A Literary Thanksgiving

Since it’s a long weekend, I think that if you have time you ought to take a trip to the library or a great bookstore in your neighborhood.  If you’re in DC, check out Politics and Prose.  Or, if you’re in Raleigh, take a look at Quail Ridge Books.  South Bend has a great used bookstore, too.  It’s called Erasmus Books and it’s just about the best place ever. Jesse introduced me to it on an afternoon when I said, well, screamed, “THIS TOWN IS A HOLE!!!!!!”  I picked up Sylvia Plath’s unabridged journal, and Jesse bought me I am Asher Lev  and Wuthering Heights without my knowing and gave it to me for my birthday.  I think we went to Macri’s Deli afterwords and ate donuts and read books along the East Race. I think that was the beginning of me thinking South Bend isn’t so bad, and, as poetic justice would have it, I miss the town terribly.

Speaking of Erasmus, I updated my “The Stack” page if you need some great book recommendations.  My criteria for putting a star next to a book title has to do with whether or not I would, in my free time, pick it up again, and so I feel a little like a poser by putting a star next to The Praise of Folly.  That book was not easy for me to get through. Time seemed to stand still when I was reading it. However, this is not to say it’s a bad book, and in fact, I think it’s a very good, very important book.  I wouldn’t have known that though, if I hadn’t listened to lectures on it and then written about it.

And that is what I’m thankful for today.  I’m thankful that I get to read the hard things. I’m thankful that I get to write, and I get to try and make it funny and sad at the same time.

I’m thankful for my writing spots:

my desk,

this place,

and this one.

In an essay called “Portrait of a Writer,” Natalia Ginzburg writes, “She has asked whether writing, for her, was a duty or a pleasure. Stupid. It was neither. At the best of times it was, and is, her way of inhabiting the earth.”

I’m thankful that I get to inhabit the earth this way.