MY LIFE IN SEVENTEEN BOOKS

Sweeney celebrates the books that never left him in this literary memoir.

Some books just get their hooks into you. “Have you carried a book in your bag long after the time of reading it has passed, because it has become essential for you in ways that would be difficult to explain?” asks Sweeney early in this volume, which is all about the amazing bond that can form—sometimes unexpectedly—between a reader and a particular tome. Often these books come to readers at key moments in their lives, aiding them in understanding the path forward. Tales of the Hasidim by Martin Buber, for example, which Sweeney found in a used bookshop while traveling for work, helped him to contextualize his failing marriage. Some reading experiences come with a blush of embarrassment: At the age of 21, Sweeney brought a biography of activist Thomas Merton on his honeymoon, much to the chagrin of his bride. (It wasn’t the only time a book got him into trouble; his sixth grade teacher was disturbed to notice Sweeney happily making his way through a 1,400-page biography of Adolf Hitler.) His love of Wendell Berry’s Recollected Essays inspired a college-age Sweeney to spend his spring break driving to Kentucky to try to meet the man. From classics by Tagore, Tolstoy, and Thoreau to more obscure works, like the Bengali religious text The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna and Frederick Rolfe’s “fantasy papal novel” Hadrian the Seventh, the author charts his personal and spiritual development through the texts he could never seem to put down, even after he finished reading them. Sweeney’s affinity for books is apparent in every sentence of his lush prose: “This chapter is also about how pictures can make a book something other-wordly: passionate pages moving the heart, or feet, and stirring the emotions. At certain books we are meant to gaze. We look at them differently than others. We take them in, more than read them.” The memoir will be of greatest interest to spiritual readers, but all book-lovers will recognize themselves in these essays.

A meandering bibliophile’s memoir that links spiritual development to the written word.