I bought a few books this summer. Old books that I never read because I was lazy and probably wouldn't understand anyways. And books like ghosts and memories, that have been following me around, telling me to buy them already. I have bought Virgina Woolf's 1927 novel "To the Lighthouse" and Betty Smith's 1943 "A Tree Grows In Brooklyn". But perhaps the best thing I'm doing is reading books that I already own and never actually read or finished. Smart recession move here huh.
For instance I never did finish "The Art of The Personal Essay". It's a beautiful anthology from classical to a present structure of writing. It is filled with seventy-five essays and because they are all short essays and there is no need or rush to finish such a thick book, I found myself carrying it everywhere. Reading next to the pool, on the plane and in my job. Each essay is very personal, an experience where each author draws you in a very elegant and distinct form.


"when I was six or seven years old growing up in Pittsburgh, I would take a precious penny of my own and hide it for someone else to find. It was a curious compulsion; sadly, I've never been seized by it since. For some reason I always "hid" the penny on the same stretch of sidewalk up the street. I would cradle a penny at the roots of a sycamore, say, or in a hole left by a chipped-off piece of sidewalk. Then I would take a piece of chalk and, starting at either end of the block, draw huge arrows leading up to the penny from both directions. After I learned to write I labeled the arrows: SURPRISE AHEAD or MONEY THIS WAY. I was greatly excited during all this arrow-drawing, at the thought of the first lucky passer-by…. The world is fairly studded and strewn with pennies cast broadside from a generous hand. But–and this is the point–who gets excited by a mere penny?… If you cultivate a healthy poverty and simplicity, so that finding a penny will literally make your day, then, since the world is in fact planted in pennies, you have with your poverty bought a lifetime of days."

Annie Dillard's "Seeing" 1974