“Oh, it’s all very well to talk,” said the Mole, rather pettishly, he being new to a river and riverside life and its ways.

A river, even one as dammed and sluggish as the Colorado in Austin, is a great place to ponder the power of nature, the insignificance of man, and other Very Deep Thoughts. Humans have always loved rivers; our bodies, after all, are 60 to 70 percent water. Rivers connote baptism, cleanness, purity, replenishment, power, life itself. When I stand in or next to running water, I find it impossible not to think about travel, and possibility, and change; the water now passing by me probably began its journey hundreds of miles away, and that journey probably won’t end for more hundreds of miles, in the ocean. Rivers are simultaneously linear and cyclical, a conundrum I find inexplicably pleasing. (And how can a river “empty” into the sea if it’s always full of water?)

When I was a wee lad, my favorite book was The Wind in the Willows, Kenneth Grahame’s masterpiece of pastoral Edwardian anthropomorphism, featuring Mole, Rat, Badger, and of course the insufferably self-important Toad. Much of the book concerns itself with life along an unnamed river (presumably the Thames, on the banks of which Grahame passed a happy childhood in the village of Cookham in Berkshire), which appealed to me immensely and perhaps helps explain my subsequent fascination with rivers.

Here are some of my personal favorites: the Rio Grande, the Blanco, the Mississippi, the Hudson, the Columbia, the Arkansas, the Roaring Fork, and the Frying Pan; the Thames and the Derwent; the Tiber and the Arno, into which I scattered my mother’s ashes many years ago.

But the river that is closest to my heart, both physically and emotionally, is the Colorado—the Texas Colorado, I mean. We Austinites take an inordinate pride in our river, even though it’s much the smaller of the two by that name in the American Southwest. Indeed, the Colorado and its various natural and manmade tributaries and manifestations (Barton Springs, Hornsby Bend, Lady Bird Lake, Lake Austin, Lake Travis, et al.) are the true center of the city, more than the Capitol or the University of Texas or even Scholz’s.

People engage in all kinds of activities in and on and beside the river: canoeing, kayaking, rowing, jogging, walking, biking, fishing, and picnicking. (And those are just the legal ones!) Even those who don’t spend a lot of time on or near the water (like me) take comfort in knowing that it’s there.

To return to The Wind in the Willows, I’m definitely more Mole than Rat (or at least Mole early in the book, before he’s learned to love the river). I’ve never been much of a swimmer, and Jaws pretty much put me off the ocean for good.

I’ve never been much for water sports, either, but a couple of months ago Heather (who’s a dedicated rower) and our daughters decided to try stand-up paddling, which has become very trendy in Austin. They had a great time, and Heather and Thea have tried to go once a week since then, but until this week I had stubbornly resisted their invitations to join them. Having missed those initial lessons, I knew how frustrated I’d get when Heather and Thea went skimming on ahead of me, standing gracefully on their boards, while I struggled (and occasionally failed) to keep my balance, legs jittering like a sewing machine as my board bobbed helplessly in their wake.

Perhaps I was addled by the early summer heat, but I finally took the plunge (haha!) on the Fourth of July. Of course the lake was crowded with rowers and canoeists and kayakers and stand-up paddlers, all of whom looked considerably more competent and confident than I. We headed off from the Texas Rowing Center dock and up the river to Red Bud Isle; I paddled out from the dock on my knees, and finally, tentatively, managed to stand up on the board. I fell off a few times, and I never did figure out how to get any speed going—Heather and Thea got up there and back way ahead of me, and on the way back, with the wind hitting me in the face and my arms feeling heavier with every stroke, I felt like I might actually be moving backward (which hardly seemed fair, since I was supposed to be heading downstream). I began to wonder if I would ever actually make it back to the dock on my own, or if they’d have to send a motor launch out to tow me in. When I finally made it back and staggered onto the dock, I tried not to sob openly in relief.

“Are you all right?” Heather asked me.

“Oh, yeah,” I gasped, smiling wanly.

I was, of course, lying. At that moment I wanted to curl up and lie down in an air-conditioned room and never, ever go outside again.

A few days later, however, there I was again, standing knee-deep in the river on the north side of Red Bud Isle, facing Tom Miller Dam, with a fly rod in my sweaty hands. Heather and I had decided to try our hands at fly-fishing without the beneficent guidance of Tink Pinkard. Soon after we set up and started casting I looked over and saw that Heather was taking her rod too far back on her back cast—one of the few observations about anyone’s casting that I’m even halfway competent to make—and, like a dummy, said something about it to her. I regretted opening my mouth even before I’d finished speaking.

She glared at me and said, with some asperity, “Would you like me to tell you what you’re doing wrong too?”

Needless to say, I backed off and shut up. Later she apologized for snapping at me, saying that hearing criticism from men, especially men who were no more competent than she, concerning athletic endeavors was one of her particular bugaboos.

I couldn’t blame her, of course; I probably would have reacted exactly the same way, or worse, had she said something similar to me. But of course she never would; I’m the one afflicted with Male Answer Syndrome, after all.

My faux pas aside, the casting went pretty well, at least for a while, but I had gotten no action on the fly I was using (some kind of tan thing that Tink had given us) and finally decided to switch over to a black woolly bugger. (My friend Bruce, a recent convert to fly-fishing, had been going to Red Bud Isle three nights a week, and said he’d caught several fish on woolly buggers.)

I nipped off the old fly and started to tie on the woolly bugger, but my extremely limited knot-tying skills suddenly deserted me, and I couldn’t for the life of me tuck the end of my leader back through the loop…. I stood there, sweating and cursing silently, for about fifteen minutes, trying to tie that knot, before I gave up, took my rod apart, and went in search of Heather, who’d waded around to the other side of a little point. (Consider the words of Jack Ohman: “If you’ve got short, stubby fingers and wear reading glasses, any relaxation you would normally derive from fly-fishing is completely eliminated when you try to tie on a fly.”) I stood and watched her for a while, looping her fly out with stately, calm casts, and realized that this might be yet another activity at which I might never be as good as she.

On the other hand, I’ve found very little to match the satisfaction to be derived on those rare occasions when it’s all working, when you’re casting beautifully and rhythmically, the rod is loading, the line is singing, the fly is rolling out in a perfect straightening curl. At such golden moments, catching a fish is really beside the point; the esthetics of the experience are paramount, and the rhythm, the Zen calm. You’re in the zone. It may not happen often, but it’s a feeling I want to experience as often as I can. So if you come looking for me over the next few evenings, while Heather’s visiting family in Colorado, you may find me on Red Bud Isle, struggling with knots and trying to unsnarl my line. After all, there are worse ways to spend a punishingly hot summer evening than up to one’s knees in a river.

“And you really live by the river? What a jolly life!”

“By it and with it and on it and in it,” said the Rat. “It’s brother and sister to me, and aunts, and company, and food and drink, and (naturally) washing. It’s my world, and I don’t want any other. What it hasn’t got is not worth having, and what it doesn’t know is not worth knowing.”

What we’re reading
Heather: Mary Doria Russell, Doc
Martin: Josh Wilker, Cardboard Gods: An American Tale

Like Rob Fleming, the protagonist of Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity, I seem to have a strong taxonomic impulse. Longtime readers of this blog have already seen several manifestations of my obsession with list making, but Heather and the kids will tell you that one of my more annoying habits is my annual end-of-the-year insistence that we all update the Kohout family top ten lists.

Every New Year’s, I insist that the whole family, and whatever friends and innocent bystanders happen to be around, sit down and list their ten all-time favorite novels, movies, and albums. This always occasions a good deal of grumbling, at least from the family, but they usually do it.

Here are the basic rules:

• Each list must include ten items, no more and no less, though I’ll cut you some slack when it comes to works in multiple parts (for example, we customarily count The Lord of the Rings trilogy or the Harry Potter series as one entry).
• Unlike so many end-of-the-year lists, these aren’t your favorites from the last twelve months; they’re supposed to be your all-time favorites, which is why you’ll always find at least a couple of children’s books on my list.
• The items don’t have to be in order of preference; just your ten favorites, in whatever order they occur to you.
• Plays count as fiction, as does epic poetry (The Odyssey, Paradise Lost); lyrical poetry does not.
• All this is done with the understanding that if you were to do it again tomorrow, you might come up with a very different list.

Since we’re approaching the end of another year, and I’m preparing to crack the whip on the family again, I thought it might be interesting to share my own most recent top-ten lists, even at the risk of exposing myself to the ridicule of our readership. (More so than usual, I mean.)

Without further ado, then, here they are:

Fiction (in alphabetical order by author)
Richard Bradford, Red Sky at Morning
Margaret Wise Brown, The Sailor Dog
Michael Chabon, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union
Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows
Dennis Lehane, The Given Day
Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall
Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale
Richard Price, Lush Life
William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose

Movies (in alphabetical order by title)
Casablanca
Funny Bones
The Godfather/The Godfather Part II
Groundhog Day
Local Hero
A Night at the Opera
Sense and Sensibility
The Third Man
Wings of Desire
Young Frankenstein

Albums (in alphabetical order by artist)
Dave Alvin, Ashgrove
The Cambridge Singers/La Nuova Musica, directed by John Rutter, The Sacred Flame: European Sacred Music of the Renaissance and Baroque Era
Rosanne Cash, Black Cadillac
Manu Chao, Clandestino: Esperando la Ultima Ola
Derek and the Dominoes, Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs
Howlin’ Wolf, The Definitive Collection
Iron and Wine, The Shepherd’s Dog
Mark Knopfler and Emmylou Harris, All the Roadrunning
The Rolling Stones, Exile on Main Street
Jordi Savall, El Nuevo Mundo: Folías Criollas

Bonus List: Nonfiction (in alphabetical order by author)
Brendan C. Boyd and Fred C. Harris, The Great American Baseball Card Flipping, Trading and Bubble Gum Book
Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War< Doris Kearns Goodwin, Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln
Adam Gopnik, Angels and Ages: A Short Book About Darwin, Lincoln, and Modern Life
S. C. Gwynne, Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History
Tracy Kidder, Home Town
Ben Macintyre, Operation Mincemeat: How a Dead Man and a Bizarre Plan Fooled the Nazis and Assured an Allied Victory
David Quammen, The Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinctions
Henry David Thoreau, Walden; or, Life in the Woods
David Winner, Brilliant Orange: The Neurotic Genius of Dutch Football

To me, one of the pleasures of this exercise, besides the inherently enjoyable experience of summoning up cherished treasures from one’s past, is seeing what’s on other people’s lists, which can be quite revealing. (I, for example, clearly have a thing for lightweight movie comedies and for books about Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War.) They can also bring some worthy books or movies or music to your attention, or inspire you finally to read or watch or listen to that classic you’ve been meaning to read or watch or listen to for years.

So what about you, Faithful Reader? What works have mattered most to you over the course of your life?

What we’re reading
Heather: Gail Caldwell, A Strong West Wind: A Memoir
Martin: Elizabeth S. D. Engelhardt, Republic of Barbecue: Stories Beyond the Brisket

It’s the end of July (or, as we call it in Texas, “late spring”), so I’ve been thinking a lot about summer reading, which has almost become a sort of cliché. There’s a lot to be said for curling up with a good book on a cold, wet winter day, of course, but nobody talks about “great winter reading.” No, it’s summer reading that gets all the press.

For some, summer’s a time to dip into a book we would only read on the beach or in the vacation cabin, the literary equivalent of comfort food—meatloaf, say, with a big pile of mashed potatoes on the side. Thrillers and mysteries tend to fall into this category.

For others, summer’s slower pace is the perfect time to tackle the classics, those monumental books we’ve always felt we ought to read but have never quite gotten around to. Reading these books can feel a little bit like eating several helpings of healthy vegetables, instead of doubling down on the meatloaf and mashers; but that, of course, can make you feel very virtuous indeed. Proust? Sure! Tolstoy? Bring it, baby!

As for me, certain books will forever conjure summer in my mind, and I can’t even tell you why. Here’s my (very) personal top ten, with brief annotations, in alphabetical order by author:

Brendan C. Boyd and Fred C. Harris, The Great American Baseball Card Flipping, Trading and Bubble Gum Book. What could possibly be more evocative of an American summer (if you’re Of a Certain Age, that is) than a book of color photos of baseball cards from the 1950s and 1960s, accompanied by wise-ass commentary? Samples: “Earl Torgeson’s two favorite activities were fist-fighting and breaking his shoulder, both of which he did whenever he got the chance.” “Albie Pearson would have been, had he been only six inches taller, almost 5’11”.” And so on.

Richard Bradford, Red Sky at Morning. In this coming-of-age novel, teenager Josh Arnold and his high-strung Southern belle mother move from Mobile, Alabama, to the mountains of New Mexico during World War II and try, with mixed success, to adjust to a new culture and climate. Perhaps the funniest book I’ve ever read, and also one of the sweetest and most moving.

Doris Kearns Goodwin, Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln. A brilliant examination of how Lincoln shrewdly and gently won over some of his bitterest political enemies. In particular, I found the depiction of William Seward’s change of heart—by the time of Lincoln’s assassination, Seward worshipped him—profoundly moving. Goodwin is a wonderful writer, capable of making the familiar feel new: while I was reading this book for the first time, Heather came home one day to find me sitting in a chair, the book in my lap and tears running down my cheeks. “What’s wrong?” she asked anxiously. “They just shot Lincoln!” I sobbed.

Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows. Probably my favorite book when I was a boy; I don’t know how many times I’ve read it, but it must be several dozen by now. The adventures of Mole, Ratty, Mr. Toad, Badger, and all their friends turned me into a lifelong Anglophile, and the drawings by Ernest Shepard (who also illustrated that other English classic, A. A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh) are masterpieces. Nothing evokes the gentle pleasures of an English summer like this book. Oh bliss! Oh poop-poop!

Tracy Kidder, Home Town. I love just about everything I’ve ever read by Tracy Kidder, who I think is perhaps the finest nonfiction writer in the nation, but this is probably my favorite: a close-up of Northampton, Massachusetts, through the eyes of native son Tommy O’Connor, a cop who loves his hometown and touches a diverse (to say the least) cross-section of its citizenry. Highly recommended for anyone who’s ever felt a deep connection to a place, or anyone who’s ever wanted to.

Dennis Lehane, The Given Day. This historical novel interweaves the stories of Danny Coughlin, a young Irish-American cop, and Luther Laurence, a young African-American fleeing criminal violence, in Boston at the end of World War I. Actual events (the flu epidemic, the Boston police strike, the Red Scare) and characters (J. Edgar Hoover, Calvin Coolidge, and, most notably, Babe Ruth) lend the book the texture of reality, while Danny and Luther and the women they love attempt to survive against long odds.

Larry McMurtry, Lonesome Dove. I confess I can no longer read this without thinking of the miniseries—Robert Duvall, Tommy Lee Jones, Diane Lane, et al.—but the book itself is wonderfully suited for reading aloud on summer road trips, as we’ve proven repeatedly over the years while driving to or from Colorado and New Mexico.

J. K. Rowling, the Harry Potter series. Well. What can I say? We all loved all these books. Some of my favorite summer reading memories with the kids involve rushing out (to our neighborhood Randall’s, of all places) to buy multiple copies of the latest Harry Potter book on the day it came out, and then the hush—not quite absolute, but punctuated by occasional snorts and gasps and “How far are you?”s—that fell over the house as each of us burrowed immediately into his or her copy.

Alexander McCall Smith, The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency series. Not really mysteries, despite the title, but the wise and gentle adventures of the sweet but determined and “traditionally built” Precious Ramotswe, the first woman private investigator in Botswana; Mr. J. L. B. Matekoni, her suitor and the proprietor of Tlokweng Road Speedy Motors; Grace Makutsi, Mma Ramotswe’s hyperconscientious assistant; and various others as they confront a succession of quiet moral and ethical challenges.

Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose. A heartbreaking novel about the American West and the people who struggle to live in it, and the most harrowing and realistic fictional portrayal of a marriage I’ve ever read. Framed by the narration of a retired and embittered history professor, the novel is really the story of his grandmother, a refined nineteenth-century Easterner who marries an ambitious young mining engineer and embarks on a peripatetic life of frustration and accommodation.

So there you have it: ten of my seasonal favorites, right up there with fresh peaches and gin and tonics. Won’t you tell us yours, Dear Reader?

What we’re reading
Heather: Ellen F. Davis, Scripture, Culture, and Agriculture: An Agrarian Reading of the Bible (again)
Martin: A. J. Jacobs, The Know-It-All: One Man’s Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World