As John Thorndike’s father fell victim to Alzheimer's, his main hope was to stay in his own house. The Last of His Mind is the story of the year he spent taking care of his father.  

It's a heartwarming and heartbreaking book with an incredible story arc. Run out and get it - now.

I also appreciate John's feelings about books:  

"I probably have a reading disorder, because if I go without for a day or two, I get twitchy. I can live without a cell phone or a television, but I'd be laid waste if books were forbidden. I think of the Roman poet Ovid, banished by Augustus to a town on the Black Sea, where no one spoke Latin and books were hard to come by. Ovid kept writing, but after ten years of exile from Rome and his language, he died. How glad I am that instead, we swim in a sea of books."

How could I not ask John for his list of recommendations?  Here's what he sent me:

Five hundred books sit on my shelves, and no matter which half dozen I might choose as favorites, I’d be neglecting fifty others I love or that at one time swept me away. So I’ll name just three, all by James Salter.

A friend gave me the novel Light Years over twenty years ago, as I set out on a research trip into Mexico. Night after night I read it in my van, unhurried, lying under a hanging candle. After the last page I closed the book and lay with it on my chest, feeling the weight of it, the soft rise and fall—and after thirty minutes opened the book to the first page and began again.

It’s the story of a couple coming apart. Both have been unfaithful, but Nedra is now the driving force. To her husband, Viri, “she was understanding, even affectionate, though they slept as if there were an agreement between them; not so much as a foot ever touched. There was an agreement, it was marriage. “‘We must speak of it like a dead person,’” she told him.

Book suggestions are hugely subjective, and one reason Light Years grabs me is that in it I hear echoes of my parents’ divorce. But I also love how Salter writes. “Sentence for sentence,” as Richard Ford says, “Salter is the master.” I love the slantwise indirection of his characters’ dialogue, sometimes followed by a piercing, inescapable truth. “But isn’t it better,” Nedra asks her husband, “to be someone who follows her true life and is happy and generous, than an embittered woman who is loyal? Isn’t that so?”

The plot is amorphous. The book covers about twenty years, and offers  no more redemption than one finds in daily life. Which is plenty. Which under Salter’s hand is an endless fascination. For me, Light Years is the best of all novels, it’s the one I read again and again. Seldom, any more, from start to finish: I just open it up and read wherever I land. It’s like a meal. I don’t eat everything in my cupboard in one sitting, but I eat some of it every day.

Salter’s memoir is Burning The Days. It’s a kind of autobiography in which we follow Salter’s life as a pilot (he flew jets in Korea and Europe, and his aviation writing, here and elsewhere, is exquisite), followed by his leap to an entirely different life as a writer.

He explains in the book’s preface, “If you can think of life, for a moment, as a large house with a nursery, living and dining rooms, bedrooms, study, and so forth, all unfamiliar and bright, the chapters which follow are, in a way, like looking through the windows of this house. Certain occupants will be glimpsed only briefly. Visitors come and go. At some windows you may wish to stay longer, but alas. As with any house, all within cannot be seen.”

What he does show us is not merely bright, it’s incandescent. His portraits—of fellow fliers, of spectacular young and older women, of Hollywood figures like Polanski and Tate and Redford—are irresistible. Each passage is merely words on a page, and I should be able to figure out how he does it. I read the passage again. I can’t imitate it nor would I want to. But I try to figure out how Salter can carry me off—and inevitably, as I read, I’m again carried off and forget about how he does it.

A chapter in Light Years begins, “Life is weather. Life is meals,” and five years ago Salter and his wife, Kay Salter, published a book about food, about dining, about life in the kitchen and at restaurant tables. Life is Meals is a collection of tiny essays, one or two a day for the full year. There are a few menus, but far more stories: about Louis Pasteur, about the Michelin Guide, about Winston Churchill—who once described a meal thus: “Well, dinner would have been splendid if the wine had been as cold as the soup, the beef as rare as the service, the brandy as old as the fish, and the maid as willing as the Duchess.”

I’m glad for the Salters’ light touch, and have moved the book, once again, to the table where I eat. I find it’s a book I can read every year. My first time, at least for the first half of the book, I read the passages aloud to my girlfriend, during the six months she was dying of cancer. Under July 18, her last day, there’s a description of the lobster, that “formidable creature,” along with suggestions on how to pick a good one for dinner. It’s not the best entry in the book, but I go back to it over and over.

Of course my list is subjective. How could it be otherwise?