Have you ever noticed that your choices in the books you read follow some kind of path?
Decades ago, when I was raising little ones at home in Blissfield, Michigan, I decided to keep a list of the books I read for one year. What a revealing experience! At first, it appeared to be all over the joint, then I started thinking of the events of the past year and it a pattern emerged.
I tend to have more than one book going at a time and, when it happened that one book I was reading quoted the other, I started to become more and more aware of the threads that wove my book-reading choices one to the other. I also started realizing that there was a distinct relationship to my choice of a book and what was happening externally, wondering which one came first--sometimes one, sometimes the other.
Have you ever wondered how you can browse through a library or a bookstore and come out with ONE book? How does that happen? I've heard people tell stories of how a book actually fell off the shelf and the reading of it changed their lives. Some people have told me that titles actually light up or their fingers begin tingling as they run them across the spines of books.
I started documenting these "book trails" as I wrote my second book, EARTH TRAILS-HEART TRAILS, a journal of our three-month trip around the Southwest in 2002. I found that when I made a distinct daily effort to find the connections between what I was reading and what I was living, a whole new level of seeing opened up. I found myself carrying a notebook down every trail we hiked, stopping to make notes to include later in my daily journal entries.
When I read others' journals, it's like being handed yet another map that I can overlay on my own, seeing where others explored this canyon or that deep green valley or paddled down a river I didn't even know was there. Reading journals, or first person accounts, is like being handed another life I get to live--just because someone took the time to write down their "maps". And then there's the wonderful surprise when you reach the end of a book and there's a "Suggested Reading" list--Oh, joy! It's like following a link on a website--you just never know where you're going to end up.
My Canadian friend, Marianne, publishes e-books about their travels in the west and southwest of the U.S (www.frugal-rv-travel.com). Whenever I'm missing her, all I have to do is start reading one of her books and there she is--her joyous personality, her wit, her gentle humor, her creativity, and her intelligence shines brightly from every page. I feel as if we'd just had a cup of tea together. Don't you feel that way when you hear that a favorite author has a new book out? You rush out to the nearest bookstore because you can't wait for the paperback.
Are you , like me, one of those people who check out the book titles at people's houses? More often than not, I have been pleasantly surprised and it has led to some giant leaps over the sometimes laborious territory of getting to know someone.
How do you select a book for someone else? Sometimes when I'm reading a book, I'll think, "Wow, I bet Josh would love this book." And, thus, a book finds itself going down yet another "trail".
Would you be willing to share some of your "book trails" experiences?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Hi Julie.
ReplyDeleteFirst of all, thank you for highlighting me in this entry. I certainly feel the same way about picking up your books - especially EARTH TRAILS - HEART TRAILS which, because it sits with my cookbooks, of course gets picked up more often than books on other shelves.
This is an interesting topic. I do find myself going through phases of types of books I read. When I'm in "searching" mode, feeling restless, uncertain about my choices, and considering a change of direction, I lean toward the self-help section of the bookstore.
When all is well and I'm content with "where I'm at" or even when I'm just so busy in my life that the chance to read is simply an escape, I read novels.
I hadn't really thought about the signifigance to all this until you just posed the question. Now I see that as a young woman, virtually all I read was fiction. When I think back to that time in my life, and the type of novel I read, I was definitely using books as an escape from my own thoughts and feelings.
Then, over the past twenty-odd years, my reading was, for the most part, from the self-help section. More recently however, over the last 3 or 4 years, novels have again taken over. I've been telling myself, this is because I'm quite content. Is this the truth? Or am I simply escaping once again? Hmmmmm. Does anyone know of a good self-help book to help me figure out the answer? :-))