Tag: books

The Home Library as a Mirror of the Mind

Posted on by Allan Johnson in Observations

A personal library is never just a collection of books. It is a portrait of the self across time, and you can learn a huge amount about a person by the books that they have chosen to travel with them across that time. One’s own bookshelves are a living archive of who we have been, who we have longed to become, and who we may yet be. The books half-finished or cherished, the books read in the happy moments, the books purchased when we needed a lift. Unlike the tidy impersonality of the public library, the personal library is unruly, inconsistent, and idiosyncratic, its shape dictated less by the systemising logic of the Dewey Decimal System than by the peculiarities of taste, impulse, and circumstance. My shelves–spread across my study at home and my office at the university–when I look at them honestly, resemble a layered self-portrait that is part map, part diary, part dream, and through which I can unmistakably recall key moments in my life. The books that have travelled with me not only capture what I know but also what I have avoided, forgotten, or left unresolved.

Books we keep are often less about what we have read than about what we intend to read or read again. The unread shelf is one of the most intimate mirrors of the mind because it reflects not accomplishment but aspiration. Umberto Eco called this the ‘antilibrary’: the space of books not yet opened, which serve as reminders of all that lies beyond the edge of our present knowing. In Japan, tsundoku is the habit of buying books for the joy of owning them rather than the intention of reading them. When I look at certain volumes—some of which I bought decades ago and still haven’t touched—I feel less guilt than possibility. They are placeholders for a moment that might arrive slowly, or not at all, but whose presence reassures me that my intellectual life is not finished, not fully determined.

Reordering a shelf is often a kind of reordering of thought. Five years ago, I moved into a new office on campus, and, in spite of my best intentions, I still haven’t organised my books like I would have wanted, but that is a project for my sabbatical. And at home, I am preparing to move to a new flat, so I have been spending a fair bit of time sorting through my collection, donating some, moving others to my office, or setting some free into the wild as a Book Fairy. I have moved so many times in adulthood that my collection of books at home is regularly evolving under the simple pressures of space and time, and I’ve had to develop a somewhat loose relationship with those books, knowing that, as with everything, I can’t hold on to them forever. This is the hidden power of the library as a mirror. Our bookshelves are a form of externalised cognition, a way of staging our fears and hopes outside the confines of the mind.

Letting go of books can be difficult because they also hold memory, intimacy, and attachment. Certain volumes are less significant for their content than for the personal histories they embody. I have books given to me by mentors who shaped my early studies, others still carrying the marginalia of my younger, more anxious self. Some are battered, underlined, dog-eared—too fragile to lend but too precious to part with. In their presence, I find a strange companionship. They are transitional objects in Winnicott’s sense: things we hold onto not only for what they teach but for how they carry fragments of relationship and selfhood. These books resist being reduced to anything except being a part of the texture of a life.

As I’m choosing what books to let go of, I recall that the gaps in our libraries are just as telling as the books that line our shelves. If a library is a mirror, it reflects not only presence but absence: the silences we keep, the topics we resist, the voices we have yet to admit. I sometimes notice that my shelves are thin on contemporary fiction, which says something about my longstanding attachment to modernism and its afterlives. Other omissions—books I once borrowed and never replaced, fields I always meant to explore but never did—speak of hesitation, avoidance, or perhaps simply the finitude of time. Jacques Derrida reminds us that every archive preserves by excluding, gathering by leaving out. Our private libraries enact this paradox: they are as revealing in what they omit as in what they display.

There is also something quietly resistant in the very existence of the personal library. In an age of Kindle files and algorithmic recommendations, a wall of physical books feels like a slow, analogue refusal of efficiency. Digital texts are searchable, portable, infinitely replicable, but they lack the unruly density of shelves. But the personal library allows for accidents and rediscoveries, for stumbling across what we had forgotten. I sometimes find myself pulling down a volume at random and finding exactly the thought I did not know I needed. The shelves resist the flatness of digital feeds, offering instead a landscape shaped by serendipity and memory.

Yet even in their solitude, libraries are relational. Our shelves testify not only to solitary identity but to the communities we belong to: friends who recommended titles, colleagues who insisted on ‘essential’ readings, teachers whose voices linger in the texts they assigned (the work of W.G. Sebald falls very much into this category for me, and even though I have copies of all of his works gifted to my by an early mention and although I know that one day I will turn to him with the awe he is so regularly afforded, I know that that time hasn’t quite yet come for me. But it will.).

Quite often, while working in my university office, a visitor pauses before my shelves and points out a title, sparking conversations that might never have arisen otherwise. In this sense, the private library is not wholly private; it is porous, extending outward into dialogue. My own work in groups—whether through coaching or the Artist’s Way Circle I’m running this autumn—often reminds me that what we read, and how we gather around reading, is never a solitary affair. Libraries mirror not only the mind but also the networks of relation that sustain it.

Curating a library, then, is less about control than about cultivating a conversation. Books speak to each other across time and genre, staging unexpected encounters. I love those moments when a novel resonates with a philosopher, or when a fragment of mystical writing suddenly illuminates a passage in Freud. The library, seen this way, is not a static repository but a living dialogue, a set of voices waiting to be overheard. To tend a library is to arrange the conditions under which these conversations might occur.

Ultimately, our personal libraries remind us that identity is always a work-in-progress. Just as we are never finished as thinkers or as people, our shelves are never truly complete. They change as we change, expanding, contracting, reordering, accumulating silences and rediscoveries. To stand before them is to confront not a finished self but a process of becoming. Perhaps this is why libraries are so comforting: they mirror back to us not perfection but movement, reminding us that our lives, like our shelves, are full of possibility still unfolding.

I feel this sense of unfolding strongly at the moment, as I move between projects—teaching, writing, coaching, and group facilitation. My shelves are in transition, just as I am. There are new books arriving on attachment and literature, old companions being re-read, volumes I suspect I will never get to but cannot quite let go of. It feels fitting that, at the same time, I am gathering others into shared explorations of creativity and practice. If you are curious about these conversations, you might want to join me for The Art of Creative Practice—a space where, much like our shelves, we bring together disparate influences and let them speak to one another.

To tend a private library is to tend to the life of the mind. But more than that, it is to honour the shifting textures of memory, aspiration, and relation that define who we are. As you look at your own shelves this week, you might pause to notice not only what they contain but what they reveal—about where you’ve been, where you are, and where you might yet be heading.

✨ Upcoming Workshop: Mindfulness for Creative Practice

Thursday 23 October, 7.30-9.00pm (UK time)

Step away from the noise and distractions of everyday life and reconnect with your creative practice. This 90-minute online workshop is designed for anyone who wants to explore mindfulness as a tool to enhance focus, deepen flow, and spark inspiration.

Drawing on principles from Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) and Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT), the workshop combines evidence-based mindfulness techniques with practical creative exercises. Together, we’ll explore how to:

  • Quiet the inner critic and reduce creative blocks
  • Build sustainable habits that nourish your practice
  • Harness attention and presence to enhance imagination
  • Connect with a supportive community of fellow creatives

Through a blend of guided exercises, reflective practices, and techniques you can return to again and again, you’ll discover how mindfulness can open new pathways into your creative life. Whether your medium is writing, painting, music, research, or design, these methods are adaptable to any form of creative work.

👉 Reserve your spot here

Embracing Craft in Academia: Reflections on Sabbatical

Posted on by Allan Johnson in academia, Observations

Academia, for all its bureaucratic scaffolding and metricisation (neither of which, in spite of what many would have us believe, is newly arrived on the scene), has always seemed to me less an outcome and more a craft. The language we use is linear and progressive—impact, output, key performance indicators—but the experience is slower and quieter. What looks from the outside like a trajectory of advancement often feels, from the inside, like the painstaking rhythms of practice: revisiting texts, refining an argument, shaping a paragraph until it carries its own weight.

Beginning a period of sabbatical this month has sharpened this distinction for me. Having the time to work on my next book, on liberal theology in early-20th-century America, is an extraordinary privilege, of course, but also a perturbing reminder that the rhythms of academic life are neither fixed nor inevitable. After a six-year term as an associate dean, when my diary wasn’t my own and a truly uninterrupted hour for writing was out of the question, I now find myself in a space where mornings are less prescribed, afternoons more open, and evenings less weighed down by the day’s unanswered emails.

This shift has interrupted the treadmill to which I had grown accustomed: no more weekly meetings or administrative reports, fewer obligations to the tempo of the institution. The contrast is striking. Career logic dictates constant forward motion, progression, and visibility. Sabbatical interrupts that, slowing time to the pace of craft: immersion, attention, revision. After years of deliberately (and at times aggressively) climbing a ladder, it feels now like I am stepping back into the workshop of what I have actually been trained to do: pore over the historical record to better understand what modernist literature means, and, in doing so, cultivate my own scholarly sensibilities in order to train students to do the same.

The language of career encourages us to think in terms of advancement, but the language of craft invites us to think in terms of depth. Career implies a vertical climb: promotion, recognition, and external markers of success. Craft, by contrast, is iterative and circular: you return to the same problems with new tools, you revisit the same materials with a slightly steadier hand. In my ways, this sabbatical is feeling like an unmistakable return, and whether or not my hand is indeed steadier, it is at the very least different to when I began my career.

Pierre Bourdieu’s account of ‘academic capital’ in Homo Academicus explains much about why universities are structured to reward careerist accumulation: advancement depends on how well one plays the game, converting intellectual labour into recognisable forms of capital. But Richard Sennett’s celebration of craft in The Craftsman reminds us that the deeper meaning of scholarly work is found elsewhere: in the long hours of slow reading, the shaping of sentences, the iterative labour of interpretation. Bourdieu undoubtedly shows us the internal logic of the field, but to treat scholarship as craft is to resist the abstraction of labour into capital and to remain grounded in the work itself, the feel of words under the hand, the quiet satisfaction of making something well.

Craft is built not through dramatic leaps but through the slow accumulation of skill over time. Looking back, I see this clearly in my own trajectory. As an undergraduate, I was awkward but diligent; I once arrived late to an exam with an analogue alarm clock whose battery had died, holding it up as evidence. From those unpolished beginnings to my current role as teacher and writer, what has mattered is not sudden transformation but steady honing.

This accumulation resists the logic of outputs. Like any craft, academic practice is tethered to the materiality of tools, spaces, and habits. The scholar’s equivalents of the potter’s wheel or carpenter’s chisel are the library, the notebook, and the annotated text (I’ve also grown accustomed to my ReMarkable tablet but still feel uneasy when I see my disused notebooks glaring back at me from the shelf). 

My own sabbatical days so far have been marked by relocating books and rediscovering notes I had once scribbled in margins, while rearranging my desk into something that feels more like a workshop than an office. Bruno Latour reminds us in Reassembling the Social that tools are never neutral; they co-constitute practice. Academic work, though often presented as disembodied thought (the ‘output’, the ‘paper’, the ‘impact’), is always materially situated. The desk, the chair, the pen, the screen: they are part of the making.

The pressures of modern academia can make it dangerously easy to forget the craft beneath the career, but the dangers of modern academia can make it just as tempting to ignore the career beneath the craft, an evasion that only feeds the very thing we hoped to resist.

I know this from experience. Six years in middle leadership brought tremendous satisfaction but also a creeping drift away from the hands-on craft of my own research. Strategy and oversight are necessary, but they can displace the intimate contact with sources and sentences that drew me to academia in the first place. Sabbatical is, in that sense, a time to retool: to remember the making at the heart of the work. As Stefan Collini asked in What Are Universities For?, what are we serving if we forget the scholarly craft that justifies the institution itself?

My hope for this sabbatical is to deepen the craft. A book will come out of it, but as a tool rather than a product. I want to give myself permission to linger in primary texts, to sketch ideas without rushing to publication, to think slowly. Projects on attachment and literature, and on contemplative approaches to pedagogy beckon, but I want to approach them less as tasks to be completed than as materials to be worked with patiently.

To see scholarship as craft is to reclaim its artistry from the machinery of career. Universities will continue to speak the language of metrics, rankings, and progression, an essential role, because it is this machinery that maintains the workshop in which scholarship can take place. But we don’t have to speak in the same register. To resist or even repudiate the machine is not to undermine the institution but to create the very conditions in which scholarship can breathe: the space for slow thought, patient practice, and the kind of intellectual labour that no metric can capture.

The machinery of career will always hum in the background, but we needn’t let its clatter drown out the quieter sound of practice itself. If these reflections resonate, I explore them further in The Art of Academic Practice on Substack, a space for thinking together about how scholarship might remain both sustainable and alive.

How I’m Reading 100 Books in 2024

Posted on by Allan Johnson in creativity, habits, intention, Observations

Reading has always been more than just a pastime for me — it’s my passion and my whole world. To misquote Barbie‘s Ken: my job is books. But perhaps somewhat surprisingly, in the hustle and bustle of my day job as an English literature academic, the sheer joy of reading for pleasure has fallen by the wayside. In order to get back to the joys of simply reading for pleasure I have set myself a challenge to read 100 books in 2024.

I read a lot as it is, but as there is so much more out there that I want to consume and enjoy I am challenging myself to read a lot this year. Nearly twice as much as I read last year. And, just to be clear, the 100 books are those that I am reading for pleasure–not the many more books that I will also be reading just for work.

I’m feeling pretty confident that I can meet this challenge because I already have a lot of strategies that have always helped me read a huge amount for my job. While these tips and tricks have been helpful to me as an English academic over the years, this year I am repurposing them for my own benefit to make sure that I am reading the stuff that I want to read for pleasure this year.

Here are some tips on how you can read 100 books (or 52, or 25, or 12, or whatever!) in 2024:

  • Keeping a TBR List: In order to navigate all the fantastic books that you have in store for you, keeping track of your To-Be-Read (TBR) list is paramount. My strategy is to use Goodreads as a comprehensive tool to keep track of the books I want to read, am currently immersed in, and have completed. This not only simplifies the reading process, but also provides a rewarding visualisation of progress and turns the literary journey into a tangible adventure.
  • Multitasking the reading experience: The key to an enriching reading experience lies in variety and having several books on the go at once ensures flexibility: if I don’t like one book, there’s another waiting for me. As I take a cross-platform approach, I juggle between a printed book, a Kindle and an audiobook. This ensures that, whatever the mood or situation, I always have a literary companion at hand to transport me to other worlds.
  • Notes as a ritual of immersion: For a devoted bibliophile, reading goes beyond the act itself. It becomes an immersive ritual where you internalise the essence of each book. My simple note-taking system consists of underlining or highlighting key passages and then summarising the book in my Goodreads reviews to create a tangible connection with the material. It’s a practise that goes beyond just finishing a book; it’s about creating a record of what you’ve completed
  • Giving up the unappealing: One of the liberating facets of my reading challenge is that I allow myself the freedom to give up on a book after the first 50 pages if it doesn’t captivate me. Life is too short to force yourself through something that you don’t vibe with. This ensures that each book contributes to the pleasure of reading rather than becoming a chore.
  • Visibility and accountability: When you resolve to read a hundred books in a year, visibility becomes a powerful accountability tool. Platforms like Goodreads are no longer just personal logbooks, but become public statements of commitment. This visibility acts as a subtle motivator, a gentle reminder that the literary journey is shared and that milestones should be celebrated together.

For me the challenge of reading 100 books in one year is not just about sheer quantity, but about rediscovering the joy of reading for pleasure. You can track my progress and share your own reading adventures on Goodreads — a virtual place where fellow literature lovers come together to celebrate the magic of books!

In The Path of Mindful Living: A 21-Day Mindfulness Companion, I lead you through a series of self-guided mindfulness exercises and show you how to bring mindfulness into your daily life. Readers of my blog can download the workbook and pullout charts for only £6.