Best Books

One of my favorite columns in the only magazine I can still read, is Best Books by.... An author is invited to share her or his choices of best books and explain why. I am going to fish out the latest issue and cut out the section and paste it into my daily journal because it is such an interesting idea and I enjoy reading the critical observations made by the authors about the books. In this issue, 9/18/2026 issue, Dan JOnes mentions some books and authors I have enjoyed in the past: War and Peace by tolstoy and Middlemarch by George Eliot.

I rarely talk about books anymore though they were my first and best love. I can't read anymore because my cornea disease and cataracts have robbed me of that gift. The only way I can read The Week magazine, is with a magnifying glass.

To be honest, now that I am OLD, I can barely remember the books I read, so many books. But I remember War and Peace because I watched the film annualy for so many years. It feels as real to me as my own life. Middlemarch is a different situation. What I remember of that book was going to Lebanon, Pa. on an annual autumn pilgrimage with Dorothy and Ray Stanaitis to eat at a favorite Amish themed family restaurant. We had stopped to shop at some kind of market with second hand books and I found a beautiful copy of Middlemarch by George Eliot for $10. At the time and for a long time, I was very poor and I didn't have $10 on me. Ray Stanitis would kindly treat for my lunch but Dorothy wouldn't let him buy me the book.

Also at that time, I was still in college and locked in a battle withthe English Dept. at Glassboro State College over the lack of any women writers in the World Literature survey course. The professor had suggested that I create a bibliography of worthy authors to add to a future course and I was reading up a storm and creating a wonderful bibliography beginning with the Japanese author Lady Murasaki Shibiku, credited with writing the first set of romantic novels in the early 11th century, the Tale of Genji.

This project was a great gift to me because it brought to me all those wonderful women authors who had actually achieved fame and note in their own lives but who were written OUT of literary history later. So as not to digress, I will mention only one or two authors as examples: Christine de Pizan, the Book of the City of Women early 15th century in an attempt to acquaint the world with famous women of history and Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin which President Abraham Lincoln said ignited the Civil War. Needless to say, Middlemarch was a much desired and worthy addition to my collection, but I didn't have the $10 and nobody offered to lend it to me so I had to let it go. Dorothy worked in a library and didn't believe in buying books. Eventually, though I did manage to get a copy.

Anyhow these 10 best or 5 favorites columns always make me think of my own but I couldn't ever limit them to these small numbers - there have been too many. It would be like saying my ten best memories - I have thousands. But I often think of the sweeping epics like War and Peace, by Tolstoy and Dr. Zhivago by Pasternak and Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell. Those books educated me and broadened my world and became deep layers in my entellectual development. I am sorry so few read or care about books today, or perhaps just that I have interactions with so few book lovers in my increasingly constricted life.

In that same issue of The Week magazine there was a piece on the latest book by Emily Wilson, the classicist who wrote a translation of The Odyssey that spawned a big market movie this summer. Her new book Crossing The Wine Dark Sea discusses among other things, the art of translation and how an author must move beyond literal translation to a deeper understanding of the meaning being conveyed since languages do not literally translate from one to another.

All of my books are gone now, box by box, set adrift like baby Moses on the drifting waters into other hands, the collection of a lifetime. I try not to think about that, or to mourn the missing. This morning I was missing my collection of diaries and the book that instigated that collection: A Book of One' Own 1984, Mallon. It is a casual history of great diaries. I miss it and the diaries I collected along with it. But they are gone and it is no use looking back because you turn into a pillar of salt.

Also this morning I read a news piece about a documentary being released in which the filmmaker interviews each of the succeeding "oldest people in the world" the last one mentioned in his work was 116 and lived in Brooklyn. He said she was so old she couldn't keep her eyes open and she died the following year. When I think about my possible goal of reaching 90, I do think that is old enough because I am neither trusting nor optimistic enough to feel that I would be safe being in the infant state that people older than that seem to fall into - diapers, wheelchairs, oh it is so depressing to contemplate, most of my friends in my age group fear it.

Those centenarians, somehow, seem to be able to sift down into it and give over to fate, so maybe that is the gift.

Well to drift from literature to old age is far enough. Time to get moving and deliver a book I bought for a friend: A Midwife's Tale by Martha Ballard, as it happens, a book about the diary of a midwife from the 1770's. It is a wonderful book and there is a lovely film made from it as well. The friend I am delivering it to was a teaching friend of mine, Joanne Wells, the school librarian. She and I used to walk in the park near our school on our combined lunch and prep periods. We are both long retired now - me 20 years, she 2 years.

Happy trails! wrightj45@yahoo.com

(please remember to use my e-mail to contact me as comments doesn't work well due to robot spam and that is also why I don't link my e-mail and just post it for you to copy and paste - thanks!)