Shelfies #3: Jeffrey Alan Love

In my early 20s I walked into a bookstore having given up the Dragonlance books of my youth (for Pynchon, Faulkner, Hemingway) when I saw Don Maitz's cover painting for Gene Wolfe's The Shadow of the Torturer and my life changed. It remains my favorite cover of all time, and getting to see the original painting in person was as close to a religious pilgrimage as I'll probably ever get. And as the cover drew me in and I began to read the book, I realized that there was a place in fantasy for me now, as an adult, that this feeling was something I wanted to try to capture for myself. I'm not a first edition hardcover sort of book collector, but I am when it comes to Gene Wolfe.

Butcher's Crossing by John Williams, The Shootist by Glendon Swarthout, True Grit by Charles Portis - many of my favorite books to reread are Westerns. Just as my love of fantasy comes from a childhood of growing up in Europe and running around dark German forests and mist-shrouded castles, my memories of Saturday afternoons as a child always seem to involve watching a Western film on tv with my father. E.L. Doctorow's debut novel Welcome to Hard Times takes the tropes of the western, the battle of good vs evil, and burns it all to the ground. This is one of those rare books where the tragic ending truly is a catharsis, a purging of emotion both inevitable and surprising. It is the feeling I chase when I read a book, that I hope awaits me when I reach the end. (And as an aside: Ron Jaworowski's Small Town Sins has three of the best cathartic endings I've read in years - THREE IN ONE BOOK! It's not fair.)

I've moved every few years of my entire life, but when I moved to Northern California I thought I had finally found the place where I belong. The weather, the landscape, the smell of the Redwoods, the ocean - it felt like home. And then life and world events happened and I moved away. And while I was mourning leaving I saw that Sara Gran, one of my favorite authors, was a writer on a tv show called Chance that was filmed in the Bay Area. And so every night I would watch an episode and feel like, in some way, I was back there. Chance was based upon a novel by Kem Nunn, so I picked up The Dogs of Winter, another book of his based in Northern California. An "agnostic surf fable," the book deals with an aging surf photographer who feels that he is dead to the world, that his life is over. Coming out of the pandemic, out of pain and loss of family members, I felt that too. But then something happens that calls him back to life, to be reborn through trial and pain and suffering. And that was something I needed too. That I still need. And when I want to return to Northern California, and to remember that life is not over, that you can find your way through pain and loss, I reread The Dogs of Winter.

Jeffrey Alan Love is an award-winning artist and writer. www.jeffreyalanlove.com

Shelfies is edited by Lavie Tidhar and Jared Shurin. If you are interested in sharing a shelfie, please let us know.