The following column is the opinion and analysis of the writer:
A constellation of unfinished books are always scattered across our bedroom by this scatterbrained reader who savors skimming and hopscotching from book to book to book. Some lay open on our bed, their spines cracked. Others are closed over bookmarks, paper scraps and shoelaces marking my place. Towers of books to be tackled are stacked on my nightstand like jenga puzzles.
Atop one teetering stack is “Making Peace with Cochise: The 1872 Journal of Lieutenant Joseph Alton Sladen,” a Gettysburg veteran’s respectful account of daily life among the Chiricahua Apaches in the Dragoon Mountains. That prized book rests atop my three favorite Sarah Vowell books: “Assassination Vacation,” “Lafayette in the somewhat United States,” and “The Wordy Shipmates.” If you want to tour the past with a deliciously snarky modern voice, Vowell’s the perfect time travel companion.
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My second tower of tomes is topped with Simon Rich’s latest humor anthology, “New Teeth,” a collection of short, comic essays inspired by this veteran comedy writer’s passage into parenthood. His tale of Barbary pirates struggling to balance their occupations, marauding and pillaging, with parenting a found toddler, is as funny as his account of a man, reared by wolves, going home for Thanksgiving.
I need the salve of humor because I’m sweating through “Ministry for the Future,” a climate change epic by Kim Stanley Robinson which begins with mass death in India and birds falling from the sky. Or was that last week’s news? Robinson’s rollercoaster of the economic turmoil, social upheavals and political cataclysms that await us in the next half-century is a smart white knuckle — yet optimistic — ride. Robinson’s comprehensive forecast is President Barack Obama’s favorite book on the subject of global warming.
On the floor next to it is my favorite book on the subject of humor.
“Sick in the Head: Conversations About Life and Comedy,” a collection of probing interviews with comedy giants spanning the last three decades by the thoughtful Judd Apatow is a book I open randomly, like scripture, for profound insights from today’s sages and stand-up prophets, peppered with the brain-jostling humor I desperately need now because “The Nightmare Years 1930-1940,” a history of the rise of the Nazis, by William L Shirer, is captivating me again. Shirer, the war correspondent who wrote “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich,” details the rise of the diabolical Nazis to unlimited power in “The Nightmare Years,” perfect scholarship for those hoping to understand our present nightmare all the better.
Atop that masterwork is Timothy Snyder’s 20 lessons “On Tyranny,” beautifully drawn by Nora Krug in the format of a graphic novel. The lessons from our past apply to the perilous present with such fidelity you’re reassured you aren’t losing your mind. We’ve been here before.
And so I’m relying on the sharp humor of Patton Oswalt to distract me as I have so often before, skimming the hilarious escapism of “Zombie Spaceship Wasteland: A Book,” Oswalt’s collection of short stories I reread when I’m desperate for savory comedic brilliance.
With America’s right-wing Christian Nationalists in the news, I’m revisiting “Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth” by Reza Aslan, a detailed account of how a crucified itinerant peasant healer came to be revered as a divine messiah decades after the destruction of Jerusalem. Among my many post-it note bookmarks: “US Right’s take on Jesus dist fm hist reality.”
I read the whole of mom’s Bible one summer because I dug archaeology, Moses’ mission and Goliath’s whupping by my namesake. Matthew Stuart’s new book, “Nature’s God: The Heretical Origins of the American Republic,” is next to that dog-eared Bible. When the lieutenant governor of Texas recently claimed God wrote the Constitution, I reached for Stuart’s reliable scholarship on our revolutionary doubters like Ethan Allen, who authored “Reason the only Oracle of Man,” or the freethinking Dr. Thomas Young, a leader among the “Sons of Liberty,” or Jefferson, who penned his own Bible sans miracles.
When frightened reach for the enlightened. Or good writing.
At the foot of our bed, one cat’s purring over “Reputations,” a beautiful novella about an aging political cartoonist by Juan Gabriel Vasquez, a Colombian savant whose writing whisks you away. Our other cat’s playfully pawing the Garrison Keillor mother lode written by the master storyteller at his peak — a treasury I treasure more than my copy of Christopher Buckley’s “Wry Martinis” or Molly Ivin’s “Can’t say that, can she?”— Keillor’s 1990 collection of short stories: “We are still married.”
I tell my beloved I’m grateful we are still married, in spite of not owning one book on how to organize a library among our chaos. Pretending to listen to me, she looks up from Matthew Pearl’s “The Last Bookaneer” and smiles, happily engrossed in a book about — what else? Books.
