By Michael Patrick O’Brien–
Each October celebration of national book month reminds me that books are some of our most devoted life companions. A relatively new book by a friend confirms my belief.
The book’s author—Jon M. Sweeney—is the discerning editor who acquired my own Monastery Mornings for Paraclete Press to publish in 2021. In other words, Jon has really good taste in books.
He’s worked in publishing since 1990 and has written about religion, spirituality, and interfaith understanding. He loves books.
His work My Life in Seventeen Books is not a favorite books list. Instead, Jon reveals a bit of his heart and soul by writing about books he’s carried close to him at pivotal life moments.
And by “carry,” Sweeney does not mean only what he’s toting around in his shoulder bag. He means something magical, like how “the sound of church bells ringing in a city might carry for miles.”
He’s really written about the books that have carried him.
For instance, one chapter of Sweeney’s “literary memoir” tells how a set of Hasidic tales (Tales of the Hasidim by Martin Buber) brought him through the end of an unhappy first marriage to the beginning of a second (and happy) union with his current wife, a rabbi.
A different chapter describes how, when his heart felt “exhausted” by organized religion, another set of folktales (Twenty-three Tales) collected by the great Russian writer Leo Tolstoy confirmed Sweeney’s suspicions that the institutional church often gets in the way of true spirituality.
And Jon writes about how a book of ghost stories (The Collected Ghost Stories of M.R. James) helped him confront the terrors of self-doubt and worry he faced as a parent. There are many other wonderful accounts of man-meets-book too.
Besides being—according to one reviewer—a “gem…tender, loving, humble,” Sweeney’s book asks a provocative question…what books have carried you? It’s not something I’d pondered much before, but now I’ve compiled a nice list.
In childhood, I devoured the family encyclopedias, and they revealed that words are wells flowing forth with facts and interesting information. Like today’s internet, my encyclopedias connected me with the wider outside world.
A small volume of Robert Frost’s poems that I won in a school reading contest (You Come Too) taught me to love the beauty of words. That bond later guided me on a literary pilgrimage to the place where Frost composed them.
I grew up at a Trappist Abbey in Northern Utah, a story told in my Monastery Mornings memoir, The monks gave us a copy of Something Beautiful for God, Malcolm Muggeridge’s 1971 book about Mother Teresa. The future saint visited the simple little Huntsville monastery in 1972.
Muggeridge’s wonderful book helped form my notion of how to see and show the face of God. Both happen, as with Mother Teresa, through our loving encounters with others.
The exclamation point on this epiphany came from a book too. A friend and high school teacher—Holy Cross Sister Patricia Ann Thompson—gave it to me for my college graduation.
Compassion by Holy Cross priest Don McNeill also describes the place where God is seen and shown: “Compassion asks us to go where it hurts, to enter into places of pain, to share in brokenness, fear, confusion and anguish.”
After college, I chose a legal career. Four decades later, the law heroes I read about in my twenties—Robert Bolt’s Thomas More (A Man for All Seasons) and Harper Lee’s Atticus Finch (To Kill A Mockingbird) —still inform my vocation today.
I’ve never had to choose—as did More—between my head and my principles. Nor has a client’s life ever depended on my lawyerly skills, as was the case for Finch.
Yet, I try to let the integrity and devotion of these books inspire even the mundane bits of advice and counsel I render from my Salt Lake City office at Parsons Behle & Latimer.
Our family copy of A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens is torn and tattered. I read it with each of my children, and several times more.
Speaking of fatherhood, in my thirties and forties I often carried the Harry Potter books by J.K. Rowling. This started serendipitously, when a friend recommended the first one for my oldest daughter, then in third grade.
I’ve now read the landmark series four times. I enjoy quiet book time, but few things have matched the collective anticipation, joy, sorrow, and satisfaction I’ve felt while reading Harry Potter out loud with my children.
I’ve never flyfished, apparently something that old men of the West like me should do. Still, when my brother Pete ended his life in 2021, I turned to Norman Maclean’s A River Runs Through It.
Like the two brothers in the book and movie, Pete and I connected only fleetingly, but during the moment we were most memorably in sync, a river ran through it. Maclean’s words mourning his dead brother comforted me when Pete died so incomprehensibly:
“Each one of us here today will at one time in our lives look upon a loved one who is in need and ask the same question: We are willing to help, Lord, but what, if anything, is needed? For it is true, we can seldom help those closest to us. Either we don’t know what part of ourselves to give or, more often than not, the part we have to give is not wanted. And so it is those we live with and should know who elude us. But we can still love them—we can love completely without complete understanding.”
When Jon Sweeney signed my copy of his memoir explaining how we carry our books and how our books carry us, he wrote simply: “For Mike—you will understand.”
I do.
(The Salt Lake Tribune published a version of this story on October 5, 2025.)
*Mike O’Brien (author website here) is a writer and attorney living in Salt Lake City, Utah. Paraclete Press published his book Monastery Mornings, about growing up with the monks at the old Trappist monastery in Huntsville, Utah, in August 2021. The League of Utah Writers chose it as the best non-fiction book of 2022. Mike’s new holiday novel, tentatively titled “The Merry Matchmaker Monks,” will be published in time for Christmas 2026.
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