So a while ago I stumbled across this article on My Ideal Bookshelf. I read it, enjoyed it, and moved on. Then I stumbled upon it again, and with my resolutions in mind and this blog waiting for posts, I decided I’d share it with you guys. My Ideal Bookshelf can be explained a lot more easily with this quote, so consider the link to the original article tl;dr (except it’s really interesting and has some great inspirational quotes so you should read it anyway).
“In 2007, artist and illustrator Jane Mount began painting “portraits of people through the spines of their books” — those aspirational bookshelves we all hold in our heads (and, ideally, on our walls), full of all the books that helped us discover and rediscover who we are, what we stand for, and what we’d like to become. A kind of book spine poetry of identity.In 2010, she paired with Paris Review writer Thessaly La Force and the two asked more than a hundred of today’s most exciting creators — writers, artists, designers, critics, filmmakers, chefs, architects — what those favorite, timeless books were for them.”
So while I am by no means one of today’s well-known or exciting creators of art, I thought it would be fun to do one for myself. So here you go, my “ideal bookshelf”:
Grendel, John Gardner
Letters to a Young Poet, Rainer Maria Rilke
The Awakening, Kate Chopin
Miss Julie, August Strindberg
Turn of the Screw, Henry James
Ploughshares, ed. Seamus Heaney/“Adagio,” Seamus Dean
The Taming of the Shrew, William Shakespeare
The Complete Works of Lewis Carroll, Lewis Carroll
The Blind Assassin, Margaret Atwood
In the Lake of the Woods, Tim O’Brien
(Note: As the writing of explanations to each of the works I’ve shared took way too long, I’ve opted to put them in another post. So enjoy this one and take a while to stew over the works I’ve chosen.)
In Quotation Marks 