My Very First Book Haul

I have been in a reading slump, one that takes its roots in my poor attention span. On Goodreads, I have hopped from one book to another in an attempt to grab onto any story and stick with it. That has resulted in me reading twenty books simultaneously.

But it would appear that my obsession with purchasing books has coalesced into a handful of new texts to populate my laden shelves so that list of “currently reading” is only going to enlarge. Soon, I will have no choice but to unload some of these reads, though I of course would love to keep them all.

There is an exciting thing to having more books, though, and that is a book haul, one I have never done before on my blog. Of course, I am hugely influenced by Booktube and aspire to nothing more than sitting on a plane reading as I jet off to interesting adventures in Iceland. Some of these books have been assigned for classes, but that does not dim my enthusiasm to crack them open and read them with a mug of steaming tea by my side.

Without further rambling, here are the books I have acquired recently:

The Home Place by J. Drew Lanham

I am already reading, annotating, and loving this book. Lyrical and pure poetry, Lanham here is inspiring this reader with his tale of growing up in Edgefield County, South Carolina. Lanham is a naturalist. When he talks of haints and the Southern obsession with lie bumps, I was reminded of my grandmother, an Alabama woman of great fortitude.

Although I consider myself a Westerner, my family is Southern, with roots that slumber deep in the loamy soil of Alabama and Appalachia. Sometimes, I am fascinated by this, just as I have an obsession with knowing everything about Mexico, my origin and rising sun on my father’s side. But my experience as a generation-removed Southerner is radically different from Lanham’s experience of racism and upheaval as a Black man. Reading these exquisite opening pages, we see that Lanham was possessed by the beauty of his home, in part because the natural world lacked bigotry, but also for the sheer love of mountain destiny. In his passage on mountains and their ability to coax out tears, I highlighted and tabbed that page, knowing exactly what he was talking about. After all, the fondest memories of my childhood were spent in the mountains of Colorado.

The jacket of this book describes it as an elegy of nature and belonging, and it is nothing less than a call for beauty.

A Mercy by Toni Morrison

I had envisioned my first experience with the incomparable Toni Morrison to be The Bluest Eye, but A Mercy was assigned for my Essence of Place course and I am thoroughly chuffed.

With this book, I believe we are following the nebulous slave trade in the late 1600s. Because I am new to Morrison, I can only assume that the thematic life of her books points a blazing and sometimes damning spotlight on the history of our country. I cannot imagine, however, that there is no hope in her work. Naturally, I am rolling around in this paragraph with reasoning that is beyond myself until I dive into A Mercy.

What I do know is that Morrison was a Nobel Laureate and that, following her death, my mother and I went to a film house in Santa Fe to watch a documentary on this peerless woman’s life. As a writer, I do aspire to write something with the Chicxulub-esque magnitude of her works.

A modern classic awaits.

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

This is my personal shame: I have never read Pride and Prejudice, and one cannot be considered a true reader until she has read Pride and Prejudice.

I read Sense and Sensibility in a women’s literature course when I was seventeen. For whatever reason, Jane Austen was never one to capture my attention and beckon it onto the page, but now I am willing to give her a try with what I am hoping is a more practiced eye. When you are young, you read things and they seem to shimmer, as though you are detached from them and see them as light purpling off a blacktop. With a little more maturity (I hope), I can see the mural Austen is aiming for head on, as opposed to some sort of parallax distortion of teenage “but-I’m-bored” mentality. Who knows, if this proves successful, I may even give Anne of Green Gables another try.

The Buddha in the Attic by Julie Otsuka

Two separate classes in my beloved MA program have now assigned excerpts from The Buddha in the Attic by Julie Otsuka. Perhaps what is initially compelling about this book is that it is written in the first person plural, something I have never seen done before, and this opens up a surfeit of possibilities for my readerly and writerly mind.

At the moment, I am reconfiguring my short story, “Les Crows,” into a potential second person perspective, more as a thought exercise than a true commitment. The freedom to experiment seems to be what this book is telling us writers, that where we choose to set up our perspectival lighthouses matters. “Les Crows” is a tale of murder; perhaps a second person perspective will sound accusatory to the reader.

But The Buddha in the Attic is, based on my skimming through the pages, also a lyrical novel of change, adaptations, and new circumstances. The plot traces the young brides of Japan as they work toward a life in San Francisco. Incantations, the jacket proclaims. This is a book of incantations. With a word like that, one cannot help but salivate at the possibility of getting lost in this book.

The Unabridged Journals by Sylvia Plath

Confession time: I was not a fan of Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar. Like everyone who wrote terribly emo poetry at the age of twelve, I had to choose whether I would become an acolyte of Plath or Edgar Allan Poe, and Poe won out for me.

Call me nosy, but I love reading journals as much as I love writing in mine. One of my favorite books, The Diaries of Anais Nin, I give as a gift to many people who I think will love it, too, including my mother and younger sister. I am hoping that these diaries of Plath’s will bridge the gap for this writer and myself, connect us in some way that is unique to the writer-reader alliance. You see, I love the unfettered, non-distilled thoughts that come from tiptoeing across a blank journal, the thoughts that are not edited and shamed and curated by a writer as she moves from the personal to the publishable.

This is also a long book, and I have never been one to be intimidated by bricks. In fact, I find that I am more eager to plunge into a longer book, armed with my annotation kit in one hand and tea in the other. The Unabridged Journals will hopefully represent a sort of stamina for myself as a fan-in-waiting for Sylvia Plath.

Diaries by Franz Kafka

I do love me some surrealism and thus adore The Metamorphosis. What that book is and what it isn’t, what it wanted to achieve and what critics retroactively ascribed to it, is of course a controversy for everyone who reads Franz Kafka and his masterpiece, but I feel as though by reading Kafka’s diaries, I am slipping away from the commotion and into a quiet corner to simply sit with those aforementioned, unfettered words.

These are the thoughts behind that masterpiece. I have been skimming through this as I prepare to reread Anais Nin’s own diaries. To be selfish and talk about myself for a bit, I have a journal that is my dear friend and I house him in a blue paperback notebook in his current form. I purchased the journal at a local paper supply store, one that I love to browse on my days when I got to work at the coffee shop just down the block from the store. Generally, the prices at the store are rather high, but I am a dreamer and I dream on paper, so I had to have this particular journal. My dear friend likes his physical carriage.

To read Kafka’s inner thoughts will likely be revealing for myself as a lover of surrealism and beauty. There is so much we can learn from words and their wordsmiths, even when that wordsmith is invested only in himself and his quiet space. Will I come away with a rich history of Kafka or will I come away with merely much-loved words arranged in a tantalizing way, eschewing plot or reports of his daily life? I suppose that is for me to learn.

The Door by Magda Szabo

I have no idea what this book is about.

Scanning the back of my copy and Goodreads, this appears to follow a writer, and that (and the fact that it is assigned for one of my courses) is enough to intrigue me.

The Masnavi by Rumi

This is one of my favorite books in the entirety of the world’s pantheon, but now I own it in the beautiful Oxford World Classics form. I do love these editions.

Who can compare to Rumi? Who can take words and lure from within me a strange and mysterious song? Rumi and Poe are likely to be my favorite poets (because they have so much in common?), but Rumi is the one I go to in times of great sorrow. I read Rumi to my mother’s cat, Oz, as he went into the big sleep, and it is Rumi I read when I want to talk to the trees and share the bounty of words with them. It is still a great dream to read his work in Persian.

This collection of The Masnavi spans five or six volumes, which I will be purchasing and annotating (again with the art of wielding a highlighter and sticky tabs!) so that I can usher some of myself into the divine poet, so that I can siphon some of his luminosity into the caverns of myself.

As Rumi said, “I want to sing like the birds sing, not worrying about who hears or what they think.” This is what words were made to do.