Sarah's Books - Used & Rare

Day two of some of my favorite books of all time. Today's list deals with the delicate art of encapsulating a life. When I read a good memoir, published diary, or biography I think of flies in amber: the intricate and fascinating structure of the body, the shell, is there, but the life, the spirit has flown. Well, the best books capture some of the spirit, too, somehow. It helps if the biographer has an affinity for the subject, or the author is honest with himself or herself about their prejudices and actions. Published diaries are particularly fascinating to me - usually not intended for publication, unstinting with both praise and damnation. Reading them is like listening to authors speak to themselves under their breath. Today's caveat: there are no books about books, booksellers, or publishers on this list, simply because they will appear in a later list. I don't know about classifying books in this way, it's a losing battle, really. Some of the titles below could appear in a history list, or travel, or belles lettres. Here we go, and again, no particular order.

Out of Africa – Isak Dinesen. Random House, New York 1938. I couldn't list this with the travel books yesterday, because I consider this a memoir. Everyone knows the story, but it's her language, and what she doesn't say, both about her husband and her lover, that cuts to the core. One of my very favorite books of all time. I have a collection of books that are peripheral to this one: the fine biography of Denys Finch Hatton, Beryl Markham's West with the Night, and many of photographer and diarist Peter Beard's books.

Seven Pillars of Wisdom – T.E. Lawrence. Cape, London 1935. A book I can return to again and again, truly a masterpiece. Crucial reading for anyone interested in the Arab world, but don't read it just for that, read it for its beauty and obsessiveness, too.

Far Away and Long Ago – W.H. Hudson. Dutton, New York 1918. Hudson's account of his childhood in the wilds of South America. So different and beautiful and strange. I love reading about remote places, hence yesterday's list, and Chatwin's In Patagonia is a good modern companion to this memoir.

Elizabeth and Her German Garden and The Solitary Summer – Elizabeth von Arnim. Macmillan, New York 1899 and 1900. Very gentle books, and I love them for this. A German countess reads and gardens, raises her children, eyes her husband, The Man of Wrath (as he is known in her books), warily, and writes about her inner life and the restrictions placed on women in her station in life. Written as fiction, but they read as straight autobiography, and have photographs in them of her home, gardens, library, and children. She also wrote the novel The Enchanted April (the movie of the same name is based on this book).

Noa Noa – Paul Gauguin. Brown, New York 1920. Talk about desert-island books, this is one of the originals. Artist Paul Gaughin's autobiographical sketches about leaving Europe and the West behind as best he can, to live and paint in Tahiti.

Pack My Bag – Henry Green. New Directions, New York 1993. I love reading authors' accounts of often-hellish childhoods. This is the finest one I know of. It covers Green's early life, his schooling at Eton and Oxford, and his child's-eye-view of English society and of his own eccentric family. He wrote it thinking that he would be killed in the looming war (World War II). He wasn't, of course, but thank god it inspired him to write this book.

Another Self – James Lees-Milne. Coward-McCann, New York 1970. I have been trying for several years to assemble a collection of the diaries of James Lees-Milne. Unsuccessfully. So I re-read this memoir of his English childhood to tide me over until I can get my hands on the rest of his oeuvre. Almost as good as Henry Green's memoir above, and that's saying a lot.

Not Entitled – Frank Kermode. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York 1995. My last name is Manx, from the Isle of Man, and being thus interested in all things Manx I picked this up. I also love Kermode's TLS contributions and scholarly works, and this quiet memoir of his childhood on the Isle of Man, and his life as a young soldier and scholar, was also wonderful.

The Warden of English: The Life of H.W. Fowler – Jenny McMorris. Oxford University Press, Oxford 2001. Very dry, but like a martini, much better that way. How else could a biography about the author of Fowler's classic Modern English Usage be?

Mister Jelly Roll – Alan Lomax. Duell, Sloan and Pearce, New York 1950. Something a little different - a lively biography of New Orleans jazz artist Jelly Roll Morton.

My Family and Other Animals – Gerald Durrell. Viking, New York 1957. This memoir of naturalist Durrell's childhood on Corfu is another of my favorite books ever, probably because my family read it aloud several times when I was young, so I've been imprinted. But also because I can re-read it at any time and fall in love with it all over again, his language and description is so beautiful. The stories are often very funny, and I love the sense throughout of his being the youngest and quietest in the family, the observer. He wrote several sequels which are also good, particularly for those interested in seeing his brother Lawrence Durrell in an informal light.

Undertones of War – Edmund Blunden. Cobden-Sanderson, London 1930. The best of the soldier-poet memoirs to emerge from World War I. Beautifully written, heartbreaking.

Good-bye to All That – Robert Graves. Doubleday, New York 1957. His truly classic account of World War I and the personal breakdown that followed, with his refusal to accept the roles that British society dictated he should uphold.

The Diaries of Siegfried Sassoon. Faber and Faber, London 1983 forward. Published in several volumes over a decade or so. Sassoon was well aware that his diaries would be in print someday, and self-edited them for years, but even so they retain an immediacy and intimacy that keeps me going back to them. The first volume covers the World War I years, and later volumes his social and literary life in the 1920s and 30s.

The Letters of Gertrude Bell. Benn, London 1927. Probably my favorite collection of an author's letters to date. She describes her travels all over the Middle East, Persia, Arabia, and Mesopotamia, particularly in what is now Iraq.

Living Well Is the Best Revenge – Calvin Tomkins. Modern Library, New York 1998. Tomkins's short biography of Sara and Gerald Murphy. Written almost by accident - one of Tomkins's children met Gerald Murphy over a hedge in their backyard one day (they were neighbors), and one conversation led to another. Tomkins eventually realized that the Murphys were the same people that F. Scott Fitzgerald based the Divers on, in Tender is the Night.

Doing Battle – Paul Fussell. Little, Brown, Boston 1996. Fussell has written a few books about his experiences during World War II, and this is the one that leaves me the most thankful.

My Search for B. Traven – Jonah Raskin. Methuen, New York 1980. A biographer mystified and finally stymied by his notoriously elusive subject, B. Traven, author of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, The Death Ship, and other novels.

In Pharaoh’s Army – Tobias Wolff. Knopf, New York 1994. I still haven't read This Boy's Life, which sits next to this book on my shelves at home. I'll get to it. Someday. In the meantime, this book is very fine, about his Vietnam experience and his return home.

Memoirs and Passions and Impressions – Pablo Neruda. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York 1977 and 1983. Neruda's prose is as fluid and meaningful as his poetry.

Greene on Capri – Shirley Hazzard. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York 2000. A perfect book, impeccable writing, a sideways glance at Graham Greene during a particular time and in a certain place.

Bruce Chatwin – Nicholas Shakespeare. Doubleday, New York 2000. I think Chatwin will show up at least once, somewhere, on all of my lists. He was unique and has many admirers, for good reason. This is the official biography, written with the cooperation of his widow, and delves into both the darkness and the light.

Wordstruck – Robert MacNeil. Viking, New York 1989. A funny and joyful look at how books, writing, and journalism awakened him to the world at large. I see that a book about books, in a way, has managed to sneak on to this list after all. What is there to do but acquiesce.

Life in a Day – Doris Grumbach. Beacon, Boston 1996. One of the only books I've ever read that truly captures how a bookish person thinks during any given day. Reading this is like browsing in your home library, jumping from book to book, topic to topic, following your natural inclinations. This isn't really a book about books, it just looks that way from my encapsulation.

The Assassin’s Cloak: An Anthology of the World’s Greatest Diarists – edited by Irene and Alan Taylor. Canongate, Edinburgh 2000. Snippets of personal diaries from all times and places. The Taylors picked masterful entries, too, ones that are shocking, sometimes horrifying, often beautiful. Many of the selections are previously unpublished, and many are from very well-known authors (Virginia Woolf, Samuel Pepys - Yes, yes, I still intend to finish reading his diaries...).

It’s a Slippery Slope – Spalding Gray. Noonday, New York 1997. He spares himself nothing, he will say anything about how he's really feeling. In this case about his terrible personal behavior, and about learning to ski. I could have picked others of his books for this list, but read this recently and thought it was so funny and hard and truthful and real that it would serve.

Dry – Augusten Burroughs. St. Martin’s Press, New York 2003. For the same reason as above, I'm adding this because it's such a hard, good book, and the author doesn't spare himself. Addiction, alcoholism, recovery, even triumph.

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius – Dave Eggers. Simon & Schuster, New York 2000. While I was reading this, a small (and getting continuously louder) voice in my head was saying, Thank god, thank god, someone in my generation has found a way to write a real book, a great book, one that means something real, that rejects postmodern irony and distance and all that junk, and really goes right for the guts... The voice was saying this, I should say, only when I wasn't completely involved in the prose itself. When I took a break to catch my breath.

Once again I must stop here. I've got bookcases at home bulging (an unattractive word, but there it is, they're bulging, albeit neatly) with memoirs and could list so many more, but these will have to suffice for now. What have I left out? Joseph Mitchell's book Joe Gould's Secret, perhaps, one of my favorite books about a forgotten man, a semi-crazy street bum, the kind of person that memoirs don't usually get written about. Or The Education of Henry Adams, which I finally read this spring. And Pepys, of course. And Christopher Morley's autobiographical novel John Mistletoe. Oh dear. I can see that I may live to regret this undertaking.