My favorite books about reminding us the present is time's overlooked middle child

Tom Robbins is my favorite writer, and I return to his books again and again.

He once wrote that clocks no more contain time than books contain reality, which comes very close to how I think about both time and fiction. He was smart, funny, loyal to no genre but his own voice, and in a way practiced what he preached, still writing as if he were thirty even in his nineties.

Jitterbug Perfume is Robbins at full strength: playful, sensual, philosophical, and gloriously unwilling to stay in one time period, one tone, or even one sense. The jacket captures that perfectly: it begins in the forests of ancient Bohemia and does not conclude until nine o'clock tonight, Paris time. I love that sense of centuries collapsing into one immediate moment.

This is one of those rare books that seems completely familiar and still manages to reveal something new every time I return to it.

In a way, I think we are all a little Pooh, a little Eeyore, and a little of the others too. What stays with me most is Pooh himself: he lives almost entirely in the present, with a kind of honey-filled stoicism.

I also love the book's playfulness with language, the expedition to the North Pole, and the sense that the Hundred Acre Wood is both simple and mysterious. That combination has stayed with me for years: language that is rich without being lofty, and an ordinary place that becomes magical simply because someone is paying attention.

This book has shaped the way I look at consensus.

Like Holden standing slightly outside Pencey and watching the people around him without quite belonging, I have often felt most comfortable observing from the edge. In many ways, that distance is part of what made me a writer.

I also love the intimacy of Holden's voice, the sense that he is speaking directly to someone he trusts. I try to keep readers close in my own writing too, even without addressing them directly.

His wandering through Manhattan speaks to the flâneur in me, and I return to the humor, the sensitivity to detail, and the humanity of the book. Even when Holden is haunted by the past, he keeps choosing the present.

This is one of those books that makes me wish I could have met its author, Jerome K. Jerome.

To me, he is proof that humor can be timeless, and that very often it is only the lightest covering for a deep and truthful way of looking at life. I love his attention to detail, his fussiness, his very personal sense of what matters and what does not, his affection for nature, and the unmistakable Britishness of the whole thing.

Most of all, I love the way the book turns life's inconveniences into something worth observing and laughing at. The river keeps moving, and so does the present. The point is not only where you are going, but noticing what is happening along the way.

I love Walking for its poetry and for the slowness that allows it to sink so deeply into the present.

Thoreau treats walking not as a means of getting somewhere, but almost as an end in itself, and that changes the rhythm of everything around it. That idea stays with me: walking as pure present tense, one step after another. I love the way the book makes room for observation, thought, landscape, and silence without rushing toward a conclusion.

Thoreau has stayed close to me for years; I even chose his line, “As if you could kill time without injuring eternity,” as an epigraph to one of my novels. Sometimes the act itself is enough, and the moment becomes the whole point.