My Life in Seventeen Books: A Literary Memoir

by Jon M. Sweeney

Overview

A memoir for the bookish-inclined, using personal stories to demonstrate how books have a magical way to move a person from one stage of life to the next.

“This is a small gem of a book, tender, humble, loving. —Mary Gordon

“Sweeney makes a charming companion, telling stories in joyful reflection.” —Jeff Deutsch, author of In Praise of Good Bookstores

Former bookseller, longtime publisher and author Jon M. Sweeney shows—with history and anecdotes centering around books such as Thoreau’s Journal, Tagore’s Gitanjali, Martin Buber’s Hasidic Tales, and Tolstoy’s Twenty-three Tales—what it means to be carried by a book. He explores the discovery that once accompanied finding books, and books finding us. He ponders the smell of an old volume, its heft, and why bibliophiles carry them around even without reading them. He demonstrates how and why there is magic and enchantment that takes place between people and books.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781958972328
Publisher:	Monkfish Book Publishing Company
Publication date:	05/07/2024
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Jon M. Sweeney is an award-winning author who has been interviewed in the Dallas Morning News and The Irish Catholic, and on television at CBS Saturday Morning. His book, The Pope Who Quit, (Doubleday/Image) was optioned by HBO. He is also author of forty other books on spirituality, mysticism, and religion, including Meister Eckhart’s Book of the Heart, with Mark S. Burrows (Hampton Roads), the biography Nicholas Black Elk: Medicine Man, Catechist, Saint (Liturgical Press), and Thomas Merton: An Introduction to His Life and Practices (St. Martin’s Essentials and Penguin Random House Audio, 2021).

His bookish reputation is nothing new. In 2014, Publishers Weekly featured Jon in an interview titled, “A Life in Books and On the Move.” He began the 1990s as a theological bookseller in Cambridge, and ended the decade founding a multifaith publishing house, SkyLight Paths Publishing, in Vermont. He’s worked in books and publishing ever since. Today he writes, reviews, edits, and recommends books, speaks regularly at literary and religious conferences, is a Catholic married to a rabbi, and is active on social media (Twitter @jonmsweeney; Facebook jonmsweeney). Sweeney lives in the Riverwest neighborhood of Milwaukee.

Read an Excerpt

The only reason I was ever in Walnut Creek, California to stumble upon my Tales of the Hasidim was because I had targeted a new toy company to try and convince them to stock our illustrated children’s books. An early flight from Minneapolis/St. Paul to San Francisco, followed by a rental car counter and drive, lunch with a regular customer in Berkeley, and then a short drive to Walnut Creek, landed me in an enormous field of asphalt: the new toy company’s parking lot.

The business appointment went quickly, as they always did. I never went in for the top-handed shake or dog and pony show presentations. Don’t waste their time was my motto, and it seemed to work. I don’t remember precisely but she may have been one of the potential customers with whom I obtained an appointment by assuring on the telephone, “I will be in and out of your office in less than ten minutes, I promise.” This was said in response to, “I’m very busy. Just send me something in the mail and I’ll look at it.” I was in and out that quickly. All the more amazing, remembering it now, is that I flew 2,000 miles on such a whim and a chance. Such were those optimistic days of seeking opportunities in the books biz.

So I then had a free afternoon and knew where I would go: to what I’d heard were the best used bookstores in the area. Top of that list was Bonanza Street Books, named the “Best of the East Bay,” a store which is now sadly gone. It was the kind of used and out-of-print specialist that people on Yelp today complain about as “too stuffed with books,” as if having difficulty moving about in a bookstore due to inventory excess were a negative thing.

Right away I saw the Buber on display in an area marked “New Arrivals.” I picked it up and turned it over, probably in a way similar to how bread makers examine the bake of a loaf just out of the oven. I have seen a baker tap the bottom of a sourdough with his thumb, brush a forefinger across the top of the loaf, and then breathe in its aroma.

Table of Contents

Prologue

Chapter 1: The Martin Buber Book I Carried While My Marriage Failed

Chapter 2: Three Inches of Hitler in Very Small Hands

Chapter 3: A Means of Escape with My Side of the Mountain

Chapter 4: Forbidden Books for Ordinary Teenage Trauma

Chapter 5: In Search of Wendell Berry and an Expected Life

Chapter 6: Monica Furlong’s Thomas Merton and How to Ruin a Honeymoon

Chapter 7: Finding Tagore in Harvard Square

Chapter 8: Tolstoy’s Twenty-three Tales and Learning to Walk on Water

Chapter 9: Sitting with Swami and The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna

Chapter 10: Hand-held Devotion (Books with Pictures)

Chapter 11: Sin and Mercy at Brighton Rock

Chapter 12: A Tiny Volume of What’s Impossible

Chapter 13: Carrying Baron Corvo and My Own Petty Animus

Chapter 14: With Patience Like Spring and Thoreau’s Journal

Chapter 15: Ghost Stories as Kids Go Off to College

Chapter 16: Black Elk Speaks and the Mystery of Religious Identity

Chapter 17: Montaigne’s Essays and the Dependability of Change

Afterword: All the Rest and What’s Next

Acknowledgements

Sources and Notes

About the Author

Index

Editorial Reviews

I love this book. The addictive experience of reading, which guides and charts our inner journey, is glancingly but vividly caught. Everyone will have their own list of books which they carry in their pockets and reread constantly. For some readers, this will instantly become such a book.” —A.N. Wilson, author of Confessions: A Life of Failed Promises

“Here is a poetic account of a long journey among books whose power over the author’s mind and heart was such that they became companions on the way. It fits in no category and is magnificent.” —Richard Greene, professor of English and director of the graduate program in creative writing, University of Toronto; author of An Unquiet Englishman: A Life of Graham Greene

“This is a small gem of a book, tender, humble, loving, needed now as ever before when so many of us fear that reading—and the books that we read—are endangered species. —Mary Gordon, novelist, critic, and memoirist, author of The Company of Women, Joan of Arc: A Life, and many other books

“Sweeney makes a charming companion, telling stories in joyful reflection from the books he’s carried and the contemplative, quiet, searching—and most certainly bookish!—life he’s lived.” —Jeff Deutsch, director of Chicago’s Seminary Co-op Bookstores; author of In Praise of Good Bookstores

“Sweeney braids together the seeker and bibliophile threads of his personality in a richly satisfying volume.” —Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

“In its pages one can savor the felicity of bookstore browsing (especially in a crowded used books shop), the importance of ‘bookhood’ (that elusive quality of the individual, physical book, created by weight, smell, texture of the page, and more), the way books converse with and inform each other in the reader’s mind, the wonder of stumbling upon a book that becomes part of one’s being. My Life … offers plenty of opportunities for one of the greatest joys of reading: staring off into space, pondering some train of thought sparked by what you’ve read.” —Lucy S.R. Austen, Current 

“Sweeney’s affinity for books is apparent in every sentence of his lush prose.” —Kirkus 

From the Publisher

2024-04-30
Sweeney celebrates the books that never left him in this literary memoir.

Some books just get their hooks into you. “Have you carried a book in your bag long after the time of reading it has passed, because it has become essential for you in ways that would be difficult to explain?” asks Sweeney early in this volume, which is all about the amazing bond that can form—sometimes unexpectedly—between a reader and a particular tome. Often these books come to readers at key moments in their lives, aiding them in understanding the path forward. Tales of the Hasidim by Martin Buber, for example, which Sweeney found in a used bookshop while traveling for work, helped him to contextualize his failing marriage. Some reading experiences come with a blush of embarrassment: At the age of 21, Sweeney brought a biography of activist Thomas Merton on his honeymoon, much to the chagrin of his bride. (It wasn’t the only time a book got him into trouble; his sixth grade teacher was disturbed to notice Sweeney happily making his way through a 1,400-page biography of Adolf Hitler.) His love of Wendell Berry’s Recollected Essaysinspired a college-age Sweeney to spend his spring break driving to Kentucky to try to meet the man. From classics by Tagore, Tolstoy, and Thoreau to more obscure works, like the Bengali religious text The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna and Frederick Rolfe’s “fantasy papal novel”Hadrian the Seventh, the author charts his personal and spiritual development through the texts he could never seem to put down, even after he finished reading them. Sweeney’s affinity for books is apparent in every sentence of his lush prose: “This chapter is also about how pictures can make a book something other-wordly: passionate pages moving the heart, or feet, and stirring the emotions. At certain books we are meant to gaze. We look at them differently than others. We take them in, more than read them.” The memoir will be of greatest interest to spiritual readers, but all book-lovers will recognize themselves in these essays.

A meandering bibliophile’s memoir that links spiritual development to the written word.

Kirkus Reviews