About

The first grown-up book I read was one of my mother’s, a fat paperback with a broken spine that I wasn’t supposed to touch. I was nine, maybe ten. I understood about half of it and read it twice anyway, most of it under the covers well past lights-out. That’s more or less how I’ve read everything since.

I still don’t read to any plan. Fiction, mostly: family sagas, historical novels, crime, literary fiction, a good amount of science fiction and fantasy. But I’ll follow an interesting nonfiction book just about anywhere. One book always points to three more, and I stopped fighting that years ago.

There are usually four or five going at once: one by the bed, one in my bag, one I’m quietly avoiding. I write in the margins. I dog-ear pages and feel nothing. I keep far too many and give away almost none, and the to-read pile stopped being a pile somewhere around the second bookshelf.

It isn’t only books. Films, music, a good meal, a long walk, an argument with a friend that sends me straight back to the shelf. It all feeds the same thing. And every now and then something I’ve read won’t leave me alone until I’ve written it down. When that happens, it tends to end up here.

• Get in Touch