Progress Update
I got a new closet last month, although that’s not even the big news. Neither are the new floors. Or the new paint on the hall cabinets. BUT as long as I’m talking about the closet, I do love that I put some books in there. It’s a nice literary touch each time I walk in and ponder a long-hang choice. Instead of an outfit, I sometimes end up pondering these book titles. Do you ever consider where you were when you read a certain book? Or who gave you the book? Who recommended it?
I sort of stumbled across The Secret Life of Cowboys many years ago and it really resonated with me…a non-cowboy. I read the author’s follow-up book (also pictured in the closet books) and he even reached out to me once when I mentioned his book on my blog and we had a nice exchange.
The Alchemist is one of my favorites—there are actually multiple copies among these closet books—the little orange one being the one I bought in Paris from the Shakespeare and Co. bookstore. I remember opening the cover while sitting outside the store sipping a warm beverage, the stamped they’d inked inside still fresh and the Notre Dame cathedral in view just across the water.
My aunt gave me House Lessons after I bought my house, and it’s such a lovely tale of building and making a home, of appreciating all aspects of the architecture, of embracing all the steps involved in a project.
Billy Collins is a poet who inspired me greatly while in college. His Aimless Love shown in the closet is one of at least half a dozen books of his that I own. His poems are meaningful—and oftentimes funny—without being slaves to rhyme or form. They are delightful. While living in New York several years ago, I got to meet him at a poetry reading in Brooklyn, and it was a highlight of my literary life.
Joan Didion is a huge literary figure to me, and her The Year of Magical Thinking is one of my all-time favorites. It serves as a study on grief, and it got me through a devastating break-up over a decade ago. Since then, it’s gotten me through many hard times, me always craving those words whenever I’ve been through an emotional loss.
Treasury of American Poetry and The Prophet were both gifts to me from a high school English teacher who influenced me greatly. Her encouragement and belief in me felt epic to the shy teenager I was. I was such a homebody that graduating and leaving home felt sad, but this teacher gave me hope—and an anxious excitement—about the wide and glorious future.
And so it goes. Books have certainly meant a lot to me, and I continue to enjoy sharing my own stories for others to potentially read down the line. Which brings me to my REAL news, which is that my new manuscript is finished! I’m handing it off to be edited in a couple of weeks, and there is something so satisfying about this stage, when you actually get to read through the whole book, all the sections and chapters in the order in which they will appear, and get the first real sense of the kind of book it has turned out to be.
More to come, but in the meantime, I hope you consider your own closet books and how they each shaped your journey—and continue to propel you forward.