What’s On Your Nightstand?: The Well-Tempered TBR Pile

Last week my friend and fellow Book Riot writer Elizabeth Bastos asked on Twitter “Do you do lectio divina?” The phrase is Latin for “divine reading” and was originally used in conjunction with the kind of deep reading mandated for members of monastic orders. The four parts of lectio divina are reading, praying, meditating, and contemplating. Today, lectio divina can refer to careful, peaceful consumption of different types of materials, certainly no longer solely Christian and often not faith-based. People may read a daily meditation from a personal-growth program, revisit an essay that holds particular meaning, or even recite poetry with the goal of achieving a daily centering.

Hey! I could write an entire post on this stuff…and maybe I will, some other time. Today, the tweet from Ms. Bastos made me wonder about how many of us deliberately include reading for different types of states/moods/purposes on our nightstands. For example, I have two kinds of journals, a daily meditation book, a writer’s book of contemplative essays, and even an exercise book on my night table (some of those are used infrequently…but they are still there!).

What about you? Do you keep books for different kinds of reading (please–keep it clean, folks) in your TBR pile?