News and Opinion from Sisters, Oregon
News and Opinion from Sisters, Oregon
My 5.11 Tactical Rush72 2.0 pack — a fabulous piece of gear, BTW — proudly bears a morale patch that proclaims “ I Cannot Live Without Books.” Truer words never rode on nylon and velcro.
The forthcoming Sisters Festival of Books (see story) got me thinking about my relationship with books. Reading made me who I am. I’m sitting at my desk at The Nugget banging out this string of words on a keyboard because some time around 12 or 13 years old I read things that made me say to myself “I want to do that.”
It was pulp adventure, mystery, and Western writers who lit the fire. I could think of nothing more wonderful than to be able to put down words on paper that could thrill and move someone the way those blood-and-thunder yarns hit me.
My reading expanded as I grew older, as it does, but I never lost my taste for pulpy goodness. Used to be that the literary folk turned their nose up at suchlike, but in recent decades genre fiction has gotten the respect it deserves. Because, it turns out, it is possible to write beautiful sentences AND tell a ripping yarn.
The deepest, most lasting interests in my life have come from reading books. “The Frontiersmen,” by Allan W. Eckert bent the twig when I was about 14 years old, planting a lifelong fascination with the early Ohio River Valley frontier; Clifford Irving’s roman a clef “Tom Mix and Pancho Villa” spurred a decades-long obsession with the Mexican Revolution.
My love of music distills down to words, too. I’m a lyrics guy, and my favorite songwriters — from Kris Kristofferson to Steve Earle to Evan Felker — are self-consciously literary fellers.
My closest friends are book junkies, and nothing is more pleasing than sharing a book that we know the other is going to devour.
Nowadays, the vast majority of my reading is non-fiction. Done right, narrative history and journalism can serve up writing as lyrical and compelling as anything in fiction. My time for actual reading of books is more constrained than I’d like it to be, so I often turn to audiobooks, which I can listen to while I throw your Nugget into bins at the post office and at doorsteps around town. When I’m deep into a good book, I find it absolutely necessary to mow the lawn. Frequently. I might mow yours and your neighbor’s too, just to keep rolling.
I am closing out a binge on the work of Steve Coll, a Pulitzer Prize winner for his book “Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001.” The follow-up is just as good and just as dismaying: “Directorate S: The C.I.A. and America’s Secret Wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan.” If you want to know how we became involved in Afghanistan, and how that involvement turned into a slow-motion train wreck — all with compelling portraits of the actors in the drama, great and small — these books are for you.
Coll’s most recent tome is “The Achilles Trap: Saddam Hussein, the C.I.A., and the Origins of America’s Invasion of Iraq,” which mines a treasure trove of thousands of hours of Saddam Hussein’s recorded meetings with his inner circle to illuminate how misperception and short-sighted self-interest on all sides led to two very messy wars in the Gulf. (The First Gulf War seemed pretty tidy to us, but the aftermath was a bloody and protracted nightmare for Kurds and Iraqi Shiites — and led to a decade of failed attempts at regime change through covert action, and ultimately the 2003 invasion of Iraq.)
I cannot overstate how good these books are — providing deep and compelling insight into events that shaped the world we live in today.
That’s what books can do for us. Can’t live without ’em.
Jim Cornelius is editor in chief of The Nugget and author of “Warriors of the Wildlands: True Tales of the Frontier Partisans.” A history buff, he explores frontier history across three centuries and several continents on his podcast, The Frontier Partisans. For more information visit www.frontierpartisans.com.
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