The Nogo Bookcase, Part Two (my top shelves)

This is like, a bunch of my more, like you know, literary stuff

EDITOR’S NOTE: After ANOTHER Florida book ban, this seems quite timely.

It might be - and probably is - one of my strange quirks but whenever I notice someone being interviewed on TV in front of a bookcase, I’m always trying to see what books they have. Every time.

As I mentioned in my other bookcase column (May 22) , I have a bit of a problem with books. I can’t get rid of them. I recently drove all the way to Jacksonville to unload five different boxes of books to 2nd and Charles. There were a few it was tough to part with but, you know, it’s not like I should live in a library or something. (Actually, I sorta do.)

This is the top half of my higher-level bookcase. Some fun stuff here

Since I’m nosey enough to want to look at someone else’s bookcase, I thought maybe a few folks would wonder about what sorts of stuff I’ve crammed into my dome and what might be worth checking out. Free advice! Exactly what it’s worth!

My top shelf, well, a good half of it, is devoted to my own stuff. The first 14 volumes are mine; three editions of “Bob Dylan: A Descriptive, Critical Discography” and then my “Teaching Huckleberry Finn” and then the two versions of “Last Time Out.” After that, my brand new book, “Nashua: How Ronald Reagan led us to Donald Trump” my spicy look back at N.H. politics. (So far, 7 5-star reviews on Amazon)

My goal, upon retirement, was to fill that top shelf with, well, top-shelf books. Not there yet. But I have another one coming out in March - “Diamond Duels” - what I think will be a cool baseball book, looking at the matchups between the game’s greatest players. Cardinals’ great Stan Musial batted 356 times against Braves’ Warren Spahn over their careers. That’s almost a whole season against a single pitcher. Wow!

After that, the remaining seven volumes deal with the work, the legacy, the brilliance of Ernest Hemingway. I put them all there, hoping for osmosis. The “One True Sentence” book was a neat idea, getting writers to select a single Hemingway sentence and tell us why it rocks. “The Collected Stories Of Ernest Hemingway” is essential and there’s a hard-to-find older book “Hemingway and His Critics” and a slim volume “Hemingway on Writing” which I bought at Hemingway’s house in Key West. He wasn’t home but his billions of cats were.

Hemingway hasn’t always been in favor and may not have been the sweetest guy. But the sparkling prose of those early stories, his magical descriptions and tart dialogue, they are always worth re-reading. Teaching them was always a lot of fun. If you haven’t read him lately, sit down with a story or two. It’s cleansing.

And that last big white book I loved so much, I sent a copy to my old boss, telling him there’d be a quiz. (Haven’t given it to him yet.) “A New Literary History of America” has contemporary writers taking on all sorts of fascinating developments in history, politics, literature, culture (Chuck Berry, Bob Dylan) and even film stars like Linda Lovelace. (wink)

I’ve often thought it would be a fun story to write about what books might say to one another, resting next to each other on a bookshelf. It’d be fun to eavesdrop, wouldn’t it? Like on my Shelf Two, you’d have the wry J.D. Salinger - a book on “Catcher In The Rye’s” Holden Caulfield quipping with smart-ass Joseph Heller about “Catch 22.” It would be fun. There’s a fascinating book of conversations with Heller I got in D.C., who is as deft in interviews as he is on the page.

I have a bit of a soft spot for Heller because as a freshman - and I WAS fresh - I read his “Something Happened,” a book as unlike “Catch 22” as Mozart is from Puff Daddy or Puff Diddy or whatever it is this week. After I’d read it, I sat in the stacks of the Rivier College library and read, in Saturday Review, a brilliant essay by reviewer John Aldridge that was exactly what I thought the book was all about. It was the first time I thought maybe I CAN understand high-level writing and do OK in this college gig. I was sort of a jock at the time, sitting in classes with 20 Catholic girls. It was a lot to deal with.

There’s also some Kurt Vonnegut, whom I actually got to meet (along with Heller!) some Vonnegut graduation speeches, a lovely collection of Anton Chekhov stories (“The Lady With The Dog”!) to James Joyce’s “Dubliners” (there’s a space there where I took out my other “Dubliners” copy to write my column the other day.) There’s also an E.L. Doctorow collection of essays (a dandy on Hemingway), “What To Read And Why” by Francine Prose (pretty good stuff) and five volumes by the wild man of American Literature, Hunter S. Thompson.

If you’ve never read Hunter - the “Fear And Loathing at Rolling Stone” book is the one to get. Ultra conservative writer William F. Buckley said “Hunter Thompson elicits the same kind of admiration one would feel for a streaker at Queen Victoria’s funeral.” That was good enough for me, though Hunter once got me into trouble. That’s a story for another day. (And it’s a good one!)

In my sports writing days - which with FSU in the College World Series evidently aren’t over yet (CWS pieces drew 146, 315, 175 views; thanks Nole fans!) - I always used to get some odd looks, bringing stuff from this bookcase on road trips. It was a way for me to get somewhere away from the sports pages which I figured some day, might be a good thing for me and maybe, my writing.

And it WAS a good thing once I found myself, some years later, standing in the front of a high school English class, a place where I’d actually hang out for a dozen years and have a helluva time all sorts of cool stuff from this bookcase. That was pre-ban.

Could an old sportswriter teach an intricate Chekhov story about love and get the kids to actually love it and inspire two fantastic classroom chats about love, what it means, where it goes, why it stays?

Not quite sure how it happened but I know this - the stuff in this bookcase made it happen.