Books, Books, and More Books

Yes, Everything is Illuminated continues to be great — so great that I don't want to write here because I'd rather read.

However, I've been thinking about this particular subject for a while now and wanted to at least get started. I like lists, though they can be maddeningly frustrating sometimes. Here, then, are ten books I love — these books are on this list not only because I love them, but because they were world-changing as only a few books can be in any given lifetime. Order is not especially significant here; these are off the top of my head.

• Mere Christianity, by C.S. Lewis. It's a close race between several C.S. Lewis books, as I adored the Chronicles of Narnia when I was only a boy. Recently having reread them, I discovered that they're even better than I remembered they were. Also on the short-list from C.S. Lewis are The Abolition of Man and The Screwtape Letters. But Mere Christianity wins out because of the luminous quality of its prose and because of my peculiar reaction to reading it. I was raised Church of Christ and went to private Church of Christ school. So I took Bible classes nearly every day until I was 18 or so. They were quite in depth, and yet encountering Lewis in Mere Christianity when I was 18 was life-changing — "oh, now I see what all the fuss is about!"


• The Crossing, by Cormac McCarthy. Absolutely one of the finest novels I've ever read. Other contenders from McCarthy include Blood Meridian and All the Pretty Horses (my first McCarthy novel, and so in some ways always the best), but The Crossing wins because of its sheer power. Reading it was like being run over by a train. Repeatedly. In a good way. I've never ever been so wrung out by a book.


• Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, by Annie Dillard. Friends of mine mock me for loving such a hippie book as this one, and suggest that I ought to shut up and read Walden. But this book is practically unique in my experience; it's a book about nature and God and death and life and all the other big issues. Somehow it's also about little things, specific things, and the human quest for understanding, knowledge, enlightenment, and maybe even perfection. Its prose is marvelously light but multifaceted like a poem; you think you're done with an image and then it returns in a new light where it can be seen differently. I have encountered few books as perfect as this one in my reading life.


• The Years of Lyndon Johnson, by Robert A. Caro. I've never read a biography of anyone else that even comes close. Magesterial. LBJ rises up from the pages of these three volumes and breathes, shouts, berates, rejoices, struggles, steals, lies, cheats, and gets his way in his very own fashion. You may not like him, but he's never ever boring. Three volumes here, and Caro's not done yet. I for one can't wait for volume four.


• The Civil War: A Narrative, by Shelby Foote. Dated, maybe, but for flat-out great storytelling, it can't be beat. A beautiful, tragic, and epic book. One of the crowning literary achievements of the twentieth century in any form.

Those are the books I knew would be on the list when I started. Now, I'm going to have to do some thinking to flesh out the ten.