My Book Meme with thanks to Deborah Pearce

How does an avid reader talk about his five favorite books?  I don't think I can choose five favorites.  I'v been reading for 60 years and may have thousands of favorites.  What I'll do, I think, is choose some recently read and some I think are notable.

Last night we had our monthly Book Group meeting.  This is a small private group.  Our first read was Dante Allighieri's Inferno.  We went on to read Purgatorio and will soon be going into Paradiso to complete the Divine Comedy.  Last night we talked a bit about the completion of our most recent book, The Passion of the Western Mind by Richard Tarnas, which is an accessible exposition of the ideas that have shaped our world, beginning with the Greeks and coming all the way to the present, visiting philosophies and religions through the millenia.

We also had our annual reading (aloud) of T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets, written in 1943, and probably the greatest work by this seminal figure in the evolution of modernism.  A favorite passage follows:

To arrive where you are, to get from where your are not,                                                                                

You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy.

In order to arrive at what you do not know

You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.

In order to possess what you do not possess

You must go by the way of dispossession.

In order to arrive at what you are not

You must go throught the way in which you are not.

And what you do not know is the only thing you know

And what you own is what you do not own

And where you are is where you are not.

The next book on this list is Michael Pollan's first book, Second Nature subtitled Why Gardeners Garden.  This book was my introduction to this wise and gifted voice for sanity in our world.  I have since read all of his books and have never failed to be impressed by his love of simplicity and knowledge of how we can improve our stay on this planet.

This blog is becoming a lot of text so I'll break it up with a few pictures from my messy libraries.

The next book on my list of recent reads is Barbara Kingsolver's (along with her family members) Animal, Vegetable, Miracle.  This is a terrific ride along with her and her family in their journey away from industrial food and into learning about and doing their own food production and eating only local.  To quote her, "This is the story of a year in which we made every attempt to feed ourselves animals and vegetables whos provenance we really know . . . and of how our family was changed by our first year of deliberately eating food produced from the same place where we worked, went to school, loved our neighbors, drank the water, and breathed the air."

 I'll now suggest to you two novels from a fairly new (to me) writer, Haven Kimmel.  The first was her debut novel, The Solace of Leaving Early and the second is her 2004 novel, Something Rising (Light and Swift).  I'll not go into depth about these but just say that her character development and story telling are magnificent.

OK, that's enough from my MEME about books.  There is no such thing as five favorites since, often, my favorite book happens to be the one or two or three I am reading at the moment.  Thanks to Deborah and thanks to anyone who reads this post.