Philip Connors is the
author of Fire
Season: Field Notes from a Wilderness Lookout, out from Ecco/HarperCollins April 5, 2011. His essays and reviews
have appeared in n+1, Harper's, the
Nation, the Paris Review and the London Review of Books. For nearly a decade he has worked as a
fire lookout in New Mexico's Gila National Forest. Watch the video for Fire Season here.
On your nightstand now:
I just visited a cool little bookstore in Truth or Consequences, N.M.--Black Cat Books--and loaded up on used paperbacks. Among them: The Liars Club by Mary Karr (yes, I'm coming to it awfully late); The Land of Little Rain by Mary Austin (her classic about the California desert); and The River Why by David James Duncan (which my friends from the Northwest tell me is great). I also just finished two others: Strangers on a Train by Patricia Highsmith, which offers the incomparably creepy thrill of watching a regular guy become ensnared in a murder plot almost against his will, and before that John Jeremiah Sullivan's Blood Horses, a beautiful meditation on his sportswriter father and the allure of horse racing.
Favorite book when you
were a child:
I was a huge fan of the Hardy Boys series and Louis L'Amour's westerns. Crime-solving and frontier-living: the secret thrills of many an asthmatic, bookish boy.
Your top five authors:
Now that's just impossible. To narrow it down, how about living American writers of prose: Don DeLillo, Joan Didion, Rebecca Solnit, Denis Johnson and Cormac McCarthy.
Book you've faked reading:
The Bible.
Book you're an evangelist for:
I'm an evangelist for a lot of books--among novels, Blood Meridian and Housekeeping are favorites--but lately the writer I've been championing to anyone who will listen is Ellen Meloy. She died an untimely death in 2004 with four books to her credit: Raven's Exile, The Last Cheater's Waltz, The Anthropology of Turquoise and Eating Stone. They're all beautiful meditations on humanity's relationship to the wild, yet they never sermonize. She has a charming sense of humor, very self-deprecating, and an unerring eye for absurdity and paradox. She's a scandalously under-known treasure of American letters. The word must be spread.
Book you've bought for the cover:
I can't think of one. I have bought a book in spite of its cover, though: most recently the paperback of The Beautiful Struggle by Ta-Nehisi Coates, which I found deeply uninspiring. The cover, that is. The book is fantastic.
Book that changed your life:
A River Runs Through It by Norman Maclean. I read it on a train ride from Seattle to Minneapolis after hitchhiking in the opposite direction. Before then I'd thought about transferring to the University of Montana and abandoning print journalism for fiction writing, and that book sealed the deal. Except, as it turned out, I failed at writing fiction and stumbled into a short-lived career in print journalism to satisfy the student-loan collectors. The book also proved weirdly prophetic when my younger brother, as does the younger brother in the title novella, died a violent death at a very young age. The book both foreshadowed my brother's death and consoled me for it. I think it saved my life--and I don't say that lightly.
Favorite line from a book:
I've kept a commonplace book for 15 years, so I've written down a thousand lines I like. But the one I've turned to as inspiration for my next book comes from E.M. Cioran: "Write books only if you are going to say in them the things you would never dare confide to anyone."
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
Love in the Time of Cholera by Garcia Marquez. Rarely has a book so absorbed me in a fictional world.