This is the time of year when book bloggers and magazines and newspapers are touting their Best Of lists. I, however, am going to take a different slant on my reading for the year 2014.
Here you have Belle's Book Guide, a look at a few books that especially entertained and guided me through the year.
To begin with, for a total education I could have just read and re-read two books: Alain de Botton's The Art of Travel which covers everything from literature to history to art, and, yes, a few travel destinations along the way, and The Library at Night by Alberto Manguel which offers shelves full of architecture, histories of private and public libraries and their patrons, lost books, burned books, and a community of international authors.
Here are other BOOKS that made up my reading list this year and what they brought to my life:
Beauty: The Southerner's Handbook celebrates the beauty of what makes Southerners Southern and gave me insights into my own below-the-Mason-Dixon line heritage. These were well-written essays collected by the editors of Garden and Gun magazine on everything from sweet tea and barbecue to the Great Southern Novel and the Art of Wearing Pearls.
Anytime I read one of Peter Mayle's novels set in France - this year it was Chasing Cezanne - I know I am in for a sensory extravaganza. He not only paints for me the landscape and architecture of the region but also the glories of food and drink and the pleasures of the table. Delicious.
Observation: Reading books such as Delight by J.B. Priestly and A Book of One's Own: People and Their Diaries by Thomas Mallon remind me to slow down and take a good look at everyday pleasures and to be mindful of recording them in my own journal. Also, dipping into the wacky worlds of Dave Barry (You Can Date When You're Forty) and Bill Bryson (A Walk in the Woods) and reading their close observations and experiments with life keep me from taking things too seriously.
In Still Writing by Dani Shapiro, I observed a writer at work and also felt as if I had spent time with and gotten to know a new friend. Her look at her own writing practice with its perils and pleasures is a must-read for anyone looking to jump start her creative life.
Obfuscation: Of the over one hundred books I read this year more than 40 of them were mysteries/suspense/thriller novels. I do love a puzzle. These were books ranging from the old school Agatha Christie's The Body in the Library to the new school world of Tim Hallinan's witty burglar Junior Bender. It takes a clever author to hide clues in plain sight and yet keep me guessing.
Kindness: Unlike the murder and mayhem found in the books above, kindness and good spirits abound in The All-Girls' Filling Station Last Reunion by Fannie Flagg; the ever delightful 84,
Charing Cross Road and The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street by Helene Hanff; and, my favorite of the year, The Pink Motel by Carol Ryrie Brink. In each of these books the kindnesses of strangers and the affection of the characters for each other (including dogs and blue jays) encourage one to just Be Kind.
Simplicity, Solitude, Silence: There are a dearth of books telling me how to pack more into and organize every nanosecond of my days. I, however, prefer to live a life with broad margins. I aim to leave time between activities - whether chores and errands or the more contemplative ones of painting and writing. Here are the books that inspired me this past year: Shelter for the Spirit by Victoria Moran; two by Elaine St. James, Simplify Your Life and Living the Simple Life; and the first two 'shells' (her chapters on solitude and simplicity) in Anne Morrow Lindbergh's Gift from the Sea.
For the complete list (to date) of my shelf full of books for 2014, browse here.
Now, what books guided you through the year?
I am a big fan of libraries. I have had a library card allowing me free access to its treasures from every library in each city I have lived. I visit libraries when I travel. My mother was in charge for many years of one of the busiest branches in our city library system. My first job was as a page in one of the smaller neighborhood branches when I was in high school. I shelved books and was paid a whopping fifty cents an hour.
A few years ago, I even asked the head of the city library if I could spend the night in the Main Library. I wanted to write a feature story about what that would be like. He just looked at me, mumbled something about security, and shook his head.
Oh, well. I tried.
Which leads me to The Library at Night by Alberto Manguel. From the title one may think this is a horror story in which evil lurks in the stacks. But it is not. Instead, Mr. Manguel looks at libraries - public and private, ancient and modern - from many different perspectives. So we have chapters - fifteen in all - with titles of, for example, The Library as Shape; as Imagination; as Order; as Workshop; as Mind.
He begins with a description of his own library built on the spot of the barn of his 15th century house in France and lets the reader know that his favorite time to be there is at night.
If the library in the morning suggests an echo of the severe and reasonably wishful order of the world, the library at night seems to rejoice in the world's essential, joyful muddle.
But we soon leave the author's library and go on a magic carpet ride through history, literature, architecture, lost books, lost libraries, censorship and the burning of books (which is where the real evil lurks), and other people and their libraries.
In one of my favorite chapters - The Library as Workshop - Manguel evokes the room known as 'the study', a classification one doesn't hear about any more except in reading Golden Age British mysteries. The study, he writes, is the area within the library where writers do their work. So we get a glimpse of the studies of Erasmus, Borges, Kipling, Victor Hugo, and Cervantes.
As for the author's study, Manguel writes:
There's a notable difference, for me, between the large room in which I keep most of my books, and the smaller room in which I work. In the large room, the "library proper," I choose the volumes I need or want, I sit and read and make notes, I consult my encyclopedias. But in my study, the chosen books are those that I consider more immediate, more necessary, more intimate.
He goes on to list as his chosen books both the pocket edition and the two-volume shorter edition of the Oxford dictionary, the 1962 version of Roget's Thesaurus, Graves's Greek Myths, and a few others, which he writes, "feel like extensions of myself, at arm's length, always helpful."
The rooms in which writers (that subspecies of readers) surround themselves with the materials they need for their work acquire an animal quality, like that of a den or a nest, holding the shape of their bodies and offering a container to their thoughts. Here the writer can make his own bed among the books, be as monogamous or polygamous a reader as he wishes, choose an approved classic or an ignored newcomer, leave arguments unfinished, start on any page opened by chance, spend the night reading out loud so as to hear his own voice read back to him, in Virgil's famous words, under "the friendly silence of the soundless moon."
I have faithful reader, Tullik, to thank for recommending The Library at Night to me. It is one of those books that is a liberal arts education in itself offering interesting tidbits on a variety of subjects. And it has photos which add to its appeal.
I must admit that as I was reading this book, I was overcome with the desire to install bookshelves on every wall in my house. To turn my entire home into a library...a library for day and for night. What sweet dreams.
