The journey of a book

When I'm planning a trip, one of the first items on my to-do list is to find an independent bookstore nearby. And when it's time to pack, I make sure to leave space in my suitcase, strategically staying under the weight limit despite my tendency to overpack, and dedicate most of my souvenir money to bringing home a new stack of books.

My latest haul, from Symposium Books in Providence, Rhode Island, has been somewhat disappointing. I loved the book on punctuation I picked up at the ACES conference, go figure, but the stack I carefully selected during my bookstore wandering has so far yielded two 3-star books and one DNF ("did not finish," for those not fluent in book nerd lingo). Already, two of the eight I plan to take to a local used bookstore—in exchange for different books, of course.

This is my "I just spent too much money but simply had no choice" face.

Returning or exchanging any other purchase is an annoyance, but I don't mind it so much with books, even if I lose out on money. I make sure they find a good home elsewhere (unless I hate the book; then I make it suffer). I like to imagine one of my book finding its way to someone who will appreciate it. Even if it had to travel from Rhode Island to Utah to a yard sale to a bookstore in Colorado—there's something beautiful and serendipitous about all the exchanges that must happen to get a book to where it belongs.

It's one of the reasons I like to check out used bookstores occasionally, too. By taking home a book that used to belong to someone else, I'm adding a little bit of their history to my own library.

Take Under the Tuscan Sun by Frances Mayes, for example. I bought this at Marissa's Books in Murray for $6. The former owner (male, I would guess based on the handwriting) had underlined passages throughout and left comments in the margins. For example, this passage on page 19 was underlined: "If you can't got first class, don't go at all." Next to this the reader wrote: "Reading this in first class STL–SLC. Ha!"

Now isn't that lovely? I have a clue as to where this book may have come from, and insight into the person who enjoyed it before I adopted it. Maybe he was traveling for work, or maybe he was a rich man who loves to cook (many of the recipes had markups, too). Maybe he was reading it for a school assignment, which is why so many of the philosophical passages are underlined.

This book wouldn't have meant as much to me without the personal insights the original owner added to its pages. Now it's one of my favorite books, purely because of the way it connected me to a stranger I'll never meet.

Any reader will compare books to friends at some point. Books go through quite the journey to find us, after all.

Fear

A few weeks ago, I took a couple long plane rides to Providence, Rhode Island for what I like to call my annual word nerd vacation (an editing conference). I went a day early so I could attend a writing workshop, where I expected I'd pick up a bunch of tips to bring back to our writing team.

Instead, I got group therapy.

Dave Ursillo, the guy running the workshop, wasn't there to teach us how to write. He was there to help us figure out what our main blocks (he called them "shadows") are that prevent us from writing, and to help us overcome them. We all took a quiz to find out what our main shadows were, and then the group therapy commenced.

Of the three shadows—guilt, shame, and fear—I scored highest in fear. I got the highest score in fear out of the whole group; in fact, no one scored that high in any category—except for me.

I wasn't surprised by my results. Fear drives just about every decision I make, whether I realize it or not. There's the fear of failure. Fear of wasting my time. Fear of rejection, of looking stupid, of making the wrong choice, of making a mistake. The bigger, outward things like riding roller coasters and traveling alone and pursuing a master's degree I can handle, but the less abstract, internal things I tend to sit out. Send a dragon my way and I'll fight it eventually, but invite me to do something I don't think I'll excel at and I'll respectfully decline.

But there is a bright side to this writing shadow. Those who score high in fear have a knack for finding a sense of home in their writing, like journaling. As someone who has journaled regularly since the age of 8, I am much more comfortable sorting through my thoughts in writing than I am in confiding in someone I'm close to. In that private writing realm, there is safety.

Dave's recommendation to me was to write under a pseudonym or as an alter-ego of a character I want to explore. Which is spot-on advice that I intend to follow, but the past few days I've thought more about how this might extend to other areas of my life. If I pretend to be someone else, would that make it easier to take risks? Could my instinct for avoiding the spotlight be the shield that protects me as I try new things? And maybe there's more truth to the "fake it until you make it" mantra than I realize.

If nothing else, this workshop reaffirmed one of my core beliefs: some solutions can only be found when explored through writing. And that word nerds are kindred spirits.