10 books I still think about
you know the type, the ones with the best characters
👋🏼👋🏼👋🏼 Hi! If you’re new to these parts, the short version is this: I’ve worked for myself for a long time, writing 15 (!) books, largely done from home. It sent me a bit doolally, being alone that much and also working within an industry that hasn’t always treated me kindly. That’s why I started writing How to Build a Life, now delivered to thousands of readers in over 80 countries. I’d been desperate to unpick why I seemingly had a dream career but life in general felt so underwhelming. I figured out that my brain likes writing but my soul needs something else, so at the start of this year - in addition to still writing my novels - I took a job in a high school mixing teaching and pastoral work. In one million ways this makes no sense at all, apart from the fact that working out of the house with teenagers is making me really very happy. I’m almost 40, a solo parent by choice, and knowing all this means you’re all caught up. WELCOME.
I mentioned before Easter break that my reading has been lacklustre this past few months. I get it, for some people that’s not a big deal at all - like who cares, right? Reading habits are like booking foreign holidays, nobody needs you to wang on about it. Reading happens! Whoop-de-whoop!
But my brain, you see, she needs it. Thrives on it. I don’t ascribe to “readers” being morally or culturally more superior than non-readers, don’t get me wrong. You do you, babes, read a book a week, a book a month, a book only on vacation, use a book as a paperweight or doorstop, choose the third season of HACKS instead. Me and my anxious little mental hamster wheel, though, the one that whirrs and whirrs, spins and spins all the goddamn time, wondering about life and love and purpose and meaning and the point of it all, well she finds a lot of comfort in fiction. In reading.
They say that’s all authors are, really - we’ve taken a hobby to it’s most extreme degree, read and read and read and now make our own things to read. A bit like enjoying beer so much you start a micro-brewery in your garage. An hour or so a night, that’s good for me, a hour on the Kindle as my kid falls asleep, phone locked in the kitchen, house in darkness, nothing left for me to do except listen to his heavy breathing and lose myself in a world somebody else has created so that I might come to understand my own just that little bit more.