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 has 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 list of favorite books. Instead, Sweeney reveals a bit of his heart and soul by writing about books he has 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.”
One chapter of Sweeney’s “literary memoir,” for instance, 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.
(Michael O’Brien) “My Life in Seventeen Books,” by Jon M. Sweeney.
Another chapter describes how, when his heart felt “exhausted” by organized religion, another set of folktales (“Walk in the Light and 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 Sweeney writes about how a book of ghost stories (“The 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-books.
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 had pondered much before, but now I’ve compiled a nice list.
From Robert Frost to Harry Potter
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 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 as well. A friend and high school teacher — Holy Cross Sister Patricia Ann Thompson — gave it to me for my college graduation.
“Compassion,” co-written 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 20s — 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.
(Salt Lake Tribune archives) A film still from “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.”
Speaking of fatherhood, in my 30s and 40s I often carried J.K. Rowling’s “Harry Potter” books. 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.
Comforting words
I’ve never fly-fished, apparently something that old men of the West like me should do. Still, when my older 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.
(Michael Patrick O’Brien)
Writer, attorney and Tribune guest columnist Michael Patrick O’Brien.
Note to readers • Michael Patrick O’Brien is a writer and attorney living in Salt Lake City who frequently represents The Salt Lake Tribune in legal matters. His book “Monastery Mornings: My Unusual Boyhood Among the Saints and Monks,” about growing up with the monks at an old Trappist monastery in Huntsville, was published by Paraclete Press and chosen by the League of Utah Writers as the best nonfiction book in 2022. He blogs at theboymonk.com.