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Tom Coyne is the author of several acclaimed books about golf, including A Gentleman’s Game, Paper Tiger, and his latest, A Course Called Home, about his adventures as the owner of a run-down nine-hole course. Below, he names the books for which he’s most grateful.
‘Where I’m Calling From’ by Raymond Carver (1988)
I am certainly not the only MFA grad who has Raymond Carver to thank (or blame) for pursuing short-story writing as a vocation. When this collection landed in my hands, I was not only taken by the stories but also inspired to try my hand at this thing he made look so easy. These are stories I return to when I worry that I need to be writing about vampires or dragons. Buy it here.
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‘This Boy’s Life’ by Tobias Wolff (1989)
Memoir gets a bad rap as indulgent and self-absorbed stuff, but this book was a lesson in memoir as entertainment and storytelling. And it would influence my next five books, steering me away from the therapeutic confessional that tempts the nonfiction writer. Buy it here.
‘On Writing’ by Stephen King (2000)
I used to not read a lot of Stephen King, and a writer reading another writer’s take on writing felt like a circular chore. But the book turned out to be life-changing stuff. The man knows literature and craft in a way that his popular fiction belies, and it’s a surprising page-turner. Buy it here.
‘My Ántonia’ by Willa Cather (1918)
If you want to write books, you have to love them, unreasonably so, and I remember falling hard for My Ántonia. Everything about it—the place, the heart, the strength. I was a high schooler who found a book I wanted everybody to read, and I told everyone who would listen that I had the book for them. Buy it here.
‘To the Linksland’ by Michael Bamberger (1992)
I went to grad school to write the Great American Novel. Instead, I wrote a book about caddies. When I found myself accidentally landing in the golf-writing genre, I wasn’t sure if I had sold out my ambitions. Bamberger’s book assuaged such fears and helped me embrace golf as a subject worthy of literary treatment. Buy it here.
‘Sailing Alone Around the Room’ by Billy Collins (2001)
Insert any of Billy Collins’ collections here. Before I sit down to write, I read a few of his poems—“Snow Day” is a favorite—to recall what great sentences sound like, and to recall that one right word trumps a thousand ambitious ones. Buy it here.
