I have so many more unread books on our shelves than I'll ever read. Each of those books is somewhere on my TBR
list. I'm thinking that I might complement my #TBR list with a #NTBR list. There are so many (and more and more)
books, and I have so little (and less and less) time in front of me when I might read them. Obviously, winnowing
the collection would help to declutter our small space, but might it also declutter my mind? https://johnrakestraw.com/post/from-the-tbr-pile-to-the-ntbr-pile/. @bookstodon#reading#books
You said in your article "one has to be very careful when one considers getting rid of books that one urgently needs to read... I have to admit that there’s something freeing about it."
I'm currently reading Walking on Water by Anthony De Mello. He mentions detachment often in regard to freedom, including spiritual freedom. He gives this exercise: Take these books (hard to separate from) and say to them "How precious you are and loved, but you are not my life. I have a life to live and a destiny to fulfill different from you." That seems to be a way to get rid of something with care.
"As soon as we die, we enter into fiction. Just ask two different family members to tell you about someone recently gone and you will see what I mean. Once we can no longer speak for ourselves, we are interpreted" (Hilary Mantel).
I don't remember where I stumbled on this book -- perhaps even here on Mastodon? -- but I have to say that Jeff Deutsch's 'In Praise of Good Bookstores' is a wonderful celebration not only of independent #bookstores but also of #books, #reading books, and conversations about books. And there's a bonus -- a nice mini-history of one of my favorite bookstores, the #SeminaryCoop bookstore in Chicago. Well worth the read. @bookstodon#bookstodon
“The task of calling things by their true names, of telling the truth to the best of our abilities, of knowing how we got here, of listening particularly to those who have been silenced in the past, of seeing how the myriad stories fit together and break apart, of using any privilege we may have been handed to undo privilege or expand its scope is each of our tasks.”
Rebecca Solnit, “A Short History of Silence” (The Mother of All Questions, p. 66)
Solnit: We are our stories ... that can be both prison and the crowbar to break open the door of that prison; we make stories to save ourselves or to trap ourselves or others, stories that lift us up or smash us against the stone wall of our own limits and fears. #Liberation is always in part a storytelling process: breaking stories, breaking silences, making new stories. A free person tells her own story. A valued person lives in a society in which her #story has a place.
SimoneWeil, in 1934: “everything that seems normally to constitute a reason for living dwindles away, when one must … call everything in question…. The triumph of authoritarian and nationalist movements should blast almost everywhere the hopes that well-meaning people had placed in democracy… We are living through a period bereft of a future. Waiting for that which is to come is no longer a matter of hope, but of anguish.” Hope lives in 2023, somehow. @bookstodon#SundaySentence cluster
Claire Messud: "Each of us is made up of our lived experiences, of course; but also, both consciously and unconsciously, of all the stories that we have heard, read, or watched. Without realizing it, we come to understand what a story is and how it means by the accretion of narratives in our heads" ('Kant's Little Prussian Head and Other Reasons Why I write,' p. 65).
#amreading The House by the Sea, one of #MaySarton’s several journals; it’s a treat. She’s such a good writer, but the occasional gems from her life are also very interesting. An example: her passing reference to #VladimirNabokov as a tenant in a house where she once lived, who loved “a small ashtray covered with butterflies.” Nothing else said — it’s just an idle recollection as she packs up mementos from a house she once shared with Judy Matlack. @bookstodon
Of course I know I’ll never read all the books already in my #ToBeReadPile, but that doesn’t blunt the serendipitous encounter with book(s) by an author I knew nothing about. Sure, it adds to the list, but still. Recent discoveries: John McPhee and May Sarton. Two very different writers, but both wonderful #wordsmiths.
"… in seeking happiness above all, of course we never find it. It is a by-product and not the end of life surely. And all personal relationships depend so much on patience, on living through the deep places, the bored places, the dark places together."
-- in a 1945 letter to Juliette Huxley. Published in "Dear Juliette," p. 142.