I never dreamed of owning a bookstore or three. I had much broader and adventurous aspirations: following nomadic reindeer herders in Siberia on a Watson Fellowship, climbing Denali in Alaska, driving the Hippie trail over the Khyber Pass in Afghanistan to Istanbul that my dad so badly wanted to do with our family in 1971 until a spy told him bandits would kill us, trekking across the Australian desert like Robyn Davidson did on a camel as recounted in her book TRACKS. Life got in the way but I kept wanting for more.
One of the more difficult questions I get is “What are you reading?” In my attempt to respond, I stumble, thinking “What am I reading?” Being one who reads more than 200 books a year, most of them galleys or books that will be published months after I read them, I try to think of one that is in print at the moment of the question, especially if I don’t have my small Leuchttrum notebook with my books read. This process takes my brain back to books that have a had a meaningful or unforgettable impact on my life. GIFT FROM THE SEA by Ann Morrow Lindberg is one of these. Written in 1956 this book is timeless. One of my favorite lines is “Solitude, says the moon shell. Every person, especially every woman, should be alone sometime during the year, some part of each week, and each day…. But women need solitude in order to find again the true essence of themselves, that firm strand which will be the indispensable center of a whole web of human relationships. The problem (women have) is how to feed the soul.” In her book, Lindberg introduces Charles Morgan who says “the stilling of the soul within the activities of the mind and body so that it might be still as the axis of the revolving wheel is still.”
I wish in my own life I had paid more attention to what Lindberg wrote in her wise gem of a book; it may have had a smoother path, less on the spinning wheel without a center of an axis, perhaps. GIFT FROM THE SEA is one of those quintessential books to recommend, sharing a piece of yourself with a friend in need of finding her own balance or center.
When I am asked by a publisher or editor to read something they love and want to share, I am most excited to read when I can discover another’s world, to escape to someone else’s life, to learn something I never knew, or to visualize a place I never knew existed, away from everything else calling to me. With each page turned, books and reading help me find a balance in my world, how I process, or disappear from an exhausting day behind every spine. On each shelf is a world that allows my mind to wander with a sense of freedom when real life is too heavy to bear.
The book, FOLLOW YOUR HEART by Susanna Tamaro, an Italian writer, was given to me by my horseback riding trainer when my life was in shatters. I had hit my “Zerrissenheit” period that Lindberg introduces in her book; my inner conflict, being torn apart into shards of myself. Tamaro writes “that no matter what the stakes, we must look within ourselves and gather the courage to follow our hearts.” Her book is a letter written by an Italian grandmother, aging and facing possible death, to her unruly off kilter granddaughter in the United States, explaining how she became who she is, what made her act the way she did, rediscovering herself in time to advise her granddaughter not to make the same mistakes and to follow your heart, which the grandmother didn’t do. When I was gifted this book, I felt like my friend was giving me a part of herself, and the permission to listen to what my heart was telling me and to follow it.
Many of the most impactful books on my list are written by strong independent women, not at all a surprise to me. Beryl Markham wrote WEST WITH THE NIGHT about Isak Dinesen, Laurie Colwin who died too young, Eleanor Roosevelt YOU LEARN BY LIVING, and CURVE OF TIME by M. Wylie Blanchet. Blanchet lost her husband young, eked out a living and took her five kids around the Canadian Gulf Islands in a 25-foot boat named Caprice during the summers.
My gardens are influenced by Celia Thaxter, author of AN ISLAND GARDEN, who lived on Appledore Island off New Hampshire in the late 19th century and grew hollyhocks, sweet peas, red poppies, lilies, larkspur, rambling roses, and many other old-fashioned favorites. Virginia Woolf, an influencer to many with her book ROOM OF ONE’S OWN, also had an impact on my life while searching for my own center and balance. Woolf’s essay is more complicated than just saying “a woman needs her own room to write and money to live on,” of course, but just the title gave me some insight as to what I may have been looking for during these times of personal struggle for my identity. Without tending Jane Geniesse’s garden on Fishers Island I may never have met Pepe Maynard who taught me the Latin names of plants, or heard of Freya Stark, a 20th century writer, photographer and explorer of the middle east. Reading Geniesses’s book, THE PASSIONATE NOMAD showed me another strong, independent minded woman of the 20th century, writing about her travels in the Middle East, books that inspired my heart to follow mine.
Annie Philbrick 