Books My Father Bought For Me
Remembering Dad On His Birthday
Today marks the beginning of handover from summer to autumn. It’s also my Dad’s birthday. He passed away in 2021, and each year we have a meal in his memory.
At the moment, a dining room table serves as a memorial, with a copper brass vessel bearing sticks of incense, a platter of fruit and treats, and a cup of milk tea, the way Dad liked it. This last summer day feels like autumn already.
Sometimes, we observe changes of seasons, and changed lives, with offerings.
A roast chicken, golden red, reproduces a recipe from Dad’s old notebook. The notebook, with its mottled black and white composition cover and a table of measurements on the inside, was like the kind I used in school. The book was filled with Dad’s clean, strong script in black ink, in a cursive style good for fountain pens, neither childish nor ham-fisted. His notes showed how to make all kinds of foods, and they included clippings and careful blocks of text. Work notes. He had little time outside of work, immersed in the deep time of survival.
On days like this, I am reminded of long time and the handover of light.
The hours are redrawn with autumn’s lines, with the rising and setting of the sun, and the fattening and slimming of the moon. Without fail, daylight’s ration recedes before the cold peaks, frozen drowsy for weeks to come, and later awakened by the next long thaw. After the longest day passes, minute slices, (both “min-itt” and “mein-oot”) slips through sunset maws, consumed.
Within my walls, this is a time of moon cakes and cooler drier air. A modest harvest of a garden, culling of old growth, and the packing away of summer.
No sooner does Autumn begin, when Winter is in the mind, and feast days become processions of gathering, making, and sharing. Gifts. Our gifts were feasts, but in the past, some were wrapped things sometimes.
Dad worked long hours - it was a big deal that he was able to sit at home. He had no choice, you see, the way his life was, to eat you could not sit still, to have shelter from the sky and strangers, you had to move and make things happen. To have a future, you strayed from the past. His motion granted my stillness. He stood so that I could sit. And read.
His gifts to me began before I was born. Life. Living. A life. A way of life. A way of living, including reading. Books.
Books remind me of one day. It was winter during its shortest days. It was that time of the year, where we practiced what we learned from a land which became our land, its ways folded into our ways — including a custom where children, if they were good and if their parents could afford it, would receive gifts on a special day that was not their birthday.
It so happened that my birthday is close to that special day too, and sometimes, I got more than one gift. I realized much later, how big that was, how big of a deal, given the childhoods that each my parents had. I half-remember most of the gifts but there was one year where the gift remains.
That winter, I wrote down a list of books I wanted to read. I was very young. There may have been a plan for an extended stay at the local library. Soon after I wrote my list, and forgot about it, a tall brown paper bag with handles was sitting on our long rosewood table. That table would soon be covered with red tablecloth, and a feast in a few days, for family and friends.
Another feast, however, had been prepared, just for me. Dad was working but squeezed in time for a list scrawled on paper by his son. A wish-list became a stack of stories of distant worlds. He did it himself with non-existent time.
Here is part of that stack of books, from my Dad to me. You know them all.
It’s not a “recommendation list”, it’s not “complete”, that’s not what I’m doing.
Your lists are probably better than mine but my list reminds me of Dad.
I’m posting some old-time covers, riffing with a single line for epic arcs.
Dad, another birthday, thank you for everything.
Everything is on the table, a feast has been prepared.
Dune. Dune Messiah. Children of Dune. God Emperor of Dune. Frank Herbert
I started and stopped reading it, then something took hold a year later, and this epic became mine within hours, “my desert, my Arrakis, my Dune”.
Foundation. Foundation and Empire. Second Foundation. Isaac Asimov
Psychedelic retro paperbacks.
These old-time covers were cool.
This remixing of historical arcs underscores the high drama of the human condition spread across the stars of a galactic empire come undone, beginning again where it had ended, at the center of home.
Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, The Restaurant At The End of The Universe, Life, The Universe & Everything, by Douglas Adams
The wry sardonic humor of someone just trying to get through the day, while bumming rides through a large and hilariously indifferent galaxy. Don’t Panic.
2001: A Space Odyssey. 2010. Arthur C. Clarke
These novels were products of their time, reflecting pre- and post- Moon landing eras, early and late Cold War sensibilities - Man small in the face of unfathomable ancient intelligences. The behind the scenes story within a story of Clarke’s collaboration with director Stanley Kubrick is its own epic.
Closing thoughts.
Today, I drink a cup of milk tea, made the way Dad liked it. This was a brief break from editing a novel, born in the weeks after Dad passed away. My brilliant editor, who has become a trusted friend and advisor, reminded me that we’re at 200,000+ words, it has been coming together nicely - a moment of stillness keeps me moving forward.
Beautiful essay - thank you.
(P.S. those retro Foundation covers are so cool)
I look forward to reading your book when it’s published.