You Could Make This Place Beautiful

12 January 2025: Finished Maggie Smith's You Could Make This Place Beautiful today and found it really captivating and moving. I read it on Kindle (got a good deal) and do wish I could have read it on paper, just to make flipping through it easier (for me), in part because I could sense all the ways it poetically echoed and built on earlier moves--and wanted to see that more clearly. 

One of those moves is recurring chapter names, including "A Friend Says Every Book Begins with an Unanswerable Question." Each of these includes only two lines of text. Here's they are from a chapter late in the book.

"Then what is mine?

how to make this place beautiful"

I could have quoted so many memorable passages, but this one stands out to me as I look towards a new semester (starting tomorrow) and--Lord help us--what's coming on January 20.