Your name might be in one of the books on my shelves

Thanks to a special addition to my marginalia habits

A much older book pile than the one I’m discussing in this post, in a totally different house. Different state, even, come to think of it. But gosh, what a delicious stack that was. I still reach for the Hauge poems on a near-weekly basis. Just seeing The Wee Free Men’s cover (even the blah digital version) makes me want to reread it IMMEDIATELY. And—sob!—until now it hadn’t fully hit me that our Sing a Song of Seasons season is past. Or wait, maybe it doesn’t have to be. The lovely thing about cultivating a rich family reading life is that the nostalgia factor makes all the kids’ childhood favorites evergreen. And now that they’re grown or nearly grown, the Hauge is a favorite too. This caption is way too long.

I’ve been doing some rearranging in my studio. Before Christmas, I was poking around on Etsy, looking for a gift for a special someone, and very nearly wound up buying something for myself: a bundle of hand-dyed linen fat quarters from a shop I favorited years ago. Linen is my favorite fabric to embroider on, and this was a lovely set of indigo in graduated hues. I’m mad about the color blue. I whisked the bundle into my cart and was poised to click the buy button when I suddenly thought: Wait. Did I…?

Reader, I did. I’d bought this exact bundle two years ago, probably in the same manner, an impulsive use of my birthday money (thanks, Mom!) while shopping for someone else. (No guilt there: it’s maybe the only perk of a mid-December birthday.) Two years ago, I’d just climbed out of a heavy pile of work and was looking forward to a lighter load in the first few months of 2023. Heaps of embroidery time, I thought! Ha—not so fast. As it happened, our landlord surprised us on January 2nd with the news that he was selling our rental house: a bombshell that kicked off one of the most overloaded, exhausting years I’ve ever experienced. (And that’s saying something!)

So instead of Proceeding to Checkout, I went rummaging through the fabric stash in the corner of my studio. Sure enough, there was the indigo bundle, still tied up with ribbon. Yikes.

This discovery kicked off an intense rearranging of the books and art supplies on my shelves. I moved all my stitching supplies into clear bins on the shelves directly across the room from this chair, the one I sit in for all my reading, writing, and stitching. Now the scrumptious linen is staring me in the face and whispering about what it wants to become.

Time for a rousing game of sliding puzzle

Image by Micha L. Rieser, via Wikimedia Commons. How do I get square #2, the most recent TBR pile, shifted to spot 15 without prying all the other squares out of place and hauling them to the basement? (It’s possible this metaphor has gotten away from me.)

But of course making room for it meant shifting the row of new books I accumulated this past year—the ones I haven’t read yet. Now there’s something I do feel guilty about. My eyes are bigger than my stomach, when it comes to brain food.

I mean, I feel only a little guilty? Turning these volumes over in my hand is an intense kind of delight: these are books I learned about from other readers, other writers. Probably some of you, reading this.

Only—I can’t remember the origin stories for some of these additions to my library.

I was thinking about this yesterday and had an idea. A really good idea! I dashed off a quick Note about it:

One thing I’m determined to do differently next year is: keep better track of who recommended a particular book I’ve decided to read. For example, I know that I bought Roland Allen’s The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper on Austin Kleon’s suggestion, and Yiyun Li’s Tolstoy Together on Simon Haisell’s suggestion, and Robert Moss’s Sidewalk Oracles because Kortney Garrison mentioned it.¹ But…whose post inspired me to buy:

• Green Darkness by Anya Seton?²

• Rumors of Spring by Richard Grant?

• William’s Wife by Gertrude Trevelyan?

• A Life of One’s Own by Marion Milner? (Or wait, that one may have been another Austin Kleon rec.)³

(I’m really asking. If you wrote about one of these books in 2024, let me know!)

What I intend to do differently, moving forward: jot down why I’m buying a book whenever I buy one on someone else’s recommendation. Who put it on my radar? What grabbed me in their description?

More and more, I’ve taken to treating books (print copies, at least) almost as journals. My marginalia has expanded to include not only the conversations I’m having with the books themselves, but quick notes about when I’m reading the thing, or why, and sometimes even what’s happening in my house or our world at the time I begin a chapter. Marginalia as diary. Thought-life + life-life.

By the end of my year reading War and Peace with

Footnotes and Tangents

, one chapter a day, I’d begun leaving a small sticky note on each chapter with a tiny diary entry. I wrote lots of notes about the book directly on its pages, but I had the idea that, since I was already planning to read it again with this year’s cohort, it would be fun to encounter these little diary entries on the same day, one year later. Imagine it—years of rereads, each with its own color of diary stickies. Like one of those five-year diaries but more organic to the way I move through time.

So you see how I’ve already been shifting to a view of print editions as a living record of the reading life, mingling personal marginalia with my intellectual/emotional/associative responses to what’s on the page.

I used to feel more precious, I think, about the sanctity of The Page Itself—a schoolgirl’s sense that marking up a text with notes was something only appropriate for the books assigned on a syllabus.

Then our lives shifted to keyboards and I began to miss seeing handwriting. Opening a used book and finding someone else’s notes in the margins sparks a flare of delight. During our move from the rental to our own home (joy!), I was packing books and found Scott’s old copy of Tale of Two Cities on the shelf. The joy I felt, flipping through it and seeing my college boyfriend’s handwriting! We text or Slack each other all day long, but penmanship holds a special kind of magic. It’s deeply personal and full of personality. You see the human hand behind it. It’s tactile, it leaves grooves on the page.

And decades later, there it still is.

Tiny black script

In “Marginalia,” my favorite Billy Collins poem, the poet writes:

Even Irish monks in their cold scriptoria
jotted along the borders of the Gospels
brief asides about the pains of copying,
a bird singing near their window,
or the sunlight that illuminated their page–
anonymous men catching a ride into the future
on a vessel more lasting than themselves.

(Gosh, that poem. Give yourself a treat and read the whole thing. Its final stanza is sheer perfection.)

So here I am, making notes in last year’s bought-but-not-yet-read volumes. That’s the plan, moving forward. Did I seek a book out myself, or did someone else’s words fill me with enthusiasm to read it? What’s the origin story of the object in my hands?

In the comments of my note,

Melanie Bettinelli

(one of the smartest readers I know) mentioned that reading on Kindle adds a wrinkle to the practice, and I agree with her—but I already use the Kindle’s highlight and note features pretty liberally. I’m going to try adding an origin-story note to the title page. What I like about this notion is that it will work for library books too—since nearly all my library reading now happens on Kindle via Libby. But let’s face it, digital notes aren’t nearly as magical as the ones “written in soft pencil– /
by a beautiful girl, I could tell” or the “ferocious skirmishes” “raging along the borders of every page / in tiny black script” described by Billy Collins.

Although I’ve forgotten the provenance of the titles I listed in my note above, I do remember whose recommendation inspired me to read many, many of the other tomes on my shelves. Mental Multivitamin’s recs alone probably fill several rows of bookcase.⁴ My already hefty poetry collection expanded considerably after I started taking Holly Wren Spaulding’s workshops, ages ago. Billy Budd—banished since high school—returned to my shelves this past year, thanks to

Christopher Frizzelle

and Rebecca Brown. My battered, much-marked-up copy of Flannery O’Connor’s Mystery and Manners, lugged from Virginia to North Carolina to New York to Virginia again to San Diego to Portland, now has new entries sparked by Chris Frizzelle and

Brian Bouldrey

. These layers of meaning, the history of the individual book as object, add enormously to my relationship with the book as text.

So if I have you to thank for Green Darkness or Rumors of Spring—both of which I do mean to read this year—let me know!

As for what I’m reading right now? Well:

• Jane Eyre, which I’ll finish today in time for tonight’s final

  FrizzLit
  Book Club discussion;

• Thirst by Varsha Bajaj, which I’m writing about for an upcoming edition of the Brave Writer Dart. Technically I’m not so much reading it right now—I devoured it last spring when my editor gave me this year’s Dart booklist—but rather living in it, writing about its rich language for the kids and parents who use our guides;

• my brilliant daughter’s fabulous manuscript, about which I’m busting with pride;

• Oliver Burkeman’s Meditations for Mortals;

• Tom Cox
  ’s Notebook. (Evidently this is my year for reading books with Notebook in the title—but NOT the Sparks novel, don’t even get me started on that topic. DO get me started on Tom Cox’s charming collection of entries from the notebooks he’s kept over the years. To be honest, I’ve finished reading it already, but I found I didn’t want to move it off the currently-reading shelf. I keep dipping back into it. Highest praise I can give a book!);

• The Beauty of Everyday Things by Soetsu Yanagi, which I stumbled upon and fell in love with; and most importantly:

• Moominpappa at Sea, out loud to my teens while they work a jigsaw puzzle, as part of a years-long, ongoing Moomin readaloud which I’m informed will go on forever, or until they move out. We get to the end of the series and start all over again. But we’d skipped this one in previous cycles, for some reason. It’s our first time! Our last first Moomin read!

• And probably some others I’ve forgotten. Plus I’ll be starting War & Peace back over on Wednesday with Simon Haisell & co., as well as Simon’s new The Siege of Krishnapur slow read that begins Jan. 13. Off we go!⁵

1. This post contains Bookshop.org affiliate links. I’ve curated some splendid booklists there, I don’t mind saying. And writing this post inspired me to create a new one, just for TBR books. Of course I can’t add them all. But a list of books I’ve actually purchased, meaning to read? This seems like a good plan.

2.

Wendi Gratz

let me know that while she wasn’t the person who rec’d Green Darkness to me, she adores it: “I bought a copy at a garage sale when I was in high school. (I was already an Anya Seton fan after reading Katherine.) I stayed up ALL NIGHT on a school night reading it, only to find at 6 am that the last few pages had been torn out! My school library didn’t have a copy, so I had to wait ALL DAY to visit the public library on the way home to finally finish it. Agony!” I’ll definitely be moving it higher on my TBR pile, thanks to this endorsement!

3. I was right. Austin Kleon wrote about Milner’s A Life of One’s Own in this post.

4. The brilliant MFS was my first favorite blogger, back in the exhilarating blog-ring days of 2005-2010. She now writes at Nerdishly and continues to keep my wish list filled to overflowing.

5. I just got an ominous pop-up warning me this post has nearly reached the email word limit. Who knew there was such a thing! Have I passed it with this footnote? How about now?