Storing Books You've Read

“What do you do with books you have already read?” –from 4,000 Questions by Barbara Ann Kipfer

This is a real problem for me. I know some people give them away so others can enjoy them. I don’t do that, for a number of reasons.

First, I underline passages that move me. Second, I make personal notes next to other passages—notes I really don’t want other people reading. They aren’t earth-shattering as much as they are personal. Third, I often refer back to books I’ve already read when I’m writing a book or an article, so I need to hang on to them. Oh, and sometimes I re-read books. I’m really thinking about diving back in to the Mitford Series by Jan Karon.

If I had all the time in the world, I’d go through books when I finished reading them and enter the marked passages into a database. That way the nuggets would always be at my fingertips when I’m writing and I wouldn’t have to worry about finding each book from which I want to quote. Realistically though, that’s probably never going to happen.

Consequently, my real problem with knowing what to do with books I’ve already read is figuring out how to store them in such a fashion as to be able to find them when I need them.

A few years ago, I went through my entire library and assigned books to designated bookshelves, including a shelf of books I’d already read. But then my collection outgrew my shelves and it became a free for all. Now, I have books stacked everywhere and in no particular order. Well, that’s not entirely true. Some semblance of order exists from my previous organizational effort, but not enough.

I’m thinking this needs to be a Saturday afternoon project in the near future.

On the Road Again

It felt great to be home for two days, but now I’m on the road again. I headed for Kansas City this morning to teach at the HACWN writer’s conference. This conference holds a special place in my heart because it’s where I got my start. Back in 1998, I attended this conference and got bit by the writing bug. Five years later, I began writing full time.

Many of the people I met in 1998 and over the next couple of years at the conference have moved on and they no longer attend the conference. That sort of bums me out, but I’ve already bumped into so many people I met at the conference in recent years and it is fun to catch up with them. I saw one guy today who handed me a published copy of his book—the same book that was just an idea as we discussed it five years ago at the conference.

Life is about relationships—both new and established.

I met a woman today whom I’ve never met before. She contacted me via email before the conference to let me know she signed up to pray for a member of the conference faculty and she got my name. Today she told me she’s still praying for me. She even handed me a gift bag this afternoon. It was a very humbling experience.

Tonight, after I got back to my hotel, a woman on the conference faculty knocked on my hotel room door and handed me a pop. She heard me say I wanted one earlier and she went out of her way to bring me one.

Tomorrow is a new day. I’m going to look for a way to be a blessing to somebody else the way several people were a blessing to me today.

Nicknames

I saw several people discussing nicknames on Twitter this morning and it instantly made me think about a nickname someone gave me many years ago. It wasn’t a flattering nickname, but I have to admit that it was kind of funny—in a hurtful sort of way. The nickname was “Slow-Mo.” I got the tag because a guy I was playing basketball with said it looked like I was in slow motion on the court.

He might have just been talking about my style of play which relied on fakes and a couple of unorthodox moves; a guy who is 5’10” and overweight has to depend on some sort of deception on the court, otherwise he’ll never get a decent look at the basket. But I suspect it had more to do with my being overweight than my movement.

The nickname never really caught on, thankfully. A couple of guys used it on the basketball court, but it stopped there.

The thing about a hurtful nickname is, it’s a constant reminder about some quality or lack thereof that a person doesn’t need to be reminded of. The person already knows his or her deficiencies and in one way or another is trying to compensate for them, or maybe even just forget about them for 60 minutes during a game.

But we have something inside us as humans that like to point out the deficiencies in others. Maybe we’re just trying to hide our own issues.

A Visit to the Ghost Ranch

The Ghost Ranch near Abiquiu, NM

This past week, I traveled to a place called the Ghost Ranch—located about 20 miles north of Abiquiu, New Mexico to be on staff at the CLASS Christian Writer’s Conference.

All of us were in for a surprise as we pulled off Highway 84 and headed down the mile and a half long gravel road that leads to the Ghost Ranch: we were cut off from the outside world. Our cell phones had zero bars in zero places; internet access was limited to a few hot spots; and we didn’t have a television.

There’s a certain stillness that is attractive about the place.

The dust swirls off the roads. The rock formations surrounding the buildings demand attention—especially if you are outside in the morning when the sun reflects off the earth toned colors. You have to go looking for a stream, but if you look hard enough, you can find one.

Animals walk around freely and pretty much get what they want.

One particular portly raccoon shows up every night and climbs into a trash can that sits outside the building known as the gathering place. He doesn’t mind people. But he also doesn’t mind having a little fun with them. As people walk past the trash can on their way to the bathroom, he pops his head out. More than one woman shrieked. I couldn’t help but laugh.

One night, as I was driving my golf cart back to my room, I heard a noise about 100 yards off the path. I turned my flashlight in time to see an animal that looked like a cross between a deer and a kangaroo. It had long floppy ears. Later in the week, I had a friend with me and we ran into several more of them. He said they are mule deer. He was right. I found a video of mule deer to give you an idea about what they look like.

And then there were the mice. If you left anything edible out, they attacked while we were in class. They ate chocolate marshmallows, gum, granola bars, and just about everything else. In fact, they even chewed on the buttons of a CPAP machine.

I’m not particularly fond of being cut off from society, but every once in a great while, it’s probably not a bad idea. God seems to beckon from the silence. You get to see wildlife in their natural environment. The landscape is awe-inspiring.

For a week, it seemed like the clock was been turned back 70 or 100 years to a simpler time. Not simpler in terms of not having hardship, but simpler in terms of having fewer distractions.

Truthfully though, I was glad to pull into my hotel room in Denver tonight, complete with four bars on my cell phone, free Wi-Fi in my room, without any concern for mice devouring the snacks in my duffel bag.

One trip back to a simpler time per year seems just about right to me.

The Diary of Anne Frank

Over the past few months, I’ve been working my way through The Diary of Anne Frank. With each turn of the page, the knots in my stomach grew tighter because I knew that the Gestapo’s knock on the door was coming. As long as I didn’t get to the last page of the dairy, Anne and her family were safe in their secret annex in Holland. I liked it that way. But yesterday, with a heavy heart, I finished the diary. I put the Afterward off until today.

Many years ago, I had a friend who used the word “crunchy” to describe her emotions when she felt like something was out of sorts. I felt that way this morning. I took The Diary of Anne Frank with me as I got my oil changed, but reading it in the waiting room made me feel so crunchy that I put it down so I could finish it at home.

When I got there, I read that Anne’s mother died in January of 1945 at Auschwitz in her infirmary barracks. Anne’s father survived and ultimately kept Anne’s diary alive. Her sister, Margot, died in March of 1945 at Belsen. Anne (who was 15 years old) was in the same camp as Margot and here’s what the Afterward quotes a survivor as saying, “Anne, who was already sick at the time was not informed of her sister’s death, but after a few days she sensed it, and soon afterwards she died, peacefully, feeling that nothing bad was happening to her.”

Of course, she had no way of knowing that her diary would soon be an instrumental testament against the damnable actions of the Nazis while also powerfully testifying against those who did nothing to stop the atrocities. But the Afterward of the book explains one of the ways it accomplished both:

“On October 1, 1956, The Diary of Anny Frank opened [as a play] simultaneously in seven German cities. Audiences there greeted it in stunned silence. The play released a wave of emotion that finally broke through the silence with which Germans had treated the Nazi period. For the first time there were widespread expressions of guilt and shame for what Germans had done to the Jews only a few years before . . . In Amsterdam . . . the [play opened] on November 27 . . . ‘There were audible sobs,’ the New York Times correspondent reported, ‘and one strangled cry as the drama struck its climax and conclusion—the sound of the Germans hammering at the door of the hideout. The audience sat in silence for several minutes after the curtain went down. . . . There was no applause.”

Toward the end of Anne’s diary she revealed that she wanted to be a journalist, saying “I can shake off everything if I write; my sorrows disappear, my courage is reborn. But, and that is the great question, will I ever be able to write anything great, will I ever become a journalist or a writer?”

She had no idea she was in the middle of writing something great. According to the Anne Frank Center’s website, her diary has been translated into 67 languages and has sold more than 31 million copies.

The Afterward concludes with a quote from Ernst Schnabel, who wrote Anne Frank: A Portrait in Courage: “Her voice was preserved out of the millions that were silenced, this voice no louder than a child’s whisper. . . . It has outlasted the shouts of the murderers and has soared above the voices of time.”

Schnabel captures the reason I’m drawn to writing. I’ve never experienced anything like Anne Frank did, but as a writer I can give a voice to people whose stories might not get told otherwise and I can chronicle everyday events and observations that might give somebody insight. Writing is a lot of things—it’s therapeutic, cleansing, gut-wrenching, frustrating, and time consuming—just to name a few, but it’s also satisfying because it leaves a mark on the timeline of human history that outlives the writer, giving future generations a backward glimpse at their heritage.

Newspaper Reading

Continuing in the 4,000 Questions series: In which order do you read the newspaper sections?

This question is intriguing because just watching the way a person reads the newspaper can be telling. Some start with a particular section because of their interests. Some start at the front and work their way back because of their personality type. Some only read certain portions of the paper because the news in those sections is all they care about. And some start from the back and work their way forward—I talked to a guy recently who does that.

I am definitely the type who starts from the front and works his way through each section in order until I’m finished. I don’t read the Sunday newspaper often, but when I do, for some reason, it usually arrives out of order. Before I can even start, I have to rearrange the sections into their proper order.

Obviously, I like order. But I find it difficult to live orderly in many other areas of my life because so many necessary tasks pop up throughout the day that are unplanned. Sometimes a situation forces me to read Section D when I’m still trying to make my way through Section A. What typically happens is, I read Section D and then forget where I was in Section A. Even when I remember where I was, I’ve lost focus by the time I return.

I’m better at this than I used to be, but I’m still not where I’d like to be. I’m interested in hearing from you. What order you do you read the newspaper in and what can you conclude from it regarding the way you live your life?