“She reads books as one would breathe air,
To fill up and live.” – Annie Dillard
3 weeks of vile intrusive thoughts have come before this
sitting down. Prior to opening up my laptop on this wet and windy Thursday, the
days that came before have been filled with simple lists – small goals to get
me through until I can go back to bed. If you’ve never had to do this in order
to cope with getting through a day that feels insurmountable it might be hard
to imagine how everything can feel impossible when your brain feels like your
enemy, I get it. It is tough to envisage. If you have done this then I’m here
to say I SEE YOU.
Clean teeth. Get dressed. Change bedding. Do yoga (do yoga
do yoga do yoga). Leave house. Go for a
walk. Swim. Eat. Breathe (Yes breathe. There are days when this is the only
thing that makes it on to the list).
Often the list is one item long. Sometimes none of it gets done (so we
start again tomorrow. With kindness. With love and grace and patience). And
slowly, incrementally, you find yourself ticking 2 or 3 things off of the list.
Getting dressed just happens without it having to be a focused and intentional
effort. The clouds begin to part, you feel lighter, less fractured and hope
seeps back in through these softening edges of your psyche.
It’s been such a trying, dark and tiring period of anxiety
and fear that I honestly don’t want to write about it right now. I’m usually up
for showing up with my truth and sharing the nitty gritty of it with you, but
the retreating of this flare up is just fragile enough right now that the
positive progress of the last few days feels precious and fragile like fine
bone china and I don’t want to break the spell. It’s too uncomfortable to look
back at it when I can still feel it breathing down my neck.
So, this time, let's turn away from that noise and look to
something lovely.
I was sat scrolling through Instagram this morning and was
delighted to see that it is world book day today. As a life long bookworm I
hold a deep love for the magic of books and reading and I am so happy every
year to see pictures of delighted children proudly dressed as their favourite characters
(even the kid who chose to dress as Mr Twit. Interesting choice dude, but y’know…
you do you!) and amidst my scrolling I came across a wonderful quote from Matt
Haig (all hail) that sparked my urge to write this blog. Matt said ‘Reading isn’t
important because it helps get you good grades or a job. It’s important because
it gives you room to exist beyond the reality you’re given. Reading makes the
world better. It is how humans merge. How minds connect. Dreams. Empathy
Understanding. Escape. Reading is love in action.’
Reading IS love in action. When you’re in the grip of a good
book it feels like alchemy, like tangible magic, you can be so entirely
absorbed in it, so free from everything else that it liberates you, transports
you, binds you to the truth of human connection (that we’re all different, that
we’re all the same). You know how I always use that Kimya Dawson quote ‘ I do
this to remind me that I’m really really tiny.’? Well, reading does that too but
more, it also reminds you that as well as being a tiny part of an infinite
whole, you are also huge, powerful, everything. You can play a teeny part that
influences a greater whole or you can be the entire story. Either way, books
teach us the value in exploring and understanding another perspective. They teach
us that we can change, we can overcome, we can explore, we can mess up, get up,
try again. They show us its OK to be afraid and that we can learn to be brave.
That we are already braver than we know.
 |
| Perhaps i'll read until i feel better.... |
I couldn’t have lived without books in my life, as much as I
couldn’t have lived without air or love or water. Growing up I learnt so much
about love and loss, loyalty and grief, bravery and pride from stories and how
amazing to have such a safe place to explore these big and complicated things.
The lessons we learn in the reality of our lives often arrive in a sweeping
unsubtle, messy crash all at once and we have to figure out how we feel or what
to do quickly. We make mistakes, we feel shame and fear and anxiety. Yet, when
I sat with Lyra (badass, flawed, faithful, vulnerable Lyra) and turned page after page as she learnt and grew and messed up
and blossomed with bravery, when she got in her own way or let stubborn anger
derail her I could watch from my bed and realize her lessons for myself. What
power to give a child! The power to witness and learn through observing from a
safe place and coupled with the majesty of fun, escapism and adventure. There’s
nothing like it.
How else would a bossy, anxious little white girl from Devon
have ever experienced or considered how it feels to be a Chinese princess, a
modern African woman, a gay man in Victorian London, an orphan, an immigrant, a
child soldier, a Jew, a Muslim woman in 90s Khabul… or any of the other lives I
will never live or feel or see?
Remember learning about world war one in school? No? Me neither really, but have you ever
read Birdsong? Remember how you couldn’t breathe as they crawled through the
tunnels? How palpable the fear? How raw the pain? I nearly had a panic attack reading some chapters of this breathtaking book and will remember in my bones forever how it made me feel and how that, for a moment, gave me a glimpse into how it must've been for those young men.When writing is at its finest
and the words have been sculpted like works of art an author can transport you
to an experience far from your own in a way that educates your heart and moves
the boundaries of your compassion closer to another. Isn’t that love in action?
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| "I'll read my books and I'll drink my coffee and I'll listen to music, and I'll bolt the door." J D Salinger |
The day my mum underwent 14 hours of brain surgery, my dad sat in the waiting room the entire time and do you know what he did? He read the (then recently published) Goblet of Fire from cover to cover. 636 pages that for one terrifying day, took him away from where he was enough to get through those hours, that transported him enough to keep sitting there and waiting without going mad with worry. A 50 year old man feeling the grace of escape through fiction, sat drinking cold tea and reading of the adventures of teenage wizards and witches overcoming their life's challenges, relieved for a little while of the enormity of the life happening around him. Isn’t that love in action?
I could give you a million of these examples from my own
life. Days, weeks and hours filled by the words someone else has lovingly
crafted, their creation taking me elsewhere, freeing me, teaching me and
absorbing my anxious mind but we’d be here for a lifetime. Most recently, two
weeks ago in fact, we had a holiday planned with my partners parents and here I
was right in the midst of some horrendous mental health struggle wanting to
hide in a dark cave alone forever and disappear, dreading how terrible I’d be
to be around, how hard I’d have to work to hide how I was feeling.
So I did
what I always do and packed half a dozen books knowing I would find escape and
solace there. After reading and loving Fates and Furies by Lauren Groff a few
years ago I’d ordered everything she’d ever written but (as those with a never
ending/ever growing reading list will understand) had not yet got round to
picking up and reading any of them. Among the half dozen volumes I took along was
Arcadia, Groffs second novel, told from the perspective of Bit who we meet as a
5 year old boy growing up in a hippy commune in America. I picked this book up
the night before we left as I couldn’t sleep stressing about the week ahead and
that was it. I was in it, hooked, gripped, absorbed, transported. When that
happens, it feels like exhaling. Like a big blissful sigh of relief, a release
of pressure because I know in that moment that for the next few hundred pages I
don’t have to be in my brain I get to be in Bits. Whoosh, what magic! What medicine.
I find relief on the yoga mat, in meditation, in Breathwork,
in cold water but relief in these places comes through my effort, my work, my
sweat and tears and it can be so very hard to achieve sometimes, but here in
the warm folds of delicious fiction I am able to retreat and find relief
through the majesty of someone else’s work. I marvel at the skill of writers
who can take us there and thank the universe that they exist.
I am so grateful for books (Non fiction too, poetry too) and
what they have bought into my life and I am sad that one day I’ll die partly
because I know that means I only have finite time to read a finite number of
books, but, holy gratitude batman, what a reason to stay alive.
I wanted to end with a few suggestions from my shelf to yours,
but it’s unbelievably difficult so these choices come with a disclaimer that
these lists are by no means definitive, totally personal to me, might be
different on any given day and are in no particular order.
Adult Fiction:
1Q84 – Haruki Murakami
Jitterbug Perfume – Tom Robbins
The Collector – John Fowles
A Thousand Splendid Suns – Khaled Hosseini
The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
The Colour Purple – Alice Walker
Song of Solomon – Toni Morrison
Lights out in wonderland - DBC Pierre
The Power – Naomi Alderman
The God of Small things – Arundhati Roy
White Teeth – Zadie Smith
The First Bad
Man – Miranda July
Breakfast of
Champions – Kurt Vonnegurt
The Little
Friend – Donna Tartt
Young Adult Fiction/Childrens fiction:
The Night Circus – Erin Morgenstern
The Book Thief – Mark Zusak
Twelve bar blues - Patrick Neate
Life of Pi – Yann Martel
His Dark Materials trilogy – Philip Pullam
The Invention of Hugo Cabret – Brian Selznick
Stardust – Neil Gaiman
The Curious Incident of the dog in the night time – Mark Haddon
The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
James and the Giant Peach – Roald Dahl
The Hobbit – J R R Tolkien
The Snail and the Whale – Julia Donaldson
Percy the park keeper: One snowy night - Nick Butterworth
Non Fiction/Memoir
The Body keeps the score – Bessel Van Der Kolk
Wild: An elemental journey – Jay Griffiths
How to be a woman – Caitlin Moran
Reasons to Stay Alive – Matt Haig
Animal – Sara Pascoe
What I talk about when I talk about running – Haruki Murakami
I am, I am, I am – Maggie O’farrel
RISINGTIDEFALLINGSTAR –Philip Hoare
Daemon Voices – Philip Pullman
The Sea inside – Philip Hoare
Between the world and me – Ta-nehisi Coates
Women who run with the wolves – Claudia Pinkola Estes
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