Top ten books

Why do we read? To escape. To learn. To swim in someone’s wonderful words. To pass the time on the bus. To lull a child to sleep. But what books do we choose? Here are brief descriptions of my top ten selections for your own reading pleasure.
“Surfacing” by Margaret Atwood is her best novel. For me, all others since 1973 are unreadable. A nameless narrator as alienated loser is an unusual device, to say the least, but I appreciate her anti-American stance. Only the ending confuses by offering so many possibilities. Does she stop being a victim? Pregnant, does she go with her lover Joe?
Among Canadian political memoirs, “Gentlemen, Players and Politicians” by Dalton Camp is by far the best. His cadences, use of language and insider knowledge shine. Here’s his first meeting with Robert Stanfield: “Well, I thought, at least he’s not pretty. Long-headed, with shrewd heavily lidded eyes, a long nose, and a full mouth. All else was elbows and knees.”
I’m going to bend my own rules and nominate all four volumes in the “The Years of Lyndon Johnson” by Robert A. Caro. After twelve years, the fifth volume is beyond overdue. Caro planned to live in Vietnam to do research but Covid-19 intervened. He claims to have written hundreds of pages of manuscript but his editor of fifty years recently died. Caro is 88. I fear we may never see the final volume.
We’re all Nick Carraway living next door in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby” watching the spectacle of Jay Gatsby live a hollow life entertaining fair-weather friends. But what of the mysterious green light across the water? I’m sure PhD theses have been written about what it means but I believe it stands for dreams just beyond reach.
In “The Scotch,” economist John Kenneth Galbraith’s memoir about growing up in southwestern Ontario, my favourite scene has the young Galbraith and a hoped-for girlfriend at a fence watching a bull serve a heifer in the field. Says the romantic Galbraith, “I think it would be fun to do that.” “Well,” says his companion, “It’s your cow.”
Jane Leavy’s “The Last Boy: Mickey Mantle and the End of America’s Childhood,” is about baseball, drinking and sex. Mostly the latter two. Asked once by the team PR department to relate his most outstanding experience at Yankee Stadium, the man who holds the World Series home run record replied, “I [had sex] under the right field bleachers by the Yankee bull pen.” (My square brackets soften his wording).
To call “Blue Highways: A Journey into America” by William Least Heat Moon a travel book doesn’t do it justice. Driving a van on backroads he visits Dime Box, Texas, Nameless, Tennessee, and Pitt, Washington among countless stops, writing with inspiration and launching conversations. “A good life, a harmonious life, is a prayer,” a Hopi dancer tells him. “We don’t just pray for ourselves, we pray for all things.”
Among Roy MacGregor’s many books, my choice is “A Life in the Bush,” celebrating his father with melodic prose. Roy’s boyhood clumsy deeds made his father believe there must have been a mistake. “This could not be his child. There must have been a mix-up at the hospital. Good theory, except there was no hospital back in June 1948 and I’d been the only one born that month at the Whitney Red Cross outpost.”
William Manchester fought the Japanese on Okinawa during the Pacific War. He returned years later to do research for “Goodbye, Darkness” and wrote: “The last time I was here anyone standing where I now stand would have had a life expectancy of about seven seconds.” Why did he fight? “It was an act of love. Those men on the line were my family, my home.”
You can’t carry this while in the field, but the best book on birding is “The Sibley Guide to Birds” by David Allen Sibley. The 545 pages and descriptions of 810 species with more than 6,000 coloured illustrations comprise the tome you consult at home to identify that which you could not name for certain during your traipsing. All arguments will be resolved, all queries safely settled. Well, maybe not all. 
What’s your favourite?