Top Ten Tuesday: Thankful

Ahhh! The Lure of the List. Top Ten Tuesday is my favorite bookish event, and I don't know why I've neglected the lovable list. Thanks to my former student Lindsay Bird for reminding me that lists are fun.

Hosted by The Broke and the Bookish, Top Ten Tuesday is open to any blogger who wants to join in. After you post, go back to The Broke and the Bookish and add your link.

I've been making gratitude lists lately. I read somewhere that doing this will make you feel better right away, and it certainly has that effect on me. I find it almost doesn't matter what I put on my list....almost anything I can think of can make me feel gratitude if I think about it the right way. A few keep popping up all the time, and those will be my top five....

1. Love. It all boils down to this. I feel extremely lucky that I found love (in a bookstore). Yes, I met my husband (number two) in a bookstore. Talk about meeting cute!
2. My family: those beloved people to whom I am linked by love, blood, birth, and something that is as deep as the cellular level.
3. Work. It took me some years to come to this realization. I need work the way a lost soul in the desert needs water. And how lucky am I to be doing something so obviously worthwhile: I am a teacher. Whatever the struggles and doubts, I believe in the value of what I do in the classroom.
4. Freud should be happy now. I've got the two biggest categories handled: love and work. Writing is here in the top five because, again, I can't live without it.
5. Hardship and failure. I'm grateful for every time I fell on my face, lost something or someone I loved, or felt as though my world was coming to an end. Hardship and failure have been my primary path to knowledge (I'm hopeless like that) and have given me whatever compassion I possess.
6. I am thankful for Middlemarch, Our Mutual Friend, The Magic Mountain, The Idiot, Their Eyes Were Watching God, The Great Gatsby and all of the books that seemed to be written for me alone. And just so you don't think I'm a horrendously pompous snob, I'm grateful for the Nancy Drew mysteries, the Bobbsey Twins, Big Red, and all those Betty Cavanna romance novels I read in the seventh grade. I swear Betty Cavanna saved my life in the seventh grade; I must have read a book a day.
7. Independent bookstores and used bookstores and independent booksellers. And also all the awesome librarians with tattoos and sassy attitudes.
8. Readers. Thank goodness there are other readers out there: readers in my classroom, readers on Library Thing and GoodReads, and of course, readers who write book blogs. If I want a conversation about books, I don't even have to leave my house or change out of my pajamas.
9. All the WRITERS! and publishers and publicists and editors who care so passionately about books and reading. Thanks for sending me review copies and thanks for writing the books and going to great lengths to get people to read all the books. Thank you for existing.
10. I am extraordinarily thankful for all the students I have taught over the years. Oh, wow, sorry about those first two years. Ouch. Some day I'm going to put you all in a book.

Okay, that does it. Kind of random. Kind of over-passionate and dorky at the same time. As one of my students is wont to say: Whatever whatever.

What's on your gratitude list?