The Chicago Public Library picked Go Tell It on the Mountain, the first novel by James Baldwin, as the Spring 2007 selection for One Book, One Chicago. I have tried to read each season’s selection since the program was inaugurated in 2001. Some selections have been familiar, many unfamiliar. Go Tell It on the Mountain belongs to the latter category.

The back jacket cover of the book reads:

James Baldwin’s stunning first novel is now an American classic. With startling realism that brings Harlem and the black experience vividly to life, this is a work that touches the heart with emotion while it stimulates the mind with its narrative style, symbolism, and excoriating vision of racism in America.

Moving through time from the rural South to the northern ghetto, starkly contrasting the attitudes of two generations of an embattled family, Go Tell It on the Mountain is an unsurpassed portrayal of human beings caught up in a dramatic struggle and a society confronting inevitable change.

It struck me as an appropriate book to begin today. Today marks the 60th anniversary of the day Jackie Robinson put on a Brooklyn Dodgers uniform in a regular-season game for the first time, thus re-integrating Major League baseball forever.

One of Vladimir Nabokov‘s earlier works, Laughter in the Dark tells the story of a respectable, middle-aged man who abandons his wife for a lover half his age. This affection results in a mutually parasitic relationship. The themes Nabokov would revive in many of his later works, and most notably in Lolita. This novel interests me for several reasons. I have enjoyed everything I have ever read of Nabokov’s. This story is set in the film world of the 1930s Weimar Republic Berlin. And the book appeared as a minor plot device in LOST.

I think any one of those is reason enough to read it, don’t you?

Terry Prachett and Neil Gaiman have said, “Good Omens was written by two people who at the time were not at all well known except by the people who already knew them.” Considering the book was originally published in 1990, I must concede they are correct on that point. Neil Gaiman found considerable success with the Sandman series, Neverwhere and American Gods. Terry Prachett’s Discworld series garnered him millions of fans. But in the latter part of the eighties, these things were not yet true. The two aspiring authors collaborated to write this hilarious and irreverent send-up of the Apocalypse.

It was the blurb on the back of the book that caught my attention. Even more than the authors involved:

According to The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch (the world’s only completely accurate book of prophecies, written in 1655, before she exploded), the world will end on a Saturday. Next Saturday, in fact. Just before dinner. So the armies of Good and Evil are amassing, Atlantis is rising, frogs are falling, tempers are flaring. Everything appears to be going according to Divine Plan. Except a somewhat fussy angel and a fast-living demon—both of whom have lived amongst Earth’s mortals since The Beginning and have grown rather fond of the lifestyle—are not actually look forward to the coming Rapture. And someone seems to have misplaced the Anticrist…

When I was at the bookstore last, I picked up To Kill a Mockingbird. I knew that Harper Lee and Truman Capote had been childhood friends. Lee has stated that she based the character, Dill Harris, on Capote. One of the great joys of bookstores lies in browsing them. A discovery on one shelf triggers a thought. I stalk to another section of the store looking for something– anything– inspired by that fleeting connection. To Kill a Mockingbird led to In Cold Blood. This non-fiction novel details the savage Clutter family murders in Holcomb, Kansas in 1959 and their aftermath.

Fascinated by a brief news item about the murders, Capote traveled with Lee to Holcomb and visited the scene of the massacre. The eccentric Capote spent six years writing this book– the story had that strong of an effect on him. The New York Review of Books wrote, “[In Cold Blood is] the best documentary account of an American crime ever written… The book chills the blood and exercises the intelligence … harrowing.” Whirl has encouraged me to read In Cold Blood for years. I think it is time I do.

I think there is power in science fiction. I think there is a particular power in taking a simple, improbable– but not altogether impossible– premise and drawing from it a compelling story. PD James hypothesizes in The Children of Men that in 1995 the human race became infertile. She begins her story on 1. January, 2021: the last generation to be born is now adult. She shares a world where intimacy loses allure, art is abandoned, hope is lost. — And then proceeds to use that dark, unsettling setting to frame a story of risk, commitment and the joys and anguish of love.

This is another one of those books I should have read years ago but for whatever reason never did. It was only last year that I saw Gregory Peck in the film. I am sure there is a lesson in this experience about squandering life on trivial amusements. Recently I corrected this sort of oversight with Joseph Heller‘s Catch-22. I am now– during black history month– correcting another delinquency with Harper Lee. To Kill a Mockingbird has won the Pulitzer Prize and sold millions of copies. I just learned that librarians across the country voted this book the best novel of the twentieth century. Whirl loves this story; she is quite pleased I am reading it. I am, too.