This summer has been for me a time of leaving and returning, going home and leaving homes behind. Much of my now year-plus journey has been an exploration of what “home” is–how to feel at home where you are, what it means to have multiple homes, how to process conflicting feelings about “home,” feelings of simultaneous belonging and unbelonging.
I’ve also been learning how “home” often consists so much more of the feeling I get with certain people than it does with any particular place. Yet, at the same time, I know there are distinct places that resonate with me, places where I feel in step with the world somehow, sometimes for unknown reasons. And then there are homes I’ve left behind, thinking they weren’t mine, and upon returning, I have been surprised to find that “homeness” intact, and I have been left thinking, Yes, this is my place.
My reading list over the last few months has, without intention, reflected many of these ruminations and complications. And in some ways, the ways I found these books reflect my own wandering: I picked up two of them after hearing the authors speak at the Adelaide Writers’ Week in Australia last spring. Another I’d intended to read for a long time, but this summer I found it on the shelf of an English professor friend who I was housesitting for in South Carolina. Another was left for me in the car I borrowed from a dear friend in South Carolina this summer when she moved back to South Korea. Still another, I simply stumbled across.
These are stories of returning to homes and seeing them in new lights, of being exiled from the people and places we call home, of having a home but not feeling at home in it, and stories of having your home destroyed and changed by forces beyond your control–and making due as you can. I hope these books might give you glimpses into other worlds and perhaps help you along your own journeys to and from home. Continue reading “The Traveling Bookshelf: Five Books on Leaving and Returning”
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