Another reason I should have recognized Paulo Coelho is because some of his words have been immortalized on those great keepers of wisdom: coffee cups. Words like: “You are what you believe yourself to be” and “Life is short. Kiss slowly, laugh insanely, love truly and forgive quickly” mean ever so much more when they come with a nice cup of hot coffee. My husband was obsessed with both coffee and coffee cup philosophy. In the house he had before we got married three quarters of his kitchen cabinets were literally devoted to his coffee cups---over a hundred if my memory isn’t playing Pinocchio on me. His ritual of picking out a cup reflected his mood and was not just a grab-one-and-go affair. When he’d picked the one that proclaimed “Don’t let the Turkeys Get you Down” I knew he was in a gloomy mood. He was treated for depression for over a decade so that cup got a lot of use.
When we moved in together I wasn’t willing to devote three quarters of the kitchen cabinets to his collection so I boxed most to them up with a promise to rotate them up from the basement from time to time, a promise I never kept nor intended to do. Wives are wicked that way. What would you have done if the man in your life refused to pare down a collection like that to a number that would fit into the normal, allotted cabinet space? Ya, you’d lie, too. I know you would. Or maybe you’d have risked a war of words, hurt feelings and resentments by getting rid of them when he wasn’t looking?
When I downsized to move here I didn’t keep a single one of Don’s message coffee cups but I bought a new one of my own and I kept one political cup---an Obama cup that shows his birth certificate. I had a hard time selling all the presidential campaign cups on eBay because I liked them---part my collection as well as Don's. We had them back as far as JFK. And sometimes I regret having sent the “turkeys” cup to Goodwill. It’s not like I need that object to conjure up the memory of Don sitting at his roll top desk with that coffee cup in his hand. But objects once special to deceased loved ones are like jigsaw puzzle pieces found on the floor long after we’ve boxed up the puzzles and passed them on. They give us brief memories, knowing where they came from, but we know those pictures can never be whole again. Not for us. Not for anyone.
I’ve been trying to figure out when and in what context Paulo Coelho wrote the words about writing being a socially accepted way to get naked in public but all I found out is that a ton of bloggers like me love to use the quote and that good old Paulo has a Twitter account. I love books that contain snippets of authors' words on writing written with aspiring writers in mind. I thought the quote might have been in a book like that.
Very few of those kind of books leave out Stephen King's quote about “If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.” While looking for Paulo I got hung up on a King quote about claiming your identity as a writer. He asks, “Do you need someone to make you a paper badge with the word WRITER on it before you can believe you are one? God, I hope not.” Ohmygod! This is SO me! I never say I’m a writer. Never. I will say I’m an aspiring writer or a wanna-be writer but there’s always an adjective firmly in place. I write every day and according to the Great Stephen King that’s all a person needs to do to own the title. So I'm asking: would someone like to make me a badge? I'm thinking of wearing one each time I sit in front of my computer because, ya, I'm going to try to kick the adjective habit. ©
100 Books Everyone Should Read 2022
1. 1984 (George Orwell)
2. The Alchemist
3. American Gods (Neil Gaiman)
4. And Then There Were None and Selected Plays (Agatha Christie)
5. Animal Farm
6. Anna Karenina (Leo Tolstoy)
7. Arabian Nights (One Thousand and One Nights) (Anonymous)
8. The Art of War
9. As I Lay Dying (William Faulkner)
10. Atlas Shrugged
11. Atonement (Ian McEwan)
12. Bell Jar (Sylvia Plath)
13. Beloved (Toni Morrison)
14. A Bend in the River (V.S. Naipaul)
15. The Book Thief (Markus Zusak)
16. Brave New World (Aldous Huxley)
17. The Canterbury Tales
18. Catch-22 (Joseph Heller)
19. The Catcher in the Rye (J.D. Salinger)
20. A Clockwork Orange (Anthony Burgess)
21. Cloud Atlas (David Mitchell)
22. Crime and Punishment
23. Divine Comedy
24. Don Quixote
25. Dracula (Bram Stoker)
26. Dune
27. Emma
28. Ender's Game
29. Fahrenheit 451
30. Fairy Tales (Hans Christian Anderson)
31. Fanny Hill (John Cleland)
32. The Fault in Our Stars
33. Faust
34. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (Nevada)
35. The Five People You Meet in Heaven – Mitch Albom
36. The Godfather (Mario Puzo)
37. Grapes of Wrath (John Steinbeck)
38. Gravity's Rainbow
39. Great Expectations (Charles Dickens)
40. The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald)
41. Hamlet (William Shakespeare)
42. The Handmaid's Tale (Margaret Atwood)
43. Heart of Darkness (Joseph Conrad)
44. House of Leaves (Mark Z. Danielewski)
45. The Illiad
46. Interview With the Vampire (Louisiana)
47. Jane Eyre (Charlotte Bronte)
48. King Solomon's Mines
49. Kite Runner (Khaled Hosseini)
50. Les Miserables – Victor Hugo
51. Life of Pi (Yann Martel)
52. Lolita (Vladimir Nabokov)
53. Lord of the Flies (William Golding)
54. The Lovely Bones (Alice Sebold)
55. Madame Bovary
56. Memoirs of a Geisha (Arthur Golden)
57. Metamorphosis
58. Middlesex
59. Murder on the Orient Express (Agatha Christie)
60. No Country for Old Men
61. The Odyssey
62. Of Mice and Men (John Steinbeck)
63. Old Man and the Sea
64. On the Road (Jack Kerouac)
65. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
66. One Hundred Years of Solitude
67. The Picture of Dorian Gray (Oscar Wilde)
68. The Postman Always Rings Twice (James M. Cain)
69. Pride and Prejudice
70. The Raven
71. The Remains of the Day (Kazuo Ishiguro)
72. The Road (Cormac McCarthy)
73. Robinson Crusoe (Daniel Defoe)
74. The Satanic Verses, by Salman Rushdie
75. Schindlers List (Thomas Keneally)
76. Sense and Sensibility (Jane Austen)
77. The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
78. Slaughterhouse-Five (Kurt Vonnegut)
79. Song of Solomon (Toni Morrison)
80. The Stranger (Albert Camus)
81. Stranger in a Strange Land (Robert a Heinlein)
82. A Tale of Two Cities (Charles Dickens)
83. To Kill a Mockingbird (Harper Lee)
84. To the Lighthouse
85. The Turn of the Screw by Henry James
86. Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (Jules Verne)
87. Ulysses
88. The Unbearable Lightness of Being (Milan Kundera)
89. Vanity Fair
90. War and Peace
91. Wasp Factory
92. What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (Raymond Carver)
93. Where the Wild Things Are
94. White Teeth (Zadie Smith)
95. The Wind in the Willows (Kenneth Grahame)
96. Winnie the Pooh (A.A. Milne)
97. The Woman in White (Wilkie Collins)
98. Women in Love
99. A Wrinkle in Time (Madeleine L'engle)
100. Wuthering Heights - Emily Brontë
