Book lists

While reading, I'm always interested to see what books authors recommend or refer to in their work. I've begun a reading list of titles or authors that I see repeatedly mentioned. For example, how often do you see a "classical" work refered to and think "I really should read that one day." There are only so many hours in a day so one way I get more "reading" in is to listen to books on tape. I still call them that because when I first discovered them they came on cassette tapes, now they are on CD or these little things call play-aways. I can even down load titles from the library website to my iPod. Isn't technology wonderful?

Anyways to get back to my point. When I read The Happiness Project at the beginning of the month, Rubin had a section on spiritual development and had asked readers of her blog to suggest books of inspirational quality. One such reader suggested Natalie Goldberg's Writing Down the Bones as a Zen approach to writing and life. Now I had seen that title mentioned in many other texts recommending it as a good choice for help with learning to improve one's writing. I promptly requested it from the interlibrary loan service (see I am sticking to my resolution about buying books) and it arrived this past Saturday.

Where's this going? In the car I am listening to Ernest Hemingway's A Moveable Feast, a memoir of his time in Paris. Always meant to read more Hemingway and finally getting to it. Then I start reading Goldberg's book and she quotes Hemingway from this very piece of work. Serendipity is what I call it. Is it merely by chance that right now I am focused on writing and developing the art myself that I am drawn to these titles? The Hemingway book I picked because the library had two titles on the audiobook shelf and the other I've read before, the Goldberg book because I keep seeing the title everywhere. Again perhaps it is simply serendipty, the phenomenon of finding something agreeable when you least seek to.