The Books of My Life

What are the books of your life?

That’s the question I found myself facing after reading a recent blog post about the books of someone’s life. The someone happened to be a fellow blogger, which got me thinking about my own relationship with books.

I don’t always feel comfortable answering writing prompts like this because I haven’t always felt comfortable reading. I do enjoy reading now, but I’m pretty particular about what I read. I have very specific interests, and I get bored easily when I try to read outside of those interests.

I’ve learned that I’m much happier when I find the right book rather than simply trying to read more books.

**I also loved The Very Hungry Caterpillar.**

So I started thinking about the books that have actually mattered to me. And that led me to the first question.

What is your earliest reading memory?

I wish I could say I remember my mom and dad reading me book after book at bedtime, which they did, but I don’t. What I do remember is being rewarded. Especially with stickers and such.

That memory takes me back to one summer at my local library in Lexington, Ohio, where there was a summer reading program going on. I can vaguely remember choosing certain books to take home. I believe there was a paper posted on the wall where we could keep track of our progress, and I think we got to mark our progress in front of the librarian.

I got to put my books in a book bag. The books I picked had cool covers. I had no interest in what was happening on the insides of the books. I just knew I wanted to win the contest.

They made reading fun. They were getting me inside of a library and around books.

Was my motivation stickers and such?

Absolutely.

Do I remember what I read?

Absolutely not.

Now that I’m looking at this, Miss Suzy’s treehouse might have subconsciously influenced my own decor choices.

What was your favorite book growing up?

Miss Suzy by Miriam Young. It was about a squirrel who lived in a tree and found herself in a bit of a battle with some very bad squirrels.

When I was looking back at the books I might have read during that summer reading program at the library, I had a little realization: I think I may have stopped enjoying books around the age of seven or eight, when they stopped being picture books and became mostly text.

I never really thought about that before. I wonder if I associated reading with pictures, and when the pictures disappeared, so did some of the magic of reading for me.

That makes me a little sad to realize now.

What was the book that changed you as a teenager?

There were actually four Judy Blume books that changed me in different ways, especially in how I saw myself as a girl and how I understood the world beyond the little corner of it I knew.

I grew up in a pretty rural part of central Ohio, so reading about girls who lived in New York City and suburban New Jersey in the late 1970s and early 1980s was eye-opening. Their lives felt completely different from mine.

Judy Blume was also writing about things that weren’t being talked about much anywhere else, at least not in my world. She wrote about getting your period, relationships, body image, and all the confusing things that come with being a girl and trying to figure out who you are.

The four books were:

Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret

Deenie

It’s Not the End of the World

Forever

After Judy Blume, though, my relationship with books got pretty quiet. From high school through college, I rarely read unless I had to for school. In my late 20s and 30s, I’d pick up an Oprah’s Book Club selection here and there, but reading still wasn’t really part of my life.

It wasn’t until I was around 50 that I started reading a lot more. And that’s when I began to realize that maybe I didn’t dislike reading as much as I thought I did. Maybe I just hadn’t found the right books.

Who was the writer who changed your mind?

Florence Scovel Shinn was the writer who opened the door to my soul homework in 2020. I first came across her name in another book, which led me to her work, and somehow that became the beginning of the whole soul homework journey.

Her ideas and affirmations changed the way I looked at my own life. They gave me a different perspective and made me question some of the ways I had always thought about myself and my life.

If I had never read Florence Scovel Shinn, I might never have started doing soul homework at all. And that makes her a pretty important writer in the story of my life.

What was the book that made you want to be a writer?

There really isn’t one.

I don’t necessarily connect reading and writing in my mind. I didn’t read a particular book and suddenly think, I want to do this too. Writing came from somewhere else for me.

There are, however, writers whose styles I really love. I’m drawn to writers who can take ordinary life, turn it over a little, and find something meaningful underneath it.

Writers and poets whose writing I’ve loved include Catherine Borrie, Mirabai Starr, James Crews, Francis Weller, Susan Moon, Claire Lombardo, Mark Nepo, Meg Kissinger, Terry Tempest Williams, Pema Chodron, Mary Oliver, Tara Brach, and John Green.

What is your comfort read?

Bittersweet by LaVyrle Spencer. It’s one of those paperback romance novels from the 1990s, but it’s set in Door County, Wisconsin, which makes it special to me.

Door County has always held a special place in my heart, and there’s something about returning to this particular story that feels like returning to a familiar place. It has been a comfort read for me for decades.

What is the book you could never read again?

The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold.

What is the book you discovered later in life?

I have an unusual answer to this question.

I began collecting quotes when I was 50 and started adding them to a book I kept on my coffee table. I got the quotes from all sorts of places, but mostly from reading. I filled my first quote book last year, after six years of adding quotes to it.

I found a new larger book online last year and have been slowly adding to it ever since. It will take many years to fill this one, which makes me very happy.

I love going back and reading through my books of quotes every once in a while. There’s something really nice about having a place where I’ve collected the words that have meant something to me over the years. It’s almost like a little record of where my mind has been.

I highly recommend creating a book of quotes or thoughts of your own.

What is the book you’re currently reading?

I’m almost afraid to tell people about a book that I really love because I know someone might go on Goodreads and give it two stars. And for some reason, that hurts my feelings.

I know. Who cares?

I do.

When I love something, I care about it. And I want other people to see what I see in it, too.

I can’t remember how I found this book, but I’m so glad that I did. I really enjoy the way this author writes. It’s a comfortable read, and she’s easy to understand.

My Year of Living Spiritually by Anne Bokma

What is the book you haven’t found yet?

For the past year, I’ve quietly been working on writing two books.

Even typing that makes me nervous.

I’ve done this before. I wrote a screenplay. I wrote an entire book about menopause and even sent it to publishers. Neither went anywhere.

I think that’s part of why I haven’t said much about what I’m working on now. There’s something safer about keeping it to myself. If nobody knows I’m trying, nobody knows if nothing comes of it.

But this feels different.

One is a collection of essays about ordinary life, the things I’ve spent years writing about here: family, growing older, noticing things, trying to understand myself, and finding meaning in places I probably would have missed when I was younger.

The other began when my dad was diagnosed with cancer. It started as a way to document what was happening and has slowly become something else, a book about my dad, grief, memory, and what remains after someone is gone.

I’ve been writing and rewriting both for the past year, mostly without telling anyone what I was doing.

It’s also why I sometimes go quiet here. I used to be much better at doing a bunch of things at once. I’m not anymore. When I’m deep into working on one of the books, I don’t have much left for the blog. So if I disappear for a little while, that’s probably where I am.

Maybe I’m telling you now because I need to make it real. And maybe I need a little accountability too. It’s harder to quietly put something away when I’ve told all of you that I’m working on it.

I have no idea what will happen with either book. That part is scary to admit too.