If you have a reader in your life you may want to introduce them to Thomas Lynch, David Motherwell, and Julian Barnes this Christmas. These writers are a bit off the beaten path, yet have extraordinary intelligence and creative powers that deserve to be more widely enjoyed.
Thomas Lynch has a lot to say about his day job – he’s a mortician and about the always complex ideas Americans have toward death; these ideas mostly involve pretending it won’t happen to us. In Bodies in Motion and Bodies at Rest: On Metaphor and Mortality. Lynch, like all poets, is inspired by death. Unlike other poets, he actually cares for the dead while tending to the living in a small Michigan town where he works as the funeral director. Lynch teaches us is that people who live lives of consistent kindness create legacies lasting far longer than that Very Important Big Deal who lived down the street.
One of the most important books on my shelf is David Motherwell’s Life on Sunnyside Farm. It’s Motherwell’s memoir of growing up during the ‘50s and ‘60s in Grandview, Arkansas, a one-stop bump on a little back road. When I first came to live in the Ozarks, Sunnyside was a loving and evocative tutorial on what I would find, and who I would meet if I kept my eyes and my heart open. If you’re new to the area – or have lived here your whole life – you should read this memoir.
Julian Barnes is another writer I admire. His The Sense of Ending, which won the Man Booker Prize in 2012, is an elegantly written and playful book. It’s about a middle-aged man who is “rather annoyed” by the friends of his youth who return to haunt his present life in literal and figurative ways. Barnes’s economical prose is funny, ironic, and like life, complicated. The novel is structured by a series of philosophical ideas played out in the manner of a detective novel; we never know what’s going to happen next, or to whom. You’ll appreciate this original and clever novel.
Break out the rum and curl up by the fire. Happy reading!