Gone Girl is on the Side of the Bath

I work in a bookshop, I get staff discount. For somebody who loves books, this is dangerous. Our shelves are full, piles of paperbacks stand on dusty floors, hardbacks wedged between bookcases in the patches of wall where light fixtures won't allow more shelving. It's a booky house. I spend all day surrounded by books, whether working in the bookshop or just sat in my living room - The problem being that in the bookshop I don't have time to read the books, and in the living room, I tend to stare glassy eyed at crime documentaries or Twitter.


I need to read all the books.


I'm also supposed to be a writer. If these were still the days where you used to have to put your profession on your passport, that's what it would say. This writing tends to suffer the same way the reading does. “What's that? Oh, “replace a song lyric with a vegetable” is trending on Twitter? Phew, I don't need to work on that article this afternoon.” And so on.


So, looking at my shelves, I decide – Susan Hill style* – to try and cut down on the distractions of day to day life, and to wade in and read all the books. And why not write about it at the same time? People want to know about books right? No? Do people want to know about me? No? Okay, yes, it's self indulgent, but I need to read more and I need to write more. People can read it if they want to, and if they don't, then at least I'm doing more of the things I need to do more of. Like ending a sentence with a preposition.





*Check out “Howards End is on the Landing”, a lovely cosy look at life in the Hill household as Susan reacquaints herself with her library. This personal task I've set myself isn't set over a specific time frame like her, and I'm not going to necessarily re-read books I've already read (re-reading the complete Agatha Christie, for example, would be a blog in itself!), but it inspires a sense of “I should really do that” in me.