Every so often, my curiosity about what someone else is reading in public leads to a chance encounter. In this case, it was a book titled On the Mystical Shape of the Godhead: Basic Concepts in the Kabbalah by Gershom Scholem. The reader was visiting the coffee shop I frequent all too frequently for the first time. He and his wife had recently moved to Arizona following the completion of his degrees in philosophy and English literature. Ivan was born in Macedonia, meaning the pronunciation of his name is Eevon, while his wife Merry (yep, as in Christmas) seemed receptive to my intrusion, and before I knew it, he dropped the name Adorno. My eyes lit up; nobody just casually talks about Theodor Adorno of the Frankfurt School, the author of one of my all-time favorite books, Dialectic of Enlightenment, and I do mean nobody ever.

The proverbial one thing leading to another results in us exchanging contact data, and, contrary to the more stereotypical transaction of that type of exchange, he wrote to me six days later, in early November. Soon after, we met for the second time. Fast forward following a number of subsequent meetups, and I leave our coffee encounter with a book recommendation titled A Beam of Sunlight in the Deep Forest by Édouard Schuré, which I ordered from a small company focusing on “visually striking and unusual books.” You see it in today’s photo.

I’ve not read this book yet. I’ve not read anything this year due to my commitment to what I’m writing away from these rare blog updates. Nor is this post about Ivan, as there’s too much to encapsulate in a brief missive. Nope, it’s about the books I’ve purchased this year that are gathering dust. The list includes the following: Japanese Inn by Oliver Statler, House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski, The Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell, Bifurcate: There is No Alternative by Bernard Stiegler, and Restoring the Pitchfork Ranch: How Healing a Southwest Oasis Holds Promise for Our Endangered Land by A. Thomas Cole. Compared to previous years, I believe this might be the least number of books I’ve brought into the inventory of new books that could require years before I open them. I said “open” not read, but that’s another story, another blog post for another day.