Around this time last year, I did an entry cataloguing the books I had in my bedside piles. Just when I was thinking it was about time to do it again, Robin, in her very excellent journal Midlife Matters, did sort of a similar listing of reading matter lying about the first floor of her house. I really couldn't make a thorough list, I'd scare myself to death. These are just items lying about in various states of disarray here and there in the house - I'm not going to talk about five shelves of gardening books, five shelves of cookbooks, or the bookcase in the little sitting room with nothing but philosophy and poetry. No, stop. We're planning a major move soon, and The Books are a major source of anxiety.
So, bedside pile: When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times, Pema Chodron; Peace is Every Step, Thich Nhat Hanh; Brief Intervals of Horrible Sanity: One Season in a Progressive School, Elizabeth Gold; Reading Lolita in Tehran, A Memoir in Books, Azar Nafisi; The Re-Enchantment of Everyday Life, Thomas Moore; Gardener's Latin: A Lexicon; Walking to Martha's Vineyard: Poems, Franz Wright; Eats, Shoots and Leaves, The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation, Lynne Truss;
In computer room: People's History of the United States, Howard Zinn; Ruined by Reading, a Life in Books, Lynne Sharon Schwartz; Killing the Buddha, Manseau & Sharlet; The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry.
By various reading chairs: A Play of Isaac, Margaret Frazer; The New American Spirituality: A Seeker's Guide, Elizabeth Lesser; The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy; Fooling with Words, Bill Moyers; A Place of My Own: The Education of an Amateur Builder, Michael Pollan; Finding a Way, Essays on Spiritual Practice, Ed. by Lorette Zilker.
On kitchen table, dining room table, coffee table, etc: piles of Orion Magazine, Natural Home Magazine, American Horticulture Magazine, Native Plants Magazine, Nature Conservancy Magazine, The Essential Teacher Magazine, various and sundry newsletters from EarthJustice, Oxfam, RiverKeepers, Environmental Defense, ACLU, TESOL.
Sunporch tables, floor: The Red Tent, Anita Diamant; The Sarasota, Sanibel Island & Naples Book: A Complete Guide; Emotional Alchemy, How the Mind can Heal the Heart, Tara Bennett-Goleman; A Guide to Bird Behavior (Stokes Nature Guides); Walks and Rambles on the Delmarva Peninsula, A Guide for Hikers and Naturalists, Jay Abercrombie; Country Roads of Maryland and Delaware, W. Lynn Seldon; Day Trips in Delmarva, Alan Fisher; Music of the Birds, A Celebration of Bird Song, Lang Elliott (w/CD); Terra Cotta, Pots with Style, Anthony Noel; The Winter Garden, Planning and Planting for the Southeast, Loewer & Mellichamp; Seashells, How to Identify and Collect Them. Several copies of Perennials Magazine, more Native Plants Magazine, a Sauveur Mag, several Real Simple Mags.
How's about you share your piles? Leave a comment with your piles, or write an entry in your journal and leave a link here. It's a lot of fun. (And just in case Hocuscadabra happens upon this: there are bibles in three different languages on various shelves in the house, pretty worn covers on 'em too.)
15 comments:
I recently did an entry with a little list cataloguing some books, it's so much fun to do...I may do it again with the pile on top of my computer desk, or maybe the pile in my car (yes, there's a pile in my car!) How is 'People's History of the United States' by Howard Zinn? I'm new to him, I just read the other night an awesome essay/review that he wrote in 1965 for 'Rebel Voices' by Joyce Kornbluh (his essay was called 'The Wobbly Spirit').
I love your magazine pile...you can tell a lot about a person by the type of magazines and newsletters they get! My daughter sold magazine subscriptions for a school fundraiser, and it was so interesting seeing what people ordered...my aunt ordered Consumer Report and I commented on how I confusing I would find that...while she pointed at my Astronomy magazine and said the same thing!
OK, here's what we share or have shared:
When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times, Pema Chodron; Peace is Every Step, Thich Nhat Hanh; Reading Lolita in Tehran, A Memoir in Books, Azar Nafisi;
People's History of the United States, Howard Zinn; Ruined by Reading, a Life in Books, Lynne Sharon Schwartz; Killing the Buddha, Manseau & Sharlet; The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry.
A Play of Isaac, Margaret Frazer;
Orion Magazine, Nature Conservancy Magazine
I'll work on my bedroom piles tomorrow. Happy reading.
Keep in mind I writing this from the Internet kiosk at our local Super Gigante store in Acapulco, blocks away from my bedside table. But, if memory serves, you'll find V.S. Prichett's "Collected Stories", Reginald Hill's "A Killing Kindness", Dudley Pope's "Rampage" (Joe's book, not mine -- he's the fan of British naval sagas), two November issues of the London Review of Books, and the January issue of "Vanity Fair." Just finished "Middlesex", which I find uneven. Philip Roth's "The Plot Against America", with its bookmark at the fourth chapter, remains unopened as I find it just too terrifying to read. I think it's a great novel -- probably, one of the "great American novels" -- and Roth is certainly courageous to write it, specially in this time of populist religion and populist politics, but I shudder when I read it. Roth successfully strips away all pretence about so-called "American virtue". He puts us side by side with Nazi Germany and asks, "So America, you really believe you're that different? Think again."
Oooh I love The Red Tent! I took it out of the library a few years ago, and got it for Christmas this year. I can't wait to read it again. ~Sue
Oh my. I have never had such a pile of books. My nightstand is heaped with books, and I have started and stopped in several of them. It is truly embarrassing to enumerate, but here goes:
The nightstand holds Arthur Okun's 1972 classic "Equality and Efficiency"; Karen Armstrong "A History of God"; Peter Singer "A Darwinian Left", "How are we to live?" and "Writings on an Ethical Life" (I know it sounds funny -- I am into Singer at the moment); Susan Jacoby "Freethinkers"; Richard Clarke et al "Defeating the Jihadists". I hate to admit my fecklessness -- I have read good sized chunks of four of these without finishing them off.
On my table behind my desk at work, the Sunday NY Times, untouched (it was a busy Sunday) and the latest copy of Atlantic Monthly (half read).
Laying about the house, prints on articles pulled from the archives of Atlantic Monthly -- three articles on torture, including two I have read.
Well. My work is cut out for me.
Neil
I've got many of my multiple titles by single authors here in the computer room: Annie Proulx (Postcards, Shipping News, Accordian Crimes, Ace in the Hole, Close Range, Bad Dirt), Chinua Achebe (Things Fall apart and No Longer at Ease), John Irving (A Widow for One Year, The Fourth Hand, Cider House Rules, Owen Meany), Richard Russo (Nobody's Fool, Straight Man, Empire Falls), Tim O'Brien (Going After Cacciatto, Things They Carried, Tomcat in Love), Alexander McCall Smith (the No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency, The Kalahari Typing School for Men), Charles Portis (Dog of the South, Masters of Atlantis), Martin Cruz Smith (Gorky Park, Havana Bay, Rose). Also Angela's Ashes by Frank McCourt and A Monk Swimming by his brother Malachy.
I enjoyed your visit to my journal very much! What a long, energetic, thoughtful post--thank you. I love this entry of your in particular because it screams, "Got cha!" I have piles of books EVERYWHERE and keep buying more and more for my book schmorgasbord. In fact, just stopped in at the Goodwill after work and found a copy of Chinese Mythology I had to have. My poor husband sighed--"Another book!" Oh how I wish that was all I had to do in the world--read and write books. I shall be visiting you often in the future.
Hey! I was here for Volume I !!
Here`s My Link!! Thanks, it was worth the effort!!
http://journals.aol.com/deabvt/DeablerVT/entries/461
V
Hi, I read Vince's entry and found your journal, here's my link!
http://journals.aol.com/coy1234787/Dancingintherain/entries/1231
I'll be back here often, I love your list of books in your piles there may be a few found here that I need to add to my eclectic collection!
*** Coy ***
I stuck my stack in Vinces jnl!
Here's one pile. Whew!
http://journals.aol.com/theresarrt7/TheresaWilliams-author/entries/603
I found the link to your journal in SisterCDR's, and thought it would be fun to do an entry on my piles of books, too. Come see what's not on my shelves. :-)
Ok, here are my stacks. This was fun. http://journals.aol.com/sistercdr/Sortingthepieces/entries/1383
Anni Adams could see her father from the window of her classroom. The Nazis had lined him up against the wall of a neighboring building with his co-workers and counted down the line, shooting every fourth person. Luckily, her father was passed over, but soon after he was sent to a political prison. Anni and her brother were also imprisoned in separate camps. Because of his blond hair and blue eyes, her brother was sent to an educational camp for indoctrination into the Hitler Youth, and Anni was sent to a labor camp, where she farmed potatoes in a field with undetonated mines.
Anni, a native of Luxembourg and a New Smyrna Beach resident, told the account of her stay in Wechterswinkel to Lonnie D. Story, a biographer and paralegal in Ormond Beach, who compiled it into a book titled "The Meeting of Anni Adams: The Butterfly of Luxembourg." "It was a relief to me emotionally to talk about it," Adams said. The book chronicles her stay in the labor camp, its evacuation during the fall of the Third Reich, Adams’ marriage to an American G.I. and her subsequent emigration to the United States.
A short list of a fraction of the books that take up more space than all of my other stuff put together....
Post a Comment