There are book collectors and then there are book readers. There are also people who are both, and Sam is one of these.
For example, Wendell Berry takes up a lot of room on his bookshelf, and Sam has read all his novels and short stories. In the photo below, note the two former library books! We’re big used book fans.
All of Berry’s fiction and some poetry takes place in Port Royal, Kentucky, a fictional place (inspired by the real town of the same name) where the Beecham, Feltner, Coulter and Catlett families live. Together they form a “membership” where each person feels responsibility for the well-being of the land, for the animals and for each other.
Recently I asked Sam which of Berry’s novels would be a good one to begin with, for someone new to his books. He said, “A Place on Earth or Jayber Crow.”
Sam likes Wendell Berry’s stories because they’re not written in the Gothic or magic realism style typical of Southern literature. He said, “Berry captured the world I grew up in about as well as could be captured.”
Years ago in our other lifetimes, when I worked at the bookstore and the public library in Brevard, Sam would come in looking for Southern writers, preferably humorous.
About those writers, Sam says he reads Ferrol Sams because “he’s funnier than Wendell Berry, but not as polished.” Lewis Nordan “has both the Gothic and magic realism, and his stories are often dark.” Roy Blount, Jr. is “a sports writer and humorous essay writer. I have Long Time Leaving: Dispatches from Up South, and Now Where Were We?”
In Now Where Were We?, I see that Blount’s solution to inflation is simply to “knock the last digit off every sum in America.” Sam didn’t tell me he reads fantasy!
“Some of my favorite things,” he says, “are the set pieces Fred Chappell includes in his novels.”
And there is poetry. Sam’s bookmark in Mary Oliver’s New and Selected Poems takes me to “Hummingbird Pauses at the Trumpet Vine”. My apologies to Oliver for abbreviating it, below.
Oh, Sam says to tell you there’s one more type of book person - the book starter (not finisher). That often happens with our stacks of library books now that the world’s all stirred up.
But a few minutes with a chosen book in your hands is always a spirit lifter!