Books: Food For Thought.

In "The Encyclopedia Of Trouble And Spaciousness", Rebecca Solnit touched my heart with this:

"Admiring houses from the outside is often about imagining entering them, living in them, having a calmer, more harmonious, deeper life. Buildings become theaters and fortresses for private life and inward thought, and buying and decorating is so much easier than living or thinking according to those ideals. Thus the dream of a house can be the eternally postponed preliminary step to taking up the lives we wish we were living. Houses are cluttered with wishes, the invisible furniture on which we keep bruising our shins. Until they become an end in themselves, as a new mansion did for the wealthy woman I watched fret over the right color of the infinity edge tiles of her new pool on the edge of the sea, as though this shade of blue could provide the serenity that would be dashed by that slightly more turquoise version, as though it could all come from the ceramic tile suppliers, as though it all lay in the colors and the getting."

I am somewhere between picking out tile and living with meaning.  And I am keenly aware of how strongly I am influenced by my surroundings.  

I am not happy in an ugly place.  I am not calm amid a mess.  I crave order, small touches of beauty.  It doesn't have to be expensive, some of the most beautiful things are the simplest.  A flower, a twig covered with lichen.  A picture from a magazine, a tin that once held cocoa.   A pencil drawing made by a child.  A book with a beautiful cover.  All these and more are on my night table.  

What's next to your bed?

You can read more - and find more books that will have you drooling - and thinking - on Brain Pickings Weekly. 

Happy Reading.    Happy Thinking.

Friday

Have you ever felt this way?

It's Friday.  In your life.  No one's going to do it for you, you're in charge.  Enough with the emails, get yourself down to your local independent bookstore (like Rakestraw) and buy yourself something.

And a final thought for those of you who are saying "I don't have time, I don't read fiction, I don't have time to read anything"...

Green Knowe, or a gloomy day

Have you read the Treasure of Green Knowe? It's a children's book, surreal and weird and of its time (that's a nice way to say it's dated) and today my garden looks like the picture of Green Knowe I have in my head from my long-ago childhood. 

I have great respect for this hoary old oak. A town arborist says it's one of the oldest trees he's seen, and it is so huge three of us clasping hands cannot span it. But it is stern, foreboding, not friendly. I've spent a lot more time near it at night (new dog). It's a bit creepy. Just like Green Knowe.

I have been re-reading some of the books I loved as a child. And some I have discovered as an adult. 

Have you read The Singing Tree by Kate Seredy? I first read it when I was at Green Valley Elementary a hundred years ago, and it's one of the reasons I love the wild birds. 

Have you read Al Capone Does My Shirts? Al Capone Shines My Shoes? Is there a web site called Have You Read? Should be...what have you read recently?

Oh oh oh. My mom just gave me back my old hardback copy of Five Quarters of the Orange. One of the  best books I've ever read. Get it! Go to Rakestraw Books and ask Michael for a copy.

What are you reading? What do you remember fondly from childhood? (books, you silly person, not sleeping in and Christmas morning. Everyone loved that.)