Past, Present, Future

I wanted to take some time this week to look at books read, books reading, and books to be read—and make a request for suggestions from you, the readers.

Past

First of all, on retreat at St. Meinrad Archabbey last week I read for the third or fourth time Anne Fadiman's Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader. What a terrific little book of essays. After each one I hugged the book to me as I was so delighted with what I had read. Ms. Fadiman covers a lot of ground from former British Prime Minister William Gladstone's instructions on constructing the perfect library to her own collection of books on Arctic exploration to the mingling of her and her husband's vast libraries.

Lucky for me, my room in the guesthouse was right next to The Reading Room with its wooden library table and chairs surrounded by shelves of books. Some titles had a very religious slant—after all, I was staying at a monastery—but others promised a more spiritual flair. I searched to see if there was anything that struck my fancy and came across Sweeping Changes: Discovering the Joy of Zen in Everyday Tasks by Gary Thorp. Its gentle reminder: when you are sweeping, sweep...don't be pondering your next activity or your last one. In other words, stay in the moment with your dusting, folding, or mopping. Consider those tasks to be a form of meditation. It was a small book with simple illustrations at the head of each chapter. I knew I could finish it over my short stay and it proved to be a great choice, although I must admit housekeeping is not one of my strengths.

Present

As sometimes happens, two books I had on reserve at the library came available at the same time and I am ready to settle down with both of them. The first is The House of Unexpected Sisters, Alexander McCall Smith's newest mystery featuring Precious Ramotswe and Grace Makutsi of the No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency. Oh, how I love being in their world.

The second is A Secret Sisterhood: The Literary Friendships of Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, and Virginia Woolf by Emily Midorikawa and Emma Claire Sweeney. I am really anxious to dig into this one as I have read good things about it.

Future

Photo credit: thekrystaldiaries.com

As winter is almost officially here—even though in Louisville we are still experiencing balmy temperatures—I plan to come up with a list of Cozy Books to have on hand. I am thinking more of favorite comfort books to reread that will hold the cold and dark at bay.

This is where I could use your help. Email me [bellebookandcandle(at)hotmail(dot)com] or leave a comment about what your Ideal Cozy Bookshelf would hold. I will put all our suggestions together in another post. 

Thanks. Looking forward to reading about your choices! 

A Pause to Give Thanks

Today in America we are celebrating Thanksgiving — a day set aside to pause and count one's blessings. And eat, of course. 

I am on my annual Thanksgiving week retreat. Normally I would be at the Abbey of Gethsemani but the monks are having the guest house refurbished and it is closed until March 2018. 

Not to be daunted, I switched abbeys and am staying at the guest house at St. Meinrad Archabbey. It is about an hour's drive west of  Louisville. 

I have found that monasteries are the quietest places and make for the perfect retreat. No one bothers me. The food is prepared and served and the cleaning up is done by someone else. 

I brought my watercolor paints and sketchbooks and two books of essays by Ann Fadiman - Ex Libris: Confession of a Common Reader and At Large and At Small: Familiar Essays. I have read both books before but am in the mood for them again. The books are small in size and comfortable to hold. The essays are thoughtful and engaging. 

Hope your day is splendid and that there is plenty of pie.

A Few Words on Pen-Bereavement

Penfriend in the Burlington Arcade
London

"Pen-bereavement is a serious matter." -- Anne Fadiman

I know how she feels. The above quote is from Fadiman's essay in Ex Libris entitled "Eternal Ink". She writes that her fifth-grade boyfriend gave her a fountain pen - she thinks he stole it from his stepfather. She didn't care and she cherished it.

She had the pen for years - into adulthood - and then one day it was gone. She thinks it perhaps fell through a crack in her desk and resides in some dark corner. She has never been the same. No replacement pen ever suited.

I only write with a fountain pen. I used to buy the cheap Schaeffer pens with the replacement cartridges of ink (black only, thank you very much) to write in my journal. The plastic barrels were red or yellow with a faux silver cap. When the nib began to scratch and the ink to blotch the pen was easy and inexpensive to replace.

Then on a trip to Paris and a side journey to Normandy, I strolled into a pen store in Deauville. There, I bought my first Waterman fountain pen. It had a green plastic barrel with a sort of Picasso-esque design and a top that firmly closed with a click. The nib was gold. I adored that pen and carried it with me for years, but alas, it disappeared.

I took it up a notch with my next Waterman. This one was given to me as a present (I got to pick it out) and had a marbled deep blue metal barrel and top. It also came with a lifetime guarantee. At one point the nib just plain wore out and the company replaced it. It recently had another issue with the cap and I have just not had the energy to pack it up and return it to Waterman for repairs.

Another Waterman I purchased from a tiny pen shop, the Penfriend, in the Burlington Arcade in London. It had a brown barrel and a medium nib which never really slid along the page to suit me. It too has disappeared.

Pen-bereavement for sure.

I do have a back up: a metallic blue Lamy fountain pen that I purchased in Savannah in 2010 and keep on my desk.

I discovered a few years ago that Pilot makes a disposable fountain pen, the Varsity. It costs $3.50 and I don't cry if I lose it.

I have a penchant for pens, as you can see. I also have a bejeweled dip pen and another dip pen made of blown glass from Italy. I have used them both, but the dipping and writing, dipping and writing does tend to get tedious.

In my desk are five or six dip pens that belonged to my grandfather. They each consist of a wooden barrel with the nib stuck into the end. I keep them because I like to think of him when I open that drawer and occasionally bring them out and put them on a tray with the others for display.

It somehow soothes me just to see them.

Ex Libris

Anne Fadiman

I have a new best friend - or BFF as she would be called today - Anne Fadiman. Actually we have been friends since 1998 when her book of personal essays Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader found its way into my hands. OK, so she doesn't know who I am, but by reading her essays on subjects as far reaching as North Pole exploration, the obsessive proofreading of menus, lost vocabulary, and inscriptions on a flyleaf, I have learned a great deal about her.

As part of my journey to reread books from my List of 10 (List of 10), I picked up Ms. Fadiman's book this morning and at once was comforted, amused, and informed by her thoughts. I especially liked her categorization of book lovers as carnal or courtly. Carnal book lovers write responses and comments in margins, underline passages, dog ear pages, have been known to use feathers as bookmarks and to start a collection of dead South American insects within the pages of a book.

I am not that person. I am a courtly book lover. As proof, to look at my copy of Ex Libris, you would not know that this is my third or fourth reading of it so pristine are the pages. I do notice a bit of fading of the dust-jacket's spine which causes me some distress. Anyway, as you can imagine, as a courtly book lover I always uses a bookmark, never fold the corners of a page, never underline, mark or in any way abuse A Book.

So this is where my BFF have a slight parting of the ways. On the one hand, she admonishes, "Just think what courtly book lovers miss by believing that the only thing they are permitted to do with  books is read them." But, she also admits that "the trouble to the carnal approach is that we love our books to pieces."

Literally, to pieces.

I can understand the idea of writing in books, making them your own, having a conversation with the author, but putting that idea into practice is just something I have never been able to bring myself to do. The most I might do is leave a faint pencil mark in the margin to highlight a passage. And then of course that gets erased once it has served its purpose.

I find it distracting to come across a carnal reader's comments in the margins of a second-hand book or even (god forbid!) a library book. Or underlined passages. 'What did that reader find so intriguing?' I begin to wonder and then lose sight of my own experience with the author.

So even though Ms. Fadiman and I don't agree on the carnal/courtly question, I still feel we will be best friends forever.