and so it begins: journey to the bottom of the tbr pile

Last year I made a whole list of resolutions. Inspired by the ending of one year and the beginning of another, I compiled a list of things I wanted to do, things that meant something, that I felt would serve some purpose, would serve me. 

I called them goals because that felt more achievable; resolutions are abstract where goals are concrete. Or so I imagined. I didn’t manage to achieve many of those goals/resolutions. In fact, if I’m honest, barely one was properly and completely crossed off the list. 

So was my 2015 a failure? 

I guess that depends on your definition of failure. And conversely, of success. I’m still working out what those things mean to me. So I’m ill-equipped, currently at least, to know if 2015 was a failure. Or a success. 

What I do know is I only made one resolution this year. Start small and all that. 

There are currently around fifty books in my tbr pile. I say around fifty because I only counted the books that haven’t managed to find their way onto a bookshelf. I suspect my real tbr pile is a little higher, but my ability to buy books at a faster rate than I can read them is really a story for another day. So let’s stick with the piles of books beside my bed.

I've long harboured an appreciation for/small obsession with/insatiable desire to understand what our personal tbr piles mean, what they say about us and who we are and who we want to be. Perhaps that's why I've built such a large pile. Maybe the construction of such a pile is a way to decipher something of who and what I am, to try to find a definition for failure and success that I can use as a measuring stick for my life. Perhaps, once again, I'm attempting to make the tbr pile more than what it is. Maybe it really is just a pile of books. 

My preoccupation with the tbr pile aside, this years single resolution/goal is to not buy another book until I’ve read all the books stacked beside my bed. I’m calling it my journey to bottom of the tbr pile. Which makes it sound like a much more physical adventure than it will actually be. Though I do resolve to get up at semi-regular intervals to make a fresh pot of tea. 

As a way of attempting to keep myself accountable, I’ve decided that I will post a review of each of these books after reading. And as a way of attempting to keep myself accountable to the reviews, I’m posting a list of my tbr pile here:

Rebecca Solnit - Encyclopedia of Trouble and Spaciousness

Chris Kraus - I Love Dick

EB White - Essays of EB White

Fury: Women Write About Sex, Power and Violence

Nakkiah Kui - Kill The Messenger

Grace Paley - The Collected Stories

Sofie Laguna - The Eye of the Sheep

Ariel Levy - The Best American Essays 2015

Rebecca Solnit - A Field Guide to Getting Lost

Robyn Davidson - No Fixed Address

Miranda July - The First Bad Man

Freeman’s - The Best New Writing on Arrival

Nell Zink - The Wallcreeper

Meghan Daum - The Unspeakable

Janet Malcolm - Forty-One False Starts

Michel de Montaigne - On Friendship

Annie Proulx - Bird Cloud

Gerald Durrell - My Family and Other Animals 

Charlotte Wood - The Natural Way of Things

The Best Australian Science Writing 2015

Cheryl Strayed - Tiny Beautiful Things

Noel Pearson - The War of the Worlds

Laurie Penny - Unspeakable Things

E.M. Forster - Aspects of the Novel

Meghan Daum - My Misspent Youth

John Steinbeck - The Harvest Gypsies

Goodbye to all that: Writers on loving and leaving New York

Dorothy Parker - The Collected Dorothy Parker

The Paris Review Presents The Art of the Short Story

Ian Moffitt - The U-Jack Society

E.M. Forster - Collected Short Stories

Los Angeles Review of Books - Summer 2015 Edition

Sapphire - Push

William Faulkner - As I Lay Dying

Judith Wright - We Call For A Treaty

Kate Grenville - Lilian’s Story

Australian Writing Today

Bill Bryson - Down Under

William Golding - Lord of the Flies

Richard Wrangham - How Cooking Made us Human

Rosemary Sutcliffe - Beowulf

Alice Pung - Unpolished Gem

Joyce: A Collection of Critical Essays

Roddy Doyle - The Woman Who Walked Into Doors

Alice Munro - Too Much Happiness

Marjorie Barnard - Miles Franklin

Douglas Hyde - A Literary History of Ireland

Flannery O’Connor - The Complete Stories

Ernest Hemingway - By-Line

Stephanie Bishop - The Other Side of The World

Sylvia Plath - The Bell Jar

The Persephone Book of Short Stories

Running down that list is equal parts intimidating and exhilarating. I best get reading. 

dust and cobwebs

It’s been so long since I’ve been here I can almost smell the dust, see the cobwebs forming in the corners of the screen. 

Despite my absence this space has been on my mind. A dull ache sitting at the base of my skull, travelling down my spine and then moving into my belly where it sat like a stone. I could feel its weight as I moved. Constantly reminding me that this space sat waiting for me, empty, devoid of words. Words I’d moved to London to write. 

I’ve been confused of late. About my place in the world. About what I want and how I can go about getting it. Confused about how something I always thought I wanted could become everything I don’t. 

That confusion kept me from this space. Kept me from writing the words I so desperately wanted to. London was supposed to be the answer, was supposed to give me what I craved, or thought I craved. And while London has given me much much more than I can ever give back - it has given me distance from what I needed distance from, it has given me sharp focus where before was only fuzziness, it has provided much needed perspective, it has allowed me to find answers to questions I didn't even know needed asking and to scratch beneath the surface of the person I thought I was, the person I saw in the mirror - it has also muddied the waters in other ways that I could never have anticipated. 

- - - 

For the past five months I’ve been writing almost daily in a journal. I’ve been transcribing thoughts as they formed in my mind, scrawling memories and moments and trying to write myself out of the sadness and fear and the kind of thinking that feels like a heavy weight on my chest. Some days it works, others it does not. 

I had envisioned what these months would be like, what being here would be like. I had told myself it would be hard, there would be moments when I questioned myself, my sanity, my ability to push through the shitty to find the gold. I just hadn’t anticipated how much of the shitty there would be.

My reality is nothing like my dreams. This is not unusual. This is life. But here it feels so much more than just life. This city has me questioning everything I thought I knew about myself and it feels like a reality I’m not sure how to traverse.

But amongst the angst and the heightened emotional state of being, there are moments, usually the late evening or early morning when I find myself walking along somewhat empty streets, when I feel like London is filling me up, forcing my ribs out and making my spine straighten and I feel the smile like it's coming from deep within my belly. I feel free and independent and anonymous, alone but not lonely. In these moments the city lets me in, lets me see what there is to see here, lets me feel what there is to feel. These moments are pure happiness, they are joy, they are perfect, they are rare.

- - - -

I wrote the words above last year, in the days before I boarded a plane home. Months ago now, many days and nights have passed since then. It’s much dustier here now. There are more cobwebs. But the space has still been on my mind. Especially as the new year approached and rolled over. What is it about a new year that forces reflection? 

This year will be an important one for me. And while there is still confusion (I’ve come to the realisation that confusion is not necessarily a bad thing and having it along as a companion, albeit a smaller one than it used to be, is something I’m ok with) there is now greater knowledge and understanding, there is now acceptance and a level of self-respect that before had not been. I feel more confident in traversing my reality now, in grasping what is real, what is important and what is worth my time. 

I owe much of this to London, to the emotional trauma I experienced while there, to the insight that being there bought, that leaving there allowed. To the questions it posed, to the answers it demanded.

I feel as if these words have blown out the dust, have knocked down the cobwebs. Maybe it’s not shiny around here (really, when has it ever been?) but I’m ok with that.