A Place of My Own

Ah, a new year. I have always loved this day each year as a new beginning, a fresh start. Oh, but I'm carrying around the burden of being behind in this blog and so I'm vowing to catch up with it this week. To begin, I need to write about the last Playaway I listened to, which was the last I'll be listening to in a while. (My brain can't handle the constant influx of words that happened with the Playaway in those times when my mind is usually idle. I've found a nice sense of balance with cranking music while washing dishes rather than listening to a story.)

Michael Pollan's A Place of My Own: The Architecture of Daydreams is not the kind of book I would have picked up to read in book form. However, I was looking for a Playaway and love the author so I thought I'd give it a go. The book is about how Pollan decided to build a house in the woods for himself to write. His wife was pregnant and had a barn where she was able to paint alone, but once the baby came, he would not have that space of his own to work. Pollan goes into the idea of a writer wanting a room of one's own, quoting Virginia Woolf. And then begins the story of the process of actually executing this plan for a simple house that he had a hand in helping to design (in a way) and build. The book is not boring, but it's not the most exciting topic either. Yet Pollan is such a good writer that he can get away with it. There were parts that dragged on and times I was ready to give up. ("The house gets built. I know it does. Why see its tedious construction to the end?") But I like his voice (I'm not sure if I would have liked it as much had someone else read it) and so I pressed on. Overall, it was pretty enjoyable.

The finished writing house

Here's the inside-- doesn't this look like an amazing space to work? Maybe I should build my own...