What are your classics?

This year when John built floating shelves for my studio room I felt so lucky. It gave me the chance to sort through my books and consider which mattered and where I wanted to put them. There is something about this whole process though that has disturbed me a little. It continues to gnaw away at me.

When I sorted out the books and put up the ones that mattered to me, I found that many of them were from twenty or more years ago. These books really affected me and I have hung onto many of the elemental ideas in them and I value them. Not every book I valued is up there. Some I no longer have a copy of or they are at home. And there are not very many of either, maybe twenty or so. Read about a book a week. Many of them I quickly forget. Most of them I pass on to friends or the library sale as soon as I have finished them. Yet there are only a few that remain close to my heart. 

The reason I find this disturbing is that I wonder if I am stuck in an old way of thinking. If I am not letting the new resonate. If I am like my father watching old black and white movies. Many of the things that deeply affected me happened a long time ago. And though this is true and meaningful, I do want to be open to holding new thoughts and ideas close. I want to see the colour of the changing world even though I may still nurture some old ideas.

So I am thinking, as I'm here looking at those shelves, that it might be important to have a shelf that holds the books that have impacted me in some way more recently. So I can be reminded of the influx of new ideas and the charm that this holds as well. "Make room for the new' says a blank journal that a friend gave me. In order for new ideas to come we must make room on our shelves. We must let new ideas take some prevalence in our lives. And so I am thinking. I am thinking of a list of all the books I can think of that affected me. Perhaps I don't need copies I just need to make a cup of tea and recall all that I can recall. A list of 100 perhaps? What would be on your list?

I can think of novels that carried me to new places in my heart. Writers like Elizabeth Strout, Richard Wright, Elizabeth Hay helped me understand people better through their stories. Looking at the paintings of Georgia Okeefe or Tom Thompson helped me see things I never saw before in the natural world. Now I see these things all the time. I read Alden Nowlans' poetry so much that when something happens in real life I can often reference one of his poems. There are worlds held in books. Worlds of wonder and worlds of change. And it is in them that the seeker finds their own world. So I am on the lookout for the classics of my own life. My own personal book awards. The ones that mattered to me. And I have to look more closely at the last twenty years, at the last two years and rethink the ones I love and why. 

And so sometime soon I hope to sit with my sketchbook and jot down that list. I want to reimagine my shelf. Even If I don't hold a copy in my hand I can hold it in my heart.