Jon M. Sweeney is the Contributing Editor for Books and New Media for Spirituality & Practice and writes many of our book reviews. We have known him since the 1990s when we regularly had dinner during his visits to New York City to tell us about new books he had published through SkylightPaths, an interfaith publisher he cofounded. He has had a long career in book publishing and marketing, and he has written more than 40 books himself. So he is the perfect book lover to write a literary memoir.
At the outset, Sweeney notes that the 17 books he covers here are “not my favorite books, nor the ones that changed my mind more than others.” They are the books he has “carried” – the sort of carrying the way one adopts something or resolves to do something – and also the books that turned out to be just the right coalescence of person and situation, the ideal moment. So there are chapters here about “The Martin Buber Book I Carried While My Marriage Failed,” “Finding Tagore in Harvard Square,” “Ghost Stories as Kids Go Off to College,” and “Black Elk Speaks and the Mystery of Religious Identity.”
Sweeney admits he has an affinity for old and worn books, which he most often finds in secondhand bookstores. He got his copy of The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna in a seminary co-op in Hyde Park, Chicago. A collection of the novels of Graham Greene showed up at a church fair. One of the first books he carried, John Toland’s book about Adolf Hitler, actually came from a Crown Bookstore in a strip mall. We found it fascinating to read where the books described in this memoir came from. (Although we have a huge library ourselves, most of our books came through the mail as review copies.)
Also fascinating are the meanings gleaned from different volumes. When he was a teenager, a librarian introduced Sweeney to two books by the farmer, essayist, and poet Wendell Berry. “Berry wrote in order to listen to where he was, where he was going, and where he had come from.” He also wrote about and modeled the simple life, which Sweeney calls a “life without expectations.” There is pleasure in reading books this way, the the way the words come together, and there is also a lot of meaning emerging from the pages. Of the influence on Thomas Merton, Sweeney admits: “A book can open up a part of us that might not ever open otherwise.”
We’ve found that we can also get sidetracked by a book. This happened to Mary Ann with this one. She would read a chapter and find herself wondering what book (and because of our work, what movie) she has carried, without even realizing it. There’s a book of poems by Rabindranath Tagore called A Flight of Swans that her sister gave her for Christmas in 1962, the first year their family lived in Karachi, Pakistan. There’s Madeleine L’Engle’s children’s book A Wind in the Door. There’s Mark Nepo’s The Book of Awakening. And there’s The Rumi Collection with poems by the great Sufi mystic from a variety of translators.
Read and enjoy Jon Sweeney’s stories (he calls them “intimate, revealing, and confessional”) about seventeen books. And be prepared to be inspired to go out and find the books that mirror your life.
