By Michael Patrick O’Brien–
I’ve heard it said that books are some of our most devoted life companions. A new book proves it’s true.
I must confess to some bias upfront. The new 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 should. He’s worked in bookselling and publishing since 1990 and written more than forty books about religion, spirituality, and interfaith understanding. He loves books.
His new work, My Life in Seventeen Books, however, is no mere favorite books list. Instead, Jon poignantly 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 also means something more magical and poetic, like how “the sound of church bells ringing in a city might carry for miles.”
I think 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—as one reviewer has noted—a “gem…tender, loving, humble,” Sweeney’s book also asks the rest of us a provocative question…what books have you carried? Bookish as I am, it’s not something I’d pondered much before.
Now, thanks to Jon’s book, I’ve compiled a nice list. And like Jon, I still own and treasure most of them.
In childhood, I devoured the family encyclopedias. A to Z, they taught me to appreciate words as wells flowing forth with facts and interesting information. An early and hard copy version of today’s internet, my boyhood encyclopedias connected me with the wider outside world.
In contrast, a small volume of Robert Frost’s poems that I won in a grade school reading contest (You Come Too) taught me to love not just the utility, but also the beauty, of words. A half century later, that bond 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 Utah 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 about a nun in India of whom I’d never heard helped form my notion of how to see, and how to show, the face of God. The seeing and the showing happen, as they did 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.
That book—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 career in the law. Four decades later, the book 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.
Of course, 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 bookmen of the law inspire even the mundane bits of advice and counsel I render daily from my Salt Lake City office at Parsons Behle & Latimer.
During the holidays, A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens is never very far from my side. Our family’s version is torn and tattered, a testament to how I read it with each of my children, and several times more.
Speaking of fatherhood, in my thirties and forties I also carried with me the Harry Potter books by J.K. Rowling. This started somewhat serendipitously, when a friend at a bookstore recommended the first one for my oldest daughter, then in third grade.
I’ve now read the landmark series at least four times, including once through all of them by myself. 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 two daughters and my son.
I’ve never flyfished, which seems to be something that old men of the West like me should do. Still, when my brother Pete ended his own life a few years ago, I turned to Norman Maclean’s A River Runs Through It.
Like the two brothers in the book (and in the lovely 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 too soon and 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.”
That’s not quite seventeen books over six decades, but gratefully I am just old, and not yet dead. I plan to keep reading and we’ll see what comes next.
When Jon Sweeney signed my copy of his new memoir explaining how we carry our books and how our books carry us, he wrote simply: “For Mike—you will understand.”
I do.
*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.
