Would You Like To Take A Look At My Bookshelves?
To me, sharing my bookshelves with the internet is very intimate! This can give you a clue into how much I love and value books!
My love of reading started very early with Goosebumps & Babysitter's Club reading beneath the sheets into the wee hours of the morning.
In fact, that groggy, tired eye, empty flashlight batteries and even sore wrist (yes I know, I am extreme) is familiar to me even today!
I am a reader and a very curious human. As such, I was quite excited when @riverflows tagged me in a reveal your bookshelves challenge. I realize I'm very overdue to actually participate in the challenge, but I took the photos a couple weeks ago and am such getting down to making the post. So without further ado!
Would You Like To Take A Look At My Bookshelves?
Upon first waking, I usually have a pile of books to my right. Some are reference books as you can see my curiosity dabbles in many subjects!
Many good ones here, but make sure to check out Toko-Pa's book Belonging! An instant classic!
My love of books has much to do with my mother's influence. She and I would read together a lot when I was a girl. It wasn't uncommon for her to be sitting up in the bed in the evenings with a bowl of potato chips, peanut m & ms and iced tea chewing the ice and reading books. I'd join her on her waterbed!!
But I think the love of reading probably didn't start there, it started with her mother!
I have a vivid memory when I was a kid of one time going into my grandmother's room and seeing through the shadows and dim light, stacks and stacks of books on the floor! I'd never seen a room like that before...
I think since then (and since seeing my grandmother's bookshelves), I always wanted a house with bookshelves lining many of the walls! I don't have a formal house yet, but I do have quite a few smaller buildings all with their own book shelves. I'll walk you through all of the repositories for books around Mountain Jewel.
Cabin
The Cabin houses, I must say, some of my favorite books. This is the "Winter Selection" of books I was either actively studying (like my herbals) or that we on the To-Read list. I just finished Racing Alone by Nader Khalili, a visionary architect who created the idea of superadobe construction & actually fired old adobe style homes like huge pieces of pottery! You'll also see Beryl Markham's West With The Night... " She is the first person to fly the Atlantic east to west in a solo non-stop flight (a westbound flight requires more endurance, fuel, and time than the eastward journey, because the craft must travel against the prevailing Atlantic winds)."
Of her Hemingway said...
"she has written so well, and marvelously well, that I was completely ashamed of myself as a writer. I felt that I was simply a carpenter with words, picking up whatever was furnished on the job and nailing them together and sometimes making an okay pig pen. But [she] can write rings around all of us who consider ourselves as writers ... it really is a bloody wonderful book
Some real classics here for me. Like Peter Bane's Permaculture Handbook. Peter was one of my first Permaculture teachers. In fact, he taught me what permaculture was one muggy summer's fortnight in the hills of Southern Indiana...
Also, books by Starhawk, Pema Chodron, and Last Standing Woman by Winona LaDuke are must-haves!
Solar Shed
Next we take a journey out from the woods to the Solar Shed....
The Solar Shed of course has shelves tucked with books. I had to take many of my books out of storage finally! After many years of travel and being cooped up in boxes here and there, they're happy to see the light of day.
Classic regional reference books.
And many of the books you see here are actually my grandmother's. After she died, my family sorted through all of her things and my parents had her huge old bookcase in their house. Well my parents recently moved and I got many of the books! My grandmother was an avid reader and I have always admired and adored her taste in books. She was a woman ahead of her time!!
Composting Toilet
Yes, even our composting toilet has a bookshelf-- but of course! We need appropriate reading material in there as well. @Riverflows, you'll notice the cherished Pharmako series!!
For anyone who isn't familiar with these... Dale Pendell has gifted the world with an offering part scientific study// poetry of his explorations and research with plants... Shamanic ethnobotany would be a good phrase here!
Yurt
Lastly, we enter the yurt! Where we have a bookshelf full of books.
From mushroom ID to earth care, fiction and magic, Etymological dictionary to Poetry... This bookshelf is eclectic; just the way I like it!!
There you have it. The books at Mountain Jewel!!
