I love books. Literally for as long as I can remember I have loved books. Always. They’ve brought me endless joy since my early childhood and continue to be a source of great enjoyment.
From the early days of Beatrix Potter and Roald Dahl, to Jacqueline Wilson and Enid Blyton, growing up with The Babysitters Club and visiting Sweet Valley High, mixing in Goosebumps and learning about Horrible Histories, then Horrible Science, and reading the Point Horror series under my bedcovers by torchlight. Be it children’s classics, regular classics, modern classics, ancient classics, biographies, true crime, encyclopaedias, fiction, non-fiction, or anything and everything in between, books have always been my constant comfort. So much is my adoration for reading that it has even been in my mind for the better part of 20 years to have ‘BOOK WORM’ tattooed across my knuckles someday…but that’s an idea for a different time.
I love words and I love writing just as much as I love reading. I don’t enjoy talking very much because my brain and mouth are never in sync. I trip over what I want to say, I’m forgetful and I’m convinced that I come across as stupid, which then leads to the much easier option of choosing to stay quiet. Writing allows time for consideration, for edits and tweaks, and is a much calmer method of communication. My ADHD-addled brain finds this very soothing. I’ve come to realise that reading grounds me and allows me to decompress, arguably a couple of impressive achievements for someone with the concentration skills of a fly. As I’m getting older the joy I get from reading has brought along the extra benefits of allowing me to switch my mind off from all of its relentless noise and that is very welcome.
In a roundabout way this books/reading/words chat is leading to my point. I want to make much more effort to document my reading and to really fall into the escapism afforded to me by books. I’ve put reviews on Goodreads here and there over the years, done roundups on Instagram from time to time, and I share what I’m reading at any given moment on Twitter. From now I’m going to take it book by book and give them the extra thought they deserve with reviews and roundups, and I’ve decided to do it here. I’ve decided to post more here in general because I want to lean more into the lifestyle side of things, to take more pictures, to find enjoyment in simplicity and to document life as it's lived. 'Lifestyle' is an all-encompassing term (some may say lazy, I say an umbrella vague enough to capture all of the bits I'd inevitably miss from a list) and I'm using that to include the presence of books in my life in a more comprehensive manner.
Each year I set a target on Goodreads for the amount of books I'd like to read. In 2023 I achieved my first goal in November of 36. I reset that target to 40 and got there late on New Year’s Eve with my final book of the year. For 2024 I’ve set a more conservative aim of 24. It's a lesser number, but quality > quantity for one. For two I have some longer reads that I want to get through this year. For three I'm now into uni year two and need to devote much more time and effort into that (I'm sensing a theme that my life is basically a bunch of side quests and tangents and I'm really not sure how I manage to keep every plate spinning at once. Sheer nervous energy? Another idea for another time, yet again I digress).
For now I'm going to get some chapters finished from my current book, Mexican Gothic. It’s one that I'm glad I've finally picked up after having it in my want-to section for ages, and I’m enjoying it very much so far.
No comments
Post a Comment