’s a curmudgeon, but he knows we all know it, and he scrutinizes his own stereotypes with the same cunning he records the follies and dreams of those whom he meets. He’s an astute chronicler, an American of a postwar era when education for working-class kids didn’t exclude an exposure to Great Books, and how a liberal arts curriculum enabled him to break his blinders. He models how one of his generation managed to overcome his constrained upbringing, and to venture beyond borders, as he’s done with fiction and fact for prolific decades. His interviews are a bonus. His time with Jorge Luis Borges proves worth the proverbial price (or time) invested.
A Prayer Journal, Flannery O’Connor. (1946-1947; 2014)
Very brief. A large excerpt in Harper’s when it was discovered intrigued me. Her no-nonsense head and yearning heart speak to me. If I’m packing, I want a spiritual resource which isn’t inspirational, but individual. Her spirit seeks, even if not yet finding what she’s looking for. As an understatement, I can relate to her quest well.
Collected Stories, Raymond Carver. (2015)
When we met, my wife introduced me to his stories, and actually his essays in a collection called Fires. I had the honor of chatting with his widow, the poet Tess Gallagher, at an Irish Studies conference in Tacoma about fifteen years ago. We discussed the works of J.F. Powers, whose fiction I’d also wanted to squeeze in. My background is in British and Irish literature, and I’ve always been found wanting when it comes to North Americans. So I’ve some catching up to do with Mister Ray.
Stanley Spencer: A Catalogue of His Paintings, Keith Bell. (1992)
Another common interest. We figured out he might be our favorite painter. While we never agreed on writers (hers, Alice Munro, Katharine Mansfield, Mavis Gallant) or music (The Replacements, The Hold Steady, but concurring on Yo La Tengo at least when they brought the noise), we found beauty in this artist’s topsy-turvy melange of Giotto, Pre-Raphaelite 19c, Cubist, and proto-Lucian Freud depictions of biblical scenes starring his neighbors in unwitting cameos and walk-on roles, the Thames shores, fields, streets of his beloved Berkshire village of Cookham. Where his vision’s been preserved, so you can see as he did a century ago. We took the same line he did when commuting from London’s Slade School of Art daily as a student. That’s a schlep. We missed the train back, waited over an hour in twilight chill.
The Times Atlas of the World. (1989 ed.)
When I turned thirty, this rewarded me. While there’s more nations, if not redrawn boundaries, after a few more wars, the time capsule of cartography has enraptured me since before I can remember. I used to draw maps, imaginary or real, of places I’d go with my parents in Southern California. I can get lost in a map any time. And I can find my walk more surely with one in hand than a GPS my wife would leave on “car.”
To a Mountain in Tibet, Colin Thubron. (2012)
What happens when a pilgrim, in the wake of his mother’s passing, lacks belief? Along with Paul Theroux, one of the top reporters from the road—he specializes in Central Asia—brings his Larkin-Barnes British secular sensibility on paths to the holy Himalayan Mount Kailash, where four faiths converge. I’m not easily moved either to laughter or tears, but the poignancy of his trek, in his exacting prose, resonates long.