New Motivations

Wow. It has officially been over a year between postings. Part of this has to do with my son's birth last May (Schuyler Henry Eastin, an up-and-coming bibliophile, I hope). Another part has to do with the fact that I started a PhD program at UC Riverside this past Fall (I've been doing a HELL of a lot of reading and writing, just not for the blog). Another part had to do with a growing malaise about writing blogs; it had begun to feel like a chore, probably because of my tendency not to limit the length of my posts, as well as the fact that they began to read like book reports and I had lost the enthusiasm for tripping through my collection.

Fortunately this last impediment has been resolved! I recently had a profound motivation for creating content for this blog. The Special Collections at UCR runs an annual book collection contest which asks its participants to put together a small collection of books with a unifying theme and short explanations of how each book fits. This seemed very similar to what I have already been doing here but with a bit more structure and the added motivation of laurels plus a $500 prize. I just submitted my collection last week and won't know the results until late May, but I've decided that this would be the perfect forum to share my collection a bit more publicly. It only includes about thirty books (and other materials) but they represent what seems to me to be a central theme of my larger collection. I will try to post an entry every week for the rest of this year, beginning with my collection's opening essay. Enjoy:

There and Back Again: Narratives of Departure and Return, a Collection

Near the outset of the journey that will span all three books in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy, Frodo Baggins recalls some wisdom given to him by his uncle Bilbo, “’It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out of your door,’ he used to say. ‘You step into the Road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there is no knowing where you might be swept off to.’” (83). Though Bilbo’s words convey a sense of wariness, if we remember Bilbo’s own adventure in Tolkien’s earlier novel The Hobbit, we know that, despite the twists and turns that are inevitable when one departs from one’s own home, it is that journey that comes to define the individual. Indeed, a long literary tradition from Homer’s epics through the chivalric romances of the middle ages and even up to modern adventure and science fiction, characters develop most when the leave a place of comfort and travel through a world that offers new perspectives, perilous obstacles, and most importantly, a story to tell when they return. The same is true outside of fiction; when we depart and return we often bring back with us fascinating stories, some of which we can tell and others that we can quite literally carry with us, bound tightly within the pages of a book.

This collection contains a number of books that contain narratives of departure and return. These books tell stories of characters that stepped out of their doors, sometimes kept their feet, and sometimes did not. Sometimes these characters returned with stories to tell, but not always. But it is not only the characters in these books that have made the journeys; sometimes the books themselves have made significant journeys. This collection has developed over the course of my lifetime. Many of these books were gifts given by people who were and often still are very important to me. Others I have acquired in the courses of my own journeys. Accordingly, I have chosen to arrange these books in the order that I acquired them in an attempt to convey an overarching narrative that spans my nearly three decades of departing and returning.