The best books that capture human resolve in the face of empty moments of despair

Steinbeck can see through his character’s eyes. I get chills when he captures private moments.

Faces on pickers being pushed off land in the dustbowl during the Depression. I tasted abject poverty when supper was passed out on pie tins—one tablespoon of beans in each. Dimes were gas money to follow a dream of picking work a brochure of orange orchards in California promised, not for bread.

The hardships mesmerized me—burying Grandpa along the highway; daughter Rosasharn rocking her swaddled stillborn to ward off the suspicion of border inspectors. In an abandoned railroad car as a night’s shelter a man was dying from malnutrition.

I was moved by the statement of character when the childless momma kneeled and offered the dying man a breast letting her dead baby’s milk save him from death. Steinbeck inspired me to become a writer—this novel and his Of Mice and Men.

I saw Twain as a standup, audience driven, storyteller with a knack for stretching more than I did as a writer.

Slave Jim, to keep it topical, joining Huck who cleverly faked his death on a raft seeded a row of corn. The Mississippi River becomes the stalk. The exaggeratedly imagined Duke and rightful king of France began narratives that grew arms like an octopus seeding chain letters of nonsense.

I tire from the lengths to which Twain will stretch a situation. That being said, there are reasons I put the novel on my list of favorites. Finn was a collection of stories created over thirty years as a riverboat captain, typed into one adventure.

The other is the scene when Huck’s raft gets hit by the steamboat startled me so much it was as if I were on that raft with him. I remember the moment to this day.

Of my favorites it was The Old Man and the Sea that held me riveted from the first line.

I felt I was walking behind the boy and the old man, listening in and watching them. How the boy loved the old man was how I loved ole Charlie in my novel. Hemingway took the patience to describe the old man and the boy’s thoughts and caring—how a framed picture of the ole man’s wife was face down on a shelf because seeing her was hard on him.

The night excursion alone couldn’t have been written if Hemingway hadn’t experienced it himself—it would seem. When sharks returned, this time, from the deep—I jolted as I was shaken when that Mississippi steamboat struck Huck’s raft. I tell students this short story is the best read ever to learn writing details as an artist would capture them in oil. 

I heard Marilyn Monroe in everything Holly Golightly said. I heard her witticisms. Turned out Truman Capote wrote it using Marilyn’s voice.

Holly, a hooker, her protagonist (apartment neighbor) was an in-the-closet gay man. Holly would climb the fire escape and crawl into his room and snuggle in bed with him as if they were lovers. She never denied she was a hooker – but never hid that she had standards and would expect fifty-dollar tips for washroom attendants.

This novella, as does Grapes and Old Man, demonstrates to me the stage play of life we choose to be in is in acts—we know our assets, limitations and to survive we follow them—in Grapes pickers followed a dream to orange groves—in Old Man—a fisher needed to prove he could get his luck back—and in Tiffany—if she could find playgrounds of the rich, she’d survive.

Where I grew up there was a rotting old gristmill at the end of the road on the corner.

I remember like it was yesterday reading the Hardy Boys Secret of the Old Mill and invited to see the inside of the old mill and my imagination reliving the experience the boys had in coming upon the counterfeiters and ultimately causing their demise.

To me the thrill of that chase was trying never to be caught. I was so enamored with my tour of both floors of the old mill I accepted the offer to kiss my guide, the three-year older neighbor—following which my right foot went through the rotted second floor, my shoe fell below into a vat and one of my tales in my first novel was born.

Hardy Boys books taught comradery—the spirit that helped win the war. They taught me never to give up.