My Life in Seventeen Books - A Literary Memoir

"A memoir for the bookish-inclined, using personal stories to demonstrate how books have a magical way to move a person from one stage of life to the next. Former bookseller, longtime publisher and author Jon M. Sweeney shows-with history and anecdotes centering around books such as Thoreau's Journal, Tagore's Gitanjali, Martin Buber's Hasidic Tales, and Tolstoy's Twenty-three Tales-what it means to be carried by a book. He explores the discovery that once accompanied finding books, and books finding us. He ponders the smell of an old volume, its heft, and why bibliophiles carry them around even without reading them. He demonstrates how and why there is magic and enchantment that takes place between people and books"--

List of contents

Prologue

Chapter 1: The Martin Buber Book I Carried While My Marriage Failed

Chapter 2: Three Inches of Hitler in Very Small Hands

Chapter 3: A Means of Escape with My Side of the Mountain

Chapter 4: Forbidden Books for Ordinary Teenage Trauma

Chapter 5: In Search of Wendell Berry and an Expected Life

Chapter 6: Monica Furlong’s Thomas Merton and How to Ruin a Honeymoon

Chapter 7: Finding Tagore in Harvard Square

Chapter 8: Tolstoy’s Twenty-three Tales and Learning to Walk on Water

Chapter 9: Sitting with Swami and The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna

Chapter 10: Hand-held Devotion (Books with Pictures)

Chapter 11: Sin and Mercy at Brighton Rock

Chapter 12: A Tiny Volume of What’s Impossible

Chapter 13: Carrying Baron Corvo and My Own Petty Animus

Chapter 14: With Patience Like Spring and Thoreau’s Journal

Chapter 15: Ghost Stories as Kids Go Off to College

Chapter 16: Black Elk Speaks and the Mystery of Religious Identity

Chapter 17: Montaigne’s Essays and the Dependability of Change

Afterword: All the Rest and What’s Next

Acknowledgements

Sources and Notes

About the Author

Index

About the author

Jon M. Sweeney is an award-winning author who has been interviewed in the Dallas Morning News and The Irish Catholic, and on television at CBS Saturday Morning. His book, The Pope Who Quit, (Doubleday/Image) was optioned by HBO. He is also author of forty other books on spirituality, mysticism, and religion, including Meister Eckhart’s Book of the Heart, with Mark S. Burrows (Hampton Roads), the biography Nicholas Black Elk: Medicine Man, Catechist, Saint (Liturgical Press), and Thomas Merton: An Introduction to His Life and Practices (St. Martin’s Essentials and Penguin Random House Audio, 2021).

His bookish reputation is nothing new. In 2014, Publishers Weekly featured Jon in an interview titled, “A Life in Books and On the Move.” He began the 1990s as a theological bookseller in Cambridge, and ended the decade founding a multifaith publishing house, SkyLight Paths Publishing, in Vermont. He’s worked in books and publishing ever since. Today he writes, reviews, edits, and recommends books, speaks regularly at literary and religious conferences, is a Catholic married to a rabbi, and is active on social media (Twitter @jonmsweeney; Facebook jonmsweeney). Sweeney lives in the Riverwest neighborhood of Milwaukee.

Summary

A memoir for the bookish-inclined, using personal stories to demonstrate how books have a magical way to move a person from one stage of life to the next.

“This is a small gem of a book, tender, humble, loving. —Mary Gordon

“Sweeney makes a charming companion, telling stories in joyful reflection.” —Jeff Deutsch, author of In Praise of Good Bookstores

Former bookseller, longtime publisher and author Jon M. Sweeney shows—with history and anecdotes centering around books such as Thoreau’s Journal, Tagore’s Gitanjali, Martin Buber’s Hasidic Tales, and Tolstoy’s Twenty-three Tales—what it means to be carried by a book. He explores the discovery that once accompanied finding books, and books finding us. He ponders the smell of an old volume, its heft, and why bibliophiles carry them around even without reading them. He demonstrates how and why there is magic and enchantment that takes place between people and books.

Foreword

• Special pre-pub review copy mailing to independent booksellers. Author intends to do readings and talks in bookstores wherever he is invited.
• Strong social media campaign.
• We’ll launch with a Facebook Live event and an in-person at Boswell Book Company in Milwaukee where author is well-known.
• Extended galley mailing.
• Goodreads giveaway.
• Library Thing giveaway.
• IndieBound Advance Access.

Product details

• Authors: Jon M Sweeney, Jon M. Sweeney
• Publisher: Ingram Publishers Services
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 07.05.2024
• EAN: 9781958972311
• ISBN: 978-1-958972-31-1
• No. of pages: 180
• Dimensions: 144 mm x 224 mm x 17 mm
• Weight: 340 g
• Subjects: Fiction > Narrative literature > Letters, diaries; RELIGION / Essays