Ann Patchett was an author of the book The Dutch House, which I wrote about for Books & Beyond in 2020.

I’m always brought into her books the way she writes about life. Early in These Precious Days,

c 2021, she shares with her readers what books mean for her:

Books were not just my education andmy entertainment. They were my partners. They told me what I was capable of. They let me stare a long way down the path of various possibilities so that I could make decisions (p. 31).

She co-owns a bookstore, and the name of the store is Parnassus.

I’ve always read books, even when my husband and I could travel in this world in a car, airplane, or ship. As soon as we arrived at a motel or took our suitcases into the bedroom of the house of people we were visiting, we got out our books and put them on the lamp table by the bed.

These Precious Days is similar to a journal, which is one of my writing assignments every day. One similarity as I compare my writing with hers, is references to writers we read. Here’s several authors she writes about: Tom Hanks, Eudora Welty,

Scarlett O’Hara, Dorothy Day, Edith Wharton, Charles Schulz, Robin Preiss Glasser, Carson McCullers, Russell Banks, Alice Munro, Raymond Carver, Donald Hall, Louise Erdrich, Kate DiCamillo.

I liked her references to Snoopy. That’s her dog. She put a typewriter on top of his doghouse, and we read that he “sits by his typewriter and taps out” (p. 79).

She writes many times about her husband Karl. Here’s one reference:

I like to tell people that Karl would be the perfect person to be stranded with on a desert island — he tells a good story, can fly a plane and sail a boat, and could take out my appendix if he had to (p. 105).

She and Karl had dated for eleven years before they married. She was forty-one years old, and he was fifty-seven years old. When they are in Budapest for a celebration he bought her a thin gold ring. One of her decisions is to not have children. And we read that this decision is based on memories she has of her childhood.

In the chapter “Nightstand,” we read about her writing materials found by her parents. And she went through these boxes too, when she knew what was going on, but she would like to throw these pages away.

Later we read about how long it takes for her to work with her book publishers about what photos or drawings will be on the cover of her book. She writes that “Book covers should entice readers the way roses entice bees–like their survival depends on it “ (p. 206).

Soon in the book, she writes about being for two years at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop at the University of Iowa. This was in the mid-1980s. I wish her dates there would have matched when my husband and I were at the University of Iowa in the early 1970s.

Her book is like a journal. I have my journals from the early 1970s, and I’ve said before I’d like to write a book about the wonderful life living in southwestern Minnesota on a farmplace