Chabon has become one of my favorite writers, ever since my book club persuaded me to pick up Kavalier & Clay. I like his essays even more than his novels. Their mix of personal experience, political and cultural trends, self-deprecating humor, and startling insight is fascinating. I find myself nodding in recognition as I read each one and am always moved by the time I get to the end.

In this 2009 collection, he delivers a multi-faceted portrait of a man, his dreams and fears, his joys and regrets. Many of the short pieces start from his experience as a father, as he questions what he himself has experienced as a brother, son and husband, and how that can inform his dealings with his sons and daughters.

In “William and I”, he recalls his father’s distrust of intimacy and resulting distance, both physical and emotional—typical of most fathers in the mid-twentieth century. Chabon considers the low bar set for being a good father and the “monumental open-endedness of the job” of being a mother, a double standard where he is praised for grocery shopping with his baby while such things are routine expectations of mothers. In striving to hold himself to the same standard as a mother would be judged by, he recognises that he, like they, will “fail every day in my ambition to do the work, to make it count, to think ahead and hang in there through the tedium and really see, really feel, all the pitfalls that threaten my children.”

Many of the essays take him back to his own childhood. He delves into his boyhood in Columbia, Maryland, a planned community halfway between Baltimore and Washington and an amazing place to be a child, especially in its early days. In his earlier essay collection, Maps and Legends, Chabon describes the thrill of being in at the creation of something entirely new and the creative impulses the experience unleashed in him. Here he looks at relationships, such as in “The Splendors of Crap” where he treats us to his relationship with the Megginson family and the creative adventures they got up to, many based on Planet of the Apes.

In these short pieces, Chabon often teases out some of the sources of his writing. In “The Story of Our Story” he reminds us of Scheherazade’s sister who was the one who actually asked for a story each night. He then goes on to describe the moment his brother Steve was brought home from the hospital. At five, Chabon had experiences under his belt, “But it was not until that morning, in early September 1968, that my story truly began. Until my brother was born, I had no one to tell it to.”

Much of the joy I felt reading this collection came from the way Chabon takes common experiences and helps us see the depth and complexity within them. For example, in “Normal Time” he looks at the impulse to think of the chaos of daily life with its alarms and excursions as temporary, that things will get back to normal soon. There is some beautiful writing as he examines how time folds in on itself, much as each essay here does, before celebrating this life, this moment in all its glorious mess.

Even if you didn’t grow up, as I did, roaming the woods, reading comics, and watching Star Trek, you will find much to delight and intrigue you here.

Have you read an essay collection that enchanted and entertained you?

Here’s another essay collection, this one from 1992 on the theme of solitude. Halpern says these pieces are not about the right to be left alone or protection of privacy but rather about “the experience of being left alone, or of not being left alone.”

In these essays she interviews, among others, a couple who have chosen to isolate themselves in the woods for 40 years, monks whose order has rules of silence, and a prisoner in and out of solitary confinement. Much has been written lately about the dangers of solitary confinement, its potentially dire consequences. Halpern relates the story of a thirty-two-year-old French woman who in 1989 isolated herself in a cave for 111 days as part of an experiment. A year after completing the experiment, the woman killed herself.

Halpern also interviews homeless people, pointing out the terrible need for privacy in homeless shelters, especially those whose beds are in dormitory rooms. She interviews a woman who has finally moved to an apartment and her fierce joy at having a place where she can close the door.

Although Halpern says these essays are not about political definition of privacy, she does look at government surveillance, still in its early days since this book was published in 1992. She talks about the cross-checking made possible by large government databases and quotes Frank Church on the power that this technological capability would give to a dictator if one ever took over the U.S., something that’s looking all too possible today, during this bizarre presidential election.

Halpern isn’t trying to make an argument or put forth a thesis. She simply introduces us to some people whose stories illustrate the need for, and dangers of, solitude and privacy. Such stories are a good counterbalance to a culture that today seems to privilege the social over the private, where wanting to spend time alone is often considered an indication of mental illness.

What I said most often as a child, what I repeated over and over was Leave me alone. Growing up in a large family meant frazzled, impatient parents and younger siblings tagging along when I tried to escape. Solitude became my vision of paradise. But no matter what white-room fantasies I’ve had, I know that absolute seclusion is not the right thing for me. I’ve found my own balance between being alone and being with others. Society, community: these are needs as well.

As may be obvious, I’m rereading some books that I’ve held onto for a while preparatory to passing them on. It’s time to clean out the bookshelves. Our local free book exchange, The Book Thing, burned down a few months ago, but I still have a few options for giving books away to those who can use them.

Where do you donate books? And what for you are the uses of solitude? What balance have you found between solitude and society?