comfort books

I am feeling kinda bleh and the words are failing me so I am going to do a list. Oh a list of books. How fun!

When I rearranged the furnitures in my room, I put my bed up against a small bookshelf. So there's a shelf of books right by my head and I can literally go to sleep with my books. I finally picked the books to put there. I had not criteria other than to pick the books that put me at ease. I didn't pick my favorite books, per se, and there is a size limitation (no books too large would fit there), but I think I have an interesting selection.

oh.. .so the list. here goes from left to right:

• Selected Poems, Jorge Luis Borges
• A Writer's Diary, Virginia Woolf
• The Virginia Woolf Reader
• The Voyage Out, Virginia Woolf
  
• Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf
• The Hours, Michael Cunningham
• Reading like a Writer: A guide for people who love books and for those who want to write them, Francine Prose
• Wintering: A novel of Sylvia Plath, Kate Moss
• The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath
• Gracefully Insane, Alex Beam
• Girl, Interrupted, Susanna Kaysen
• Tender Is the Night, f. Scott Fitzgerald
• Of Two Minds, t m Luhrmann
• Complications: a surgeon's notes on an imperfect science, Atul Gawande
• An Unquiet Mind, Kay Redfield Jamison
• Prozac Nation, Elizabeth Wurtzel
• The House of God, Samuel Shem
• New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud
• Final Exam: A surgeon's reflection on mortality, Pauline Chen
• Asylums, Erving Goffman
• The Living Clock, John D. Palmer
• The Development of Cognitive Anthropology, Roy G D'Andrade
• Facundo: Civilization and Barbarism, Domingo Faustino Sarmiento
• The Men Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat: And other clinical tales, Oliver Sacks
• Bedlam Burning, Geoff Nicholson
• Running with Scissors, Augusten Burroughs
• Stumbling on Happiness, Daniel Gilbert
• Labyrinths: Selected stories and other writings, Jorge Luis Borges
• Delivering Doctor Amelia, Dan Shapiro
• Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, Sigmund Freud

This was, more than anything, an exercise in following my heart. As cheesy as that sounds, I am trying to relinquish some control over every aspect of my life. Sometimes randomness and irregularity produce beautiful results. And if I can just let life happen, I might be pleasantly surprised. So instead of fretting over figuring out why I pick the books I did, I just grabbed the books I wanted for this mix. The collection I have doesn't quite make sense and I only have an inkling as to why I picked some of those books. The result, nonetheless, is quite satisfying.