One-night reads: Recommendations, 1

A line from yesterday’s post: “I keep thinking there is a literature of short items that would make a good college course.”

I promised a syllabus. Instead, I’ve got a list of recommendations, starting with essays. My idea of a nice evening would be spending time with any one of these writers.

• James Baldwin, “Notes of a Native Son.” This might be better classified as memoir, but its reflections on American culture are striking.

• Montaigne, anything is good. If I had to pick one, it would be “A Custom of the Isle of Cea,” a description of the ancient practice of euthanasia.

• Charles Lamb, “A Dissertation Upon Roast Pig.” Lamb is known for his humor — his ability to create a mood.

• Henry David Thoreau, “Economy” and “Where I Lived and What I Lived For.” These are chapters in Walden. You might compare this to Scott and Helen Nearing’s “Our Design for Living,” in Living the Good Life, or to Wendell Berry’s essays.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The American Scholar” and “Self-Reliance”

• Virginia Woolf, “A Friend of Johnson.” Woolf wrote a million words of what she considered journalism. This essay on a minor character in literary history is among her many wonders.

• Ta-Nehesi Coates, Between the World & Me. It’s book-length, but short. This should be a part of a writer’s education.

• William Osler, “Aequanimitas.” This advice on the cultivation of equanimity came from a doctor who was great teacher of doctors. It’s one of the essays I return to. Another, by another physician, is Oliver Sacks’s “Gratitude.” 

• Sir Thomas Browne, “Musaeum Clausum.” And, yes, yet another medical man. His book-length Religio Medici is more famous, but I have a hard time getting through it in one night.

• Umberto Eco, “My Lists,” an essay that gets at the heart of writing, the learning that goes on before a person who is thinking starts putting writing sentences.

• A.J. Liebling, Between Meals, a wonderful piece about food.

• J.B. Priestly, Delight. All lists have to end somewhere, and this ends with a short book, almost a pamphlet, of short essays about all the things that have given one writer delight. It’s the book all of us should write for ourselves.