“Home is not a place, it’s a feeling.” — Cecelia Ahern
After traveling half the globe, more than 30 hours later, I find myself back at home.
Home is such an interesting, nuanced, and complex concept. It’s space and it’s relationships, it’s a feeling, all at the same time. I came to realise, after all my travels, my relocations, and living and working in 6 different countries, that home is really where my people are. And, also for me, home is where my books live.
I feel so grateful I can call so many places home.
Because of my many homes and a lifestyle that involves lots of traveling, I have had to find reading tools that will allow me to enjoy the pleasure of relentless reading whilst not carrying the physical weight of a populated physical library:
Tool 1: an E-Book Reader
Earlier in the year, and after fighting my internal skepticism, I bought a Kindle. I have already written a bit in previous posts on how surprisingly handy it became, and how I got quickly used to it, and it’s only now after using it for those many months that the benefits reveal themselves.
My current lifestyle involves traveling and moving around regularly, on a monthly basis. The Kindle is proving to be such a great tool to carry all my books, everywhere. So when I am on a plane for 10 hours, and then on another one for 14 more, getting back to Europe for a couple of weeks, I can carry all those books in my bag and choose to read different pages from different titles. I can also carry the Kindle and all my books to a remote beach in New Zealand, and not bear extra weight. Most importantly, the decision-making on what to take for a trip becomes so simple: I don’t need to decide and choose what will I want to read upfront, I just have to grab the Kindle and go with the flow of what I will feel like reading during the trip.
Again, don’t get me wrong at all: I love my books. And (no but - yes, and), I enjoy my Kindle. Plus, I linked my Kindle to my laptop and phone, so I can re-read my notes and highlights from the books I am reading from different devices. It makes it a very convenient workflow.
Tool 2: a Library Pass
Another great tool I have rediscovered in Auckland these last months is making active use of the public library.
I don’t think we are aware in general of what a privilege it is to have public libraries in the cities we live in. We hold on to our personal possessions, our books, and forget that most of the knowledge can be found at a library for free. With the library card, I have been checking out books at no cost. This is a great tool for me at the moment because when having to come back to London (home) after my relocation contract expires, I won’t have to carry extra weight, yet I would have enjoyed the process of reading and discovering new books, some of them of big format, during all this time. Again, at no cost.
The best thing about having a library pass is to go and wander around the local library, it makes it such a great Artist Date. What a privilege to be able to walk around between books, discover hidden gems, and take the ones you like entirely for free.
I adopted these two reading tools to solve the basic need mentioned earlier: I am living on the other side of the world for a couple of years and I still want to read this much. But the need has revealed a deeper and more sustainable approach to reading: I feel less attached to my own physical collection of books and more involved in the process of reading. I am consuming and buying fewer physical books while sharing more of them.
I started the post with the personal belief that home is where my books live. Perhaps, after all, the revelation is that home is inside me, and I can carry it from Auckland, to London, to Valencia, and anywhere I go, the same way I can carry my Kindle with me.
Here’s a quote I read recently by Matt Haig: “If you take objects [books] out of a room one by one, two things will happen. The first is obvious. You will miss some of the things [books] you have taken away. The second is that you will notice the things [books] that remain more than ever. Your attention will focus.”
Having fewer physical books will make me cherish and treasure even more my personal library. Exploring different tools for reading, such as making use of a public library, will expand the boundaries of my gaining knowledge.
Traveler or not, worth a try at these two reading tools :)
Happy reading! 📚✨
Ana
📚 What I’m reading in June 2023:
New York, Line by Line: From Broadway to the Battery by Robinson (Werner Kruse) and Foreword by artist Matteo Pericoli. Such a great find at the Auckland Library. Will publish soon a post dedicated only to this fantastic book and artist.
The Big Four, another murder mystery by Agatha Christie my partner and I are reading to each other and performing in our little book club, checked out from the public library.
The Comfort Book by Matt Haig, author of The Midnight Library. Got this one on the Kindle as one of the algorithm recommendations. Matt’s style and content are very life-philosophy-focused. He’s not telling us anything new at all, but he is collecting and putting together all these comfortable thoughts in such a beautiful yet simple way it’s worth reminding of.
The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain by Annie Murphy Paul. I found this book recommended by Austin Kleon in his newsletter (I have come to greatly appreciate his readings and suggestions, he’s one of those great readers) and checked it out from the library recently. Only just started, but these essays are very relevant to get to know ourselves and our thought patterns better at a moment in time when Artificial Intelligence seems to be grabbing so much attention.