![\"img_6444\"](\"http:\/\/www.turningplanet.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/01\/IMG_6444-1-1024x768.jpg\")
<\/p>\nThere is so much to say about 2016, and so much work to be done now, in our minds, hearts, surroundings. I am beginning, however, with books.<\/p>\n
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When my parents were here over Christmas, my father drove down our mountain to get his beloved Sunday New York Times<\/i>. Of course, I devoured as much as I had time for, in between gift-wrapping and cookie-baking and puzzle-making and laundry. My favorite section was the NYT Book Review\u2019s \u201cThe Year in Reading\u201d section, in which they publish pages and pages of summaries and comments by smart, worldly people on the books they read in 2016. In their honor, I’ve decided to offer something possibly more forthcoming. Because I wonder\u2026 what about all the things those smart, worldly people picked up and, for whatever reason, put down?<\/p>\n
So, as my very first blog post of 2017, here is my list of books that I started in 2016 with very good intentions, and absolutely, for whatever reason, put down, undone. They\u2019re in no particular order except the order in which I fished them out of my bedside book pile. And since I know I returned several books to the library (almost certainly with a heavy sigh each time), I am sure this list is not complete:<\/p>\n
Peter Hershock, Chan Buddhism<\/i>
\nLewis Hyde, The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World<\/i>
\nJane Hirshfield, Women in Praise of the Sacred: 43 Centuries of Spiritual Poetry by Women<\/i>
\nJane Hirshfield, The Beauty<\/i>
\nAmitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable<\/i>
\nBari Tessler, The Art of Money<\/i>
\nMargaret Fuller, Woman in the Nineteenth Century<\/i>
\nAmy Leach, Things That Are<\/i>
\nPam Munoz Ryan, Esperanza Rising<\/i>
\nFlorence Caplow and Susan Moon, eds., The Hidden Lamp: Stories from Twenty-Five Centuries of Awakened Women<\/i>
\nTarfia Faizullah, Seam<\/i>
\nElizabeth Bishop, Collected Poems<\/i>
\nJ.C. Cleary, trans., Zen Under the Gun: Four Zen Masters from Turbulent Times<\/i>
\nLeila Aboulela, The Kindness of Enemies<\/i>
\nMario Vargas Llosa, The Dream of the Celt<\/i>
\nBrigit Pegeen Kelly, Song<\/i>
\nZenkei Shibayama, A Flower Does Not Talk<\/i>
\nThe Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde<\/i>
\nMartha Nussbaum, Anger and Forgiveness: Resentment, Generosity, Justice<\/i><\/p>\n
And here are the books I am sure I finished:<\/p>\n
Ursula K. LeGuin, The Wizard of Earthsea<\/i>
\nElnathan John, Born on a Tuesday<\/i>
\nGeorge Eliot, Middlemarch<\/i><\/p>\n
Those people they ask about the best books they read in 2016? They don\u2019t mess around! They\u2019ve given me a long list of things I am absolutely sure I will read, and possibly finish, in 2017. After I finish Hershock, Hyde, Ghosh, and Fuller. Really.<\/p>\n
And those books I did read? Novels, all three. \u201cWrite what you love to read,\u201d one of my writing teachers used to say. So stay tuned, everyone, because there is in fact a story that has been waiting patiently, all these years of parenthood, just for me.<\/p>\n
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