Here We Go…

So here we go.

The first blog post on my spanking new, shiny website.

The truth is, I’ve resisted going down the many twisting, tortuous alleyways of the social media yellow brick road. I’m an old-fashioned sort of gal, and I naively thought if I had beautiful products, displayed them in a beautiful shop and opened the doors, the customers would just flood in.

Of course, in the 21st century, this is not how it works.

You all know that, of course, but it’s taken me 24 years for the realisation to finally hit home – I need a website. So here it is. (The modest fellow who has created this website won’t let me mention him, but if you like the website, or perhaps need help creating your own website, let me know, so that I can pass his details on to you.)

I am going to diligently write a blog to share with you every week on life at the Known World coalface. And if I don’t, contact me and tell me to get on with it. Even poke me with a pointy stick, if I’m proving particularly recalcitrant.

So, what do I read? Of course, I have my favourite authors.

I love the American writer, Marilynne Robinson. Her Gilead quartet: Gilead (2004), Home (2008), Lila (2014) and Jack (2020), is sublime. Robinson is a theologian, but her novels are not didactic.

Gilead is set in a fictional small American town (Gilead) in the 1950s, and focuses on two clergymen: John Ames and Robert Boughton, Ames’ wife, Lila, and Boughton’s troubled son Jack, who is named for Boughton’s friend.

Ames is 76 years old when we meet him. He married late in life and has a young son who is seven years old. Aware that he will die soon, and that his son will have few memories of his ailing, frail father, he determines to write him a series of letters that consider his life and ministry, his friendship with Boughton and the consolations he found late in life with his much younger wife, Lila.

He is, I believe, one of literature’s most finely-wrought, richly-realised and most humane characters. It is a beautiful book.

Another favourite, and a book that greatly resonates with me, is John William’s Stoner. It is set in the early to mid-20th century.

Stoner lives and works on the family farm, and is sent by his father to university to study modern agricultural techniques. He is compelled to undertake a compulsory subject in the humanities, which evokes in him a lifelong love of literature.

Stoner decides to pursue a life as an academic.

An injudicious marriage results in the birth of his daughter, Grace. Stoner becomes more and more alienated from his frail and fractious wife and forms a relationship with a student. Of course, given his academic standing and the conventions that prevail in the first half of 20th century America, the relationship must remain clandestine.

As Stoner ages and reflects on his mortality and looks back over his life, there is a sense that he feels he has failed – in his marriage, as a father, and as a teacher.

But the last paragraph in the book affords Stoner a revelatory epiphany and solace. It is one of the most moving final sequences in a novel I have ever read,

I’ll just say this before I go. I love what I do. I love my shop. I love meeting the wonderful, thoughtful people who find their way to it. I love being surrounded by fabulous books, getting to touch them, explore them, restore them, cherish them, and then find homes for them.

I am a reader, not a collector, so I try not to be too covetous with the vast variety of books that cross my path.

It’s enough for me to be able to borrow novels, philosophical tracts and interesting biographies, take them home and read them, or pore over art books, and then return them to the shelves so that other people can experience the wonder and awe that a collection of inky marks on paper can forge on our hearts and minds.

Reading matters. It’s what makes our imaginations soar and worlds beyond our wildest dreams become manifest.

Books are awesome.

Michelle