Which books should you choose to read over others before you die? It s a question that s launched scores of lists and many arguments. And my guest, Jim Mustick, has fired his own 900-plus page missive in the debate.
00:18:48.460Well, I was just talking about this last night, and it depends on your taste, but my own favorites,
00:18:55.620and I say this because I have a pile of them right outside the bedroom, and there's always
00:19:01.340one on my nightstand, and I don't know if you know those, but he started writing them in the
00:19:12.920late 30s, and he wrote them all the way into the late 70s.
00:19:17.400So there's about 40-something of them, and I've read them several of them many times. I tend to forget who actually, you know, did the crime, but the characters are so wonderful.
00:19:31.100Nero Wolfe, the main character, is this obese man who almost never leaves his house. He lives in this brownstone in Manhattan.
00:19:41.980He has a gourmet, and he has a cook who lives with him. He keeps orchids on his roof. He has 10,000 plants, and he has all of these quirky personal characteristics.
00:19:54.660But the books are narrated by his assistant, Archie Goodwin, who is much more like a Hammett or a Raymond Chandler detective.
00:20:03.800So Archie goes out and has all the adventures, and then he brings everything back to Wolfe, and Wolfe, with his genius, figures out the crime.
00:20:13.840So in these books, you get the pleasures of two kinds of detective fiction. One is like the Sherlock Holmes or the Hercule Poirot, where you have this genius figuring stuff out,
00:20:25.320but you also have the hard-boiled type where somebody's going out and getting into fistfights and the like.
00:20:32.400And so there's a great mix of them there, and I just love them. I mean, I call it comfort reading.
00:20:38.500I love it. And I love how you have comfort reading on this list, which is pleasant, right? Because most lists are sort of a chore.
00:20:45.000Well, you know, one of the things that I wanted to do in making the book is, I really believe, I know this is true of myself,
00:20:53.040and I know from the many readers I've talked to over the years, it's true of a wide group of readers,
00:21:00.000is that we really read. It's not all seriousness. You know, we read the way we eat.
00:21:07.100And so one day, we may feel like having a very healthy salad, you know, granola for breakfast and a salad for lunch.
00:21:16.040But the next day, we're walking down the street, we're hungry, and we see a hot dog truck, and we really feel like having a hot dog.
00:21:22.380And then two nights later, we may go out for a very fancy dinner in a high-end restaurant.
00:21:27.520All of those meals are satisfying. They all speak to hungers that we have and to our appetites.
00:21:35.440And our appetites as readers are not the same all the time, just like our appetite for food changes, our appetite for reading does as well.
00:21:44.080So, you know, you want a couple of bags of potato chips in the list of books as well as nutritious meals.
00:21:51.960And that's how I approached my reading. I belong to a book group here in town in Tulsa.
00:21:57.180We're reading the great books. We started at the Iliad. Now we've worked our way. We've finished the Divine Comedy.
00:22:03.760And a lot of those books, some of them are really a joy to read, enjoyable, like Inferno and Purgatorio, really fun to read.
00:22:10.980Sort of like the beginning of sci-fi or fantasy in Dante.
00:22:16.200But then I also, some of them are just sort of a slog, Aquinas, you know, it's like hard.
00:22:22.480Yeah, the Inferno always struck me, and I'm sure somebody has already done this, but if you read the Inferno in our day and age, it's almost like you're inside a video game, you know?
00:22:33.640Where there's all these characters and you have to navigate through the different levels of hell. It's the same kind of idea.
00:22:41.140So that's a very good connection that you made. But Aquinas is not like that.
00:22:45.460Right. Yeah. But then I also read books just for fun. Right now I'm reading some of my favorite novels, Lonesome Dove. I've read it like four times.
00:22:52.600And I finally decided, okay, it's time I move on. There's other books in the series. So I started with the beginning in the sequence, and now I'm on Comanche Moon.
00:22:59.300And that's what I do before I go to bed, just read a few pages. It's for pleasure. It's nothing more than that. I'm not trying to improve my life by reading Larry McMurtry novels.
00:23:09.140Right. That variety is really important, and I try to get that in the book, and I try to also get books for every age.
00:23:17.700So you could kind of start with Good Night Moon and Where the Wild Things Are and go all the way up to, you know, C.S. Lewis's A Grief Observed. You could really have a kind of cradle-to-grave reading lifetime.
00:23:30.200I wanted all of that in the book because, you know, for people who have families, reading with their kids is really important when they're young. It's important to the kids, and it's rewarding to the parents.
00:23:42.800So I wanted to point in that direction as well and to have that sense of surprise when, you know, you could go into my book, you look for Larry McMurtry, and then next to it, there might be something different.
00:23:55.840I know you mentioned The Road by Cormac McCarthy. Right after that in my book is a wonderful picture book for kids called Make Way for Ducklings.
00:24:05.800And so, you know, that juxtaposition is really what I was after to kind of surprise people a little bit.
00:24:21.060I mean, so yeah, you include children's books on the list, and that's another thing you often don't see on book lists.
00:24:25.300What were some of the highlights from that list or genre of children's book that you have on there?
00:24:30.980Well, there's one that I particularly like, and it's a book written for, aimed at an audience of around 12-year-olds.
00:24:39.020And it's written by a man named Russell Hoban, H-O-B-A-N.
00:24:46.060And he is fairly singular in the book because, or really among writers, because he's famous for two things at the opposite ends of the literary spectrum.
00:24:58.920First, he wrote a marvelous series of picture books for kids about a badger named Francis, Birthday for Francis, Best Friends for Francis.
00:25:09.440These books have been around for 30 or 40 years.
00:25:11.740They still sell very well, very popular in stores.
00:25:15.360It's just about a mischievous little animal and her family trying to keep her under control and happy.
00:26:20.160It is extraordinarily diverse in its dealing with different themes, even though it's this kind of all of these toys interacting with each other.
00:26:30.120And I say this quite honestly, and I said this many times on the book tour, this book has as much to say about being alive on the earth as any book I've ever read, whether you're 12 or 60.
00:26:45.560I recommend it to everybody because it's just about how we have to go out into the world and learn to be more resourceful and resilient and more imaginative than we might be if life didn't kind of force us to do that.
00:28:59.780Generally, it's, for me, I like finding that quality attached to experiences that are foreign to me completely, like growing up on a sheep farm.
00:29:12.080Or in other memoirs, there's a great memoir by Mary Carr called The Liars Club about growing up in Texas.
00:29:20.660I grew up in the New York metropolitan area.
00:29:23.300So the sense of place and atmosphere and even character in the people that comes from being in a different location, both physically and kind of figuratively, is really important.
00:29:35.800Besides memoir, what other genre of nonfiction did you have a lot of fun selecting for?
00:29:42.200Was it like theology or philosophy or architecture?
00:29:46.160What was a genre that you had a lot of fun picking up books for?
00:29:50.700Well, I love books myself that push us to think about big things, like theology and philosophy or mythology as well.
00:30:01.540And science fiction does this too, but in the nonfiction realm.
00:30:04.980And I think people like to engage those ideas.
00:30:10.540They like to find meaning in what they're doing.
00:30:15.760You know, we're all so busy and we're running around doing all of the activities that our life dictates, our jobs and our families and so on.
00:30:25.020And we may be having a terrific time doing all of that, but we also want to enrich that with some sense of a larger sense of being.
00:30:36.840There's a great description in passage in a book by Norman Mailer where he talks about, if you're asked to describe yourself, you can say you are six feet tall and weigh so many pounds and brown eyes and so on.
00:30:58.160But we all have an existence that's separate from the description, where we really live in our inner life that we kind of see as moving through the world.
00:31:12.740And books can help us inform that inner life in a way we don't always have a chance to do when we're at the office or however we spend our day.
00:31:20.840And so books about religion or philosophy, whether or not one believes the dogma's being espoused or even the direction of the thinking, it gets us thinking about things.
00:31:49.400The longest conversation and most important ongoing conversation we have in our lives is the one inside our own heads that we have with ourselves.
00:32:00.520And so books of any stripe that can give us new words and new ideas to enrich that conversation are really important.
00:32:10.760And the thing I like about books, I mean, a lot of people get their information from social media.
00:32:14.420The problem with social media, I found, is that it's other people telling their opinion on things.
00:32:19.860You never have a space where you can just think about the thing on your own.
00:32:24.020But with the book, it's just you and the author.
00:32:40.360One of the things, you know, in addition to the kind of heat and distemper of much of social media, is that it's all ephemeral.
00:32:50.020You know, it's, I write in the introduction to the book about this, and I talk about what I think of as the great amnesia of our in-the-moment news feeds.
00:33:04.860Because not only are all of these distractions, first, distracting, second, often toxic, but they go away quickly.
00:33:16.420And they're replaced by something else.
00:33:21.200And one of the marvelous things about a book, and in this it's even different than a movie or music, is that we, as readers, invest a lot of our own time in a book, just as the writer has.
00:33:36.700And as we invest that time, I think this is part of what you were saying, we create space in which our thoughts can kind of, you know, stretch their limbs and wander into places where they don't normally go.
00:33:51.140So that element of putting the time in is part of the value that we get from reading, regardless of what the individual book is.
00:34:01.000And speaking of this ephemeral age we live in, one book that I got from your list that I read, I picked it up, read it in a day.
00:34:08.840It's a quick read that really describes this time, is Within the Context of No Context by James Trow.
00:35:07.240One of the points that stuck out to me is that television kind of collapsed this middle area of life, you know, social clubs, churches, like, you know, where people would sort of socialize.
00:35:18.760And now there's just like, there's broadcast world and there's intimate world, and there's no longer that middle space.
00:35:24.780And that's why everyone wants to be a celebrity, because you get to have an intimate world as well as that broadcast world.
00:35:30.960And I think it explains, like, the whole phenomenon of social media influencers.
00:35:35.320Like, every kid wants to be a social media influencer, because that's pretty much all there is.
00:36:14.020I would put on that list, The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius by Roman Emperor, great proponent of the Stoic philosophy, but very much someone in the world trying to figure out how to behave, even though he was the emperor.
00:36:34.600And it's very thoughtful, and it speaks to us now.
00:36:37.760It almost, you know, reads in a very good way like a self-help book.
00:36:41.960You know, here's one quick passage from that.
00:36:44.980This is from The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius.
00:36:48.140Everything you're trying to reach by taking the long way around, you could have right now, this moment.
00:36:54.740If you'd only stop thwarting your own attempts, if you'd only let go of the past.
00:37:00.700And anywhere you can lead your life, you can lead a good one.
00:37:05.560So, that's a terrific book, which I would really recommend to people.
00:37:08.820The second one, I already talked about, A Mouse and His Child by Russell Holdman.
00:37:14.860Whether you have kids or not, if you have kids especially, it would be a great book to read with them.
00:37:19.480As I said, it's for about 12-year-olds, maybe 10 if you're reading it aloud together.
00:37:24.160But this book is filled with very rich life lessons about coping with what the world throws at us.
00:37:32.680So, I would add that, kind of maybe surprisingly for this list.
00:37:38.200The next book is a book called Endurance by Alfred Lansing, which is about Ernest Shackleton's remarkable expedition in crossing Antarctica.
00:37:50.520And it's a very, one, it's a fantastic story.
00:38:31.120And he lived most of his life within an area of 25 miles.
00:38:37.040And he talks about, he gets really into his community, its history, all the way from its archaeology to current farming concerns.
00:38:48.400But with a kind of global perspective that makes it not parochial at all, but all about how you make your life where you are, which I think is important.
00:39:01.120He sounds like an Irish Wendell Berry.
00:40:08.860But this book is how Johnson rose to power in the Senate and then how he used it and how he both inspired and manipulated everybody around him to pass the legislation he wanted and so on.
00:40:25.620And it sounds like it would be dry and not interesting, but it's just the opposite.
00:40:33.740In Our Time by Ernest Hemingway, which was Hemingway's first book, it's a collection of short stories about a young man growing up in Michigan and then going from Michigan and being in World War I.
00:40:52.160It's about being a soldier, part of it.
00:40:55.600But it's more about someone trying to make sense of difficult experiences as he's having them and stripping away all kind of frippery from his language and his thinking to make it happen.
00:41:11.280So In Our Time by Hemingway is one I would put there.
00:42:31.440And this book is about his first trip to France and meeting all the winemakers.
00:42:37.040He went on, Kermit Lynch went on to become one of the great wine merchants and importers in America because he found all these winemakers, mostly in France, who were passionate about their work, did idiosyncratic things, and he brought them back to America.
00:42:55.440He was really a forerunner of a lot of the artisanal movement that we have now, both in wine and in beer.
00:43:03.340But this is about his discovering all of this as a young man.
00:43:07.060And it's on the order of follow your dream and figure out how you can make it work and also have good meals and good wines while you're doing it.
00:43:23.440It's a very, very thin little book called The Little Virtues, and it's by a woman named Natalia Ginsberg, who is an Italian writer.
00:43:34.940And the title essay in this book, it's about raising children and how we need to focus on how we teach them bigger virtues and how to have bigger lives.
00:43:52.660But the book is really about how the parent or the adult does this by having bigger lives themselves, that you have to have some sense of vocation and of purpose in your life that is making you get up every day with energy and good cheer, even if you're in difficult circumstances, because you have the sense of a vocation, that you're doing something that's meaningful to you.
00:44:21.340And if your children or those around you see you modeling that behavior and living in that way, that's the best influence you can give in the world to them and to yourself.
00:44:36.840Well, James, I've really enjoyed this conversation.
00:44:38.740Is there someplace people can go to learn more about your work?