Today’s TTT is ‘books that live rent free in our heads’, which is an interesting premise. But first, Teaser Tuesday Time!

RFK told the reporter that his Hoffa proposal seemed promising on paper, but he had one reservation: Who the hell had ever heard of Jimmy Hoffa and David Beck?
“If you do your job right,” Mollenhoff replied, “everybody will have heard about `em — and you, too.” – VENDETTA

Top Ten Books that Live Rent Free

(1) The Geography of Nowhere, Jim Kunstler. Geography is a history of American urbanism, but written from a punchy newspaperman with a fun prose style. I attended a talk by the author on this book and its connection to the then-emerging financial crisis of 2007/2008. I am fascinated by the built environment and its impact on our lives: Kunstler argues that low-density sprawl and ticky-tacky constructs are not only unsustainable, but profoundly demoralizing.

Born in 1948, I have lived my entire life in America’s high imperial moment. During this epoch of stupendous wealth and power, we have managed to ruin our greatest cities, throw away our small towns, and impose over the countryside a joyless junk habitat which we can no longer support. Indulging in a fetish of commercialized individualism, we did away with the public realm, and with nothing left but private life in our private homes and private cars, we wonder what happened to the spirit of community. We created a landscape of scary places and became a nation of scary people.

(2) The Meditations, Marcus Aurelius. I’m always having to quote this book to myself, mostly so I don’t lost patience with exasperating people. (“Men exist for the sake of one another. Teach them then or bear with them.”)

(3) Jayber Crow, Wendell Berry. Thoughts of Jayber, Mattie, Athey, and Burley — especially good ol’ Burley — often flit through my mind. It contains one of my favorite quotes in fiction:

One Saturday evening, while Troy was waiting his turn in the chair, [he said] “They ought to round up every one of them [war protesters] and put them right in front of the communists, and then whoever killed who, it would all be to the good.”
There was a little pause after that. Nobody wanted to try and top it. I thought of Athey’s reply to Hiram Hench.
It was hard to do, but I quit cutting hair and looked at Troy. I said “‘Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you.’”
Troy jerked his head up and widened his eyes at me. “Where did you get that crap?”
I said, “Jesus Christ.”
And Troy said, “Oh”.
It would have been a great moment in the history of Christianity, except that I did not love Troy.

(4) The Bible. This one is kind of a gimme since I grew up in a strict Pentecostal sect that was emphatic on Bible knowledge, but even during my period when I was aggressively anti-religious, the language and stories of the Bible filled my imagination and formed my thinking. KJV phraseology is especially ‘sticky’: when I’m serving as lay reader at church I have to stop my brain from automatically ‘correcting’ RSV expressions into KJV ones.

(5) The Rainmaker and (6) The Last Juror, John Grisham. These two compete for my favorite JG novel, and it’s striking that they were both written in the first person. I have read and re-read them many times, with the consequence that there are lines that sometimes just float up from the ether. Like this, from The Rainmaker:

And just like that, this woman I met three minutes ago has reduced her husband to an alcoholic imbecile.

The Rainmaker is the story of a fresh law school grad taking on a corrupt corporation, and it’s the classic soup-to-nuts story of a lawsuit being filed and executed. The Last Juror is rather different, as it’s told from the POV of a young man who buys a small-town weekly newspaper and then experiences it throughout the late 1960s and 1970s. I really owe it a re-read.

(7) Lemony Snicket’s Series of Unfortunate Events. This is cheating a bit because it’s a mix of the book and the movie, but whenever I use a word like ‘penultimate’ or ‘denouement’ I can thank Lemony Snicket.

(8) The Airman’s War, Albert Marrin. Another one to re-read: this history of WW2 aviation was immersive and inspired a continuing interest in prop-driven aviation. I’ve had the same copy since 2000 or so.

(9) Surprised by Joy, C.S. Lewis, or (10) The Screwtape Letters, C.S. Lewis. Not a surprise here since I continually re-read them, but the stuff that often floats up is not stuff you’d expect. In Surprised by Joy, for instance, it’s stuff like this:

At my first coming into the world I had been (implicitly) warned never to trust a [Catholic], and at my first coming into the English Faculty (explicitly) never to trust a philologist. Tolkien was both.