MY KONDO THIRTY
BOOK ONE
KEEPING UP WITH THE PENGUINS posted on Instagram reminding us how, "...we all collectively lost our goddamn minds...," when Marie Kondo instructed us to keep no more than thirty books in our homes. She posted a hypothetical list of thirty books on her blog with a reason for keeping each one. The post was so intriguing I decided to do one of my own! I am splitting mine into several posts. Some will be single book posts some will have several included. The first five will be my top sparking joy favorites of a lifetime. This will be thirty out of around 500 books. I will also be linking up this series with Stacking the Shelves.
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I first read Jane Eyre in seventh grade when I was twelve. My best friend was reading The Hobbit, and tried to get me to read it with her, but I just couldn't get into it; I didn't end up reading The Hobbit until the summer before my senior year in high school. Her mother was our junior high school librarian, and she suggested I read Jane Eyre. I fell in love with the story and probably read it six or seven times between then and when I turned sixteen. I remember reading it again in my mid twenties, and I read it once more a couple of years ago when I did my A Year of Reading Classics personal reading challenge.
I always loved to just throw a couple of English garden mix seed packets and two or three packets of cosmos, my favorite flower, in whatever garden beds were around the places we rented. It's easy and so pretty. The summer my son Baz was eight, these morning glory looking vines appeared from the garden mix. Baz said their leaves reminded him of dragon wings, so we started calling them "dragon glories." I had never gotten these in a mix before, so the next spring I started looking for packets of them, but never found any.
Fast forward twelve years... I'm sitting in the hematologist's waiting room with Baz; we're there to see if his last round of iron infusions took hold in his severely weakened bone marrow. Weakened by a drug the gastroenterologist had prescribed for him for his Crohn's Disease, and almost killed him with, but that long horrifying story of pathetic greed can wait for another blog post. If his iron level was still almost nonexistent he was going to have to have a bone marrow biopsy, and depending on the findings might have been facing a risky bone marrow transplant.
As I sat there reading a Better Homes and Gardens magazine article about vintage gardens, I saw the above. After twelve years I had finally found the dragon glory plant! I nudged Baz and said look it's the name of that mystery vine, just as the nurse called him in to get his blood drawn. I felt in my heart it was a good omen, and it was. His iron levels were on the rise!
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(this was ten years ago and my son is 98% better now)
That's why this Chiltern Classics Edition is my favorite, and I had to have it when I saw it. I will guarantee, no matter how many editions I amass, it will continue to be my favorite. A couple of months later I serendipitously stumbled upon a journal with the same cover. It is also special to me and I don't know what to use it for. Any suggestions?
THE BOOK STACKS DIARY
This series is also part of my The Book Stacks Diary feature, which I will be linking up with Stacking the Shelves!
Do you collect different editions of your favorite books?
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