Reading for the holidays

I often put together a “books for Christmas” column on the assumption that people who read newspaper columns are also people who read books. And that they therefore like to give and get books as gifts.

This year, rather than coming up with a set of recommendations, I decided to just write about what I’ve been reading and hope to read over the holidays, preferably while somewhere with palm trees, sand and pelicans.

The place to begin was The

Bookstore at Library Square in

Little Rock, now shifted next door to join the Galleries at Library Square. Just as people who read newspaper columns read books, people who read books tend to have favorite used bookstores.

The first find was Bob Dylan’s autobiography “Chronicles: Volume I.” For some reason, despite having misspent a chunk of my youth trying to figure out what so many Dylan songs “meant,” I’d never got around to reading it (I haven’t listened to his album of Sinatra covers either, but that’s on purpose, for a different reason — because the concept is simply too weird).

I’m still undecided as to whether Dylan is a prophet, a phony with an unequaled skill at self-mythology and promotion, or just an unusually gifted songwriter (all of the above?). Maybe “Chronicles” will help.

I loved both Amor Towles’ “A Gentleman in Moscow” (which ingeniously told us about decades of post-revolutionary Russia from the lone vantage point of a Moscow hotel) and his recent “The Lincoln Highway” (which tells us a lot about 1950s America through a 10-day cross-country road trip), so it’s another case of inexplicable omission when it comes to his debut, “Rules of Civility.”

Seeing it on display reminded me of the negligence, so in the bookstore basket it went.

So too did Joseph Epstein’s “Essays in Biography,” because Epstein truly is, as the blurb on the covers always say, our finest living essayist, and who wouldn’t want to read what he has to say about Saul Bellow, Susan Sontag, and Gore Vidal (along with W.C. Fields, Joe DiMaggio, and Adlai Stevenson)?

It was a sad comment during the flare-up over Epstein’s Wall Street Journal column on Jill Biden (in which he chided her for her insistence on being referred to as “Dr.”) that few of his critics seemed to know who he was (thereby providing additional confirmation that credentialed doesn’t mean educated).

Every literate person should know who Joseph Epstein is and try to read whatever he writes, for the sheer pleasure of seeing how smoothly the English language can be employed.

On the undeniably less erudite side, there was, for the princely sum of $1 and looking not even gently used, “101 Horror Movies You Must See Before You Die.” I’m always a soft touch for such compendiums because I want to see what makes it on to other people’s lists and compare them to mine. I’ve also retained my juvenile affection for horror movies because the supposedly disreputable genre still seems to be the one that most effectively exploits the potential of the technology of moving pictures (meaning the ability to make us jump out of our seats in dark movie theaters).

This particular volume, so far as I can tell, has only two significant omissions — “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” and “Creature from the Black Lagoon,” the latter of which I partially rectified, at least in my own mind, by putting it on the shelf next to a copy of “Horror Cinema: The Best Scary Movies of All Time,” which features the “Gill-Man” on the cover.

Apart from the used bookstore purchases, others I hope to get to include Edward White’s “The Twelve Lives of Alfred Hitchcock” (which I’ve now checked out from the library for the third time and still haven’t started), Ronald Brownstein’s “Rock Me on the Water” (continuing an immersion in late 1960s/early 1970s Los Angeles/ Hollywood that has included Peter Biskind’s “Easy Riders, Raging Bulls” and Sam Wasson’s “The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood”), “Led Zeppelin: The Biography” by Bob Spitz (who previously wrote on Dylan and the Beatles), and, again inexplicably belatedly, Terry Teachout’s biography of H.L. Mencken, appropriately titled “The Skeptic” (which I recently pulled from a free book bin).

Before all that, however, I’ve got to finish some others (a slow but restless reader, I start a lot more books than I finish, but always feel bad when I don’t): John McWhorter’s “Woke Racism” (which makes a nearly irrefutable case that the real racists are the “anti-racists”), Quentin Tarantino’s “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” (a captivating back story to my favorite movie of the past three or four years), and John Williams’ “Stoner” (another omission, of which I was embarrassingly reminded by a recent Philip Martin piece).

The odds that I will get through all this in the next few weeks are, of course, about the same as my voluntarily pulling up stakes and moving to Portland or beginning a late-life career as an NFL running back.

Probably even lower, because I won’t be able to resist re-watching Peter Jackson’s “The Beatles: Get Back.”