“Random Family,” Adrian Nicole LeBlanc

There has been no finer nonfiction written in the last century than this penetrating examination not only of a particular family and its travails (written with the complex plot of a Tolstoy novel), but also of the ways in which our society is broken, of a system that congratulates itself as democracy and yet is intractably inequitable. This book has no agenda and makes no argument; it simply reveals the truth of the country in which we live, and allows us to formulate our own call to action.

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“The Towers of Trebizond,” Rose Macaulay

This is, without exception, the funniest book I’ve ever read. The phrase book scene (which I won’t delineate further in case you haven’t yet read the book and might enjoy doing so) has made me laugh every time I’ve read it, and I’ve now read it several hundred times. Macaulay has a great gentleness, and though she keeps up her wry take on the absurd, she is also engaged in moral inquiry, in the attempt to know and understand what is right and what is the opposite of right.

“The Renaissance,” Walter Pater

I quoted from the conclusion in my wedding ceremony: “Every moment some form grows perfect in hand or face; some tone on the hills or the sea is choicer than the rest; some mood of passion or insight or intellectual excitement is irresistibly real and attractive to us — for that moment only. Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end. A counted number of pulses only is given to us of a variegated, dramatic life. How may we see in them all that is to be seen in them by the finest senses? How shall we pass most swiftly from point to point, and be present always at the focus where the greatest number of vital forces unite in their purest energy? ... To burn always with this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life.”

“The Portrait of a Lady,” Henry James

I read this whenever I need to be reminded that elegance is not reason enough to live, that we are all spiraling toward despair, and that whatever it is that leads us in that darksome way is probably of our own making. A lushly gorgeous, utterly occupying examination of how innocence is corrupted — and how it can be saved.