Best Books Part 2

I feel guilty that there are books I owned, read and loved, gave away and missed so much I bought them back again and I never mentioned them:

Here is one that just fell out of a bag on my coat closet door today - Spoon River Anthology Edgar Lee Masters. Why?

A common thread for me was the glimpse into the lives of ordinary people, the monumentalizing of the people who go unnoticed in every day life, and who are US, our families, our neighbors, and whose lives are universal and significant. Every life is a book. Masters made these lives each a poem.

There is an admonition that I like "Be Kind for Everyone is engaged in a Great Struggle." Plato. And indeed we are all engaged in struggles every day of our existence. It is a shared experience and Spoon River makes us less alone.

Our Town is a book I have bought and given away many times in my life. I love it for the narrator's answer to the question of whether any of us are capable of realizing the magic and wonder and inexplicable beauty of ordinary daily life. He answers, "Poets maybe." But I think many of us have glimpses of that each day and that helps us to survive the struggle. There is a profound wonderfulness to the most ordinary of things which are brought out by Thornton Wilder, the smell of ironing a fresh starched item of clothing, the tiny perfect oak leaf stuck on your car window, the song of a bird as you sit on the porch, the call of a neighbor passing by. These are timeless and perfect.

I wonder now that these books which came to me so early - in my twenties, I think, when I was in college, have been so meaningful to me throughout my long life. Thousands of books have passed through my brain like passengers on a busy train line, but some stay with me. These two are sitting on my piano right now, reminding me of how much I loved them.

In the background I hear clamouring voices of other authors and books that want to be mentioned and not forgotten and indeed, this morning at my Quaker Meeting a friend mentioned her travels to Prince Edward Island and I was reminded of Anne of Green Gables, a book which I loved with all my heart. The magic of the descriptions of the landscape stay with me to this day, the blossoming trees of "The White Way" and I can almost smell the blooms. These small details or scent and natural beauty are a connecting thread through all these loved experiences. I did get to visit Nova Scotia on a few occasions but never got to visit Prince Edward island but it lives in my imagination forever.

On The Trail of the Lonesome Pine....

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