About some books

For a long time, I was 'the girl who reads'* - the girl who read while walking home, the girl who was told to watch out for lampposts, the girl who found that some paperbacks (Pratchett, McCaffrey, thank you publishers) would fit in a blazer pocket. And that hasn't ever really changed, but for a while, books were work, and work was hard, and reading was about knowing everything so that if someone challlenged me on an interpretation I could elucidate and justify my position. I first got a Kindle to carry pdfs of seventeenth-century texts around more easily. 

And it wasn't that I stopped reading, so much as that I had to find other hobbies. What do you do to relax if the words on the page are all your day? Well, you knit. And you sew. And you quilt. And you might indeed find your
self learning a lot about those subjects too, and deciding that some work on the representation of textiles in fiction of the seventeenth century would be an interesting project; and wondering whether it matters that nettle fibre can be spun and made into yarn, and knit into sweaters for seven brothers, or when textiles stopped being material culture and became a literary marker of something else, even in the early modern world.

At some point, life changed. I got a 'real' job, working in an office, barely reading or writing anything, and knitting and sewing a lot. What does it say about our culture that it was easier to find friends who knit or sewed or baked (and in some circles I was admired as a young woman who performed these femininities so well) than it was to find someone to talk about books with? And so I was knitting a lot, and sewing quite a bit, but not reading all that much. Unless I came across a trilogy and fell down a rabbit hole and 'lost' a weekend to a different world.

That habit continues (yes, despite the toddler - just don't ask how much you can do while holding your Kindle in one hand), but this year has been a bit of a year. A year of incredulity, despair and disconnection, but also one of time, of home-coming, of a quiet revolution in considering what is worth consuming, worth acquiring, and a year that might yet end in hope. 

In this fractious and fragmented time, I have rediscovered the joy of ordering a book and going to collect it; of being able to choose where my cash goes; being able to spend that little bit more on books because I don't have train fare to find every month; and of being able to order books to help me to see the world differently and to learn.

*yes, I know about La fille qui lisait dans le métro, and yes, it's on my list.