The Inverse Correlation between Reading and Grieving

As I had no Christmas requests, I received a nourishing pile of novels. From all the sadness at the beginning of the year I lost my ability to read. This was a major symptom of my bereavement. It took me two months to read the first one in my pile, an excellent book, and what should have been a real page turner. Next, attempting an old loved author felt like I was wading through words, and I had to give up, unsure whether we’d grown apart or I’d lost my reading ability completely. Even in lockdown, when time has elasticated, it took a month to finish another one, a beguilingly strange read.

But finally I have my appetite back; two books this week. The Christmas pile of reading has depleted. What's left are the broken digestives, already nibbled and previously discarded. I have that familiar panic of the reading junkie, where can the next fix come from? I’ve caught up with the rest of my fellow readaholics, realizing we currently have no library to linger in or bookshop to browse.

I could go back to my broken biscuits; I know magic can happen late in… look at Captain Corelli’s mandolin. And I know I’m lucky, because I’m a re-reader, I have a bookcase full of caged favourites that I haven’t handed on, and even one or two unreads, that sneaked in without staying on the reading pile, due to being non-fiction or gifts I felt too guilty to give to a charity shop without trying.

Yes, there is Amazon, of course, destroyer of the small and beautiful. Much more wholesomely is the little independent bookshop in town, P and G Wells, which is doing local delivery and deliberately, deliciously tantalizing passers-by with its ever-changing window of relevant suggestions and possibilities. Go, P and G, I’m back in the land of the literary!

The Pile:

The Ten Thousand Doors of January by Alix E Harrow. Perfect book for me to plummet through but took me more than that month to read. Consequently, unusually I feel like I know January well. Highly recommend to people who enjoy more than one world.

Boy Swallow’s Universe by Trent Dalton. Gritty, magical, harsh, excellent. Again, a stronger relationship with this book for the time it took me to read. Waiting for his next novel, which I’m sure I’d eat within a week.

Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Naughty Neil Gaiman. A fast-food reread to supplement the TV series and to prove to myself I could still read(!). Clever, funny book and great adaptation.

The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa. Clever, weird, tragic, loved the two stories reflecting each other. Took me a strange age to read.

A Long Petal of the Sea by Isabel Allende. Isabel, I love you but I couldn’t read you. I promise I’ll try this again, but I felt overwhelmed by the lack of dialogue.

Oligarchy by Scarlett Thomas. I finally hit my usual pace. Window on a different world, page-turning, eye-opening, depressing reflection on adolescence.

Lanny by Max Porter – What a wonderful, heartbreaking, dark, light, dark read. A breath of different air. Thank you!

The Power of Purple Socks

I, sockless, wander around the town. Where are my special lucky socks? Sandals look naked with nothing purple glimpsing through. And they’re harder on the feet. I feel through my soles, through the souls; it’s how I soothsay. What if I can’t soothsay without my socks? Doubt floods into my mind, drowning my happy synapses. Yes, I know the stench that usually surrounds me emanates from those socks but that is part of their mystic quality. My plummeting mood descends to conclusion. Someone has stolen my wonderful stinky socks; someone who knows. My last remnants of soothsaying spiral around my rusting brain and land on Madame Longstocking, my arch rival, her with the stripy legs and fulsome garters. Damn that witch, samsoning my power.

I stump in flat-foot-sore sandals to her house and there on Longstocking’s washing line are my socks, clean. Robbed of all remarkable properties. I pull them down and crumple onto the ground, crushing some petunias.

Madame comes out to greet me, ‘You’re welcome.’

‘What have you done, you wicked woman?’

‘Eco wash, 30 degrees, fabric softener, extra spin. And get out of my flowerbed.’

I shake my soft sweet-smelling socks at her. ‘I’ll never soothsay with these!’

‘No, but you might get a girlfriend.’