I wasn’t one of those people that grew up with parents spinning records. By the time of my earliest memories, my grandparents had already packed up all their vinyls or long since donated them to charity shops, swapping to CDs. I remember ABBA gold playing in the car to Mcdonalds, or the radio humming quietly in the background of Sunday roasts, but never the grandeur of a turntable. The elusive turntable, the coolest accessory. I pined for one from the first day I heard about the Beatles, read my first NME magazine, saw the cool girl place the needle down in some film in that important hazy time somewhere between 13 and 16. At uni, I saw them casually sitting in the corner of friends rooms, almost forgotten as they shrugged them off as something they’d always had with a small collection of heirloom records gathering dust. Sophie played The Wombats and Luther Vandross on her, I watched an ex by Joni Mitchell’s Blue praying one day it would be amongst shared possessions, spending hours letting my fingers walk over record shop boxes to play the part I wanted. At 18 the excuse was that I didn’t have space, 20 I didn’t have the money, by my 23^rd birthday there was nothing stopping me.

I bought my first record player with the money I’d got from an article in NME. My younger self looked over my shoulder as I spent days browsing trying to find the right one, she was the one unboxing it, standing at my side watching me drop the needle all starry-eyed. I think it’s the most affirming thing I’ve ever bought.

I find it so hard to invest in myself, always filling and emptying online baskets contemplating worth and absolutely everyone was sick of me by my 3^rd week of almost but not yet buying my record player. It’s so easy to get caught up and made to feel inferior in this purchase. Blogs will tell you that if you’re not buying a £400 turntable with the best speakers available, you might as well not bother. I got so caught up in considering the purity of sound and bass despite being more than happy walking around with £3 headphones when really all I wanted was a record player to work, look nice and give me a place to play the albums I loved loud for my younger self. I realised I didn’t care too much about the technicalities, it was all for her and she definitely isn’t a purist and I still care far more about feel than sound. I got a Denver VPL-200 for £60, the first record I played was the Grease soundtrack.

As someone with a super addictive personality, the pull to buy every album I’ve ever loved is high. I hear one good song and want to run down to Piccadilly Records but I’ve had to practice restraint. Instead, I’ve been letting sentiment guide me. I think about younger me, the classic albums she’d want to brag about that have ended up being a part of my life for a decade. I think of older me and possible future kids excited that they will be the type of people that will grow up with a parent spinning records, I think about the soundtrack I want them to have.

The first album I bought was Folklore by Taylor Swift. It was the release that got me my NME commission, so I bought it as a gift to remember the occasion, for me now, me at 14 and me at 50 when I still want to remember my cool days. Hearing the echoing harmonies on My Tears Ricochet spinning around my living room was immediately almost tear-inducing, I realised why people have always wanted the experience, understanding the longevity of the form.

From Depop, I picked up Patti Smith’s Frederick for my favourite author and Blondie’s Sunday Girl for my old burlesque name. With far less restraint, my 7” collection grows rapidly, containing odd Bowie tracks, French songs I love, and Lennon tracks I felt like I should have.

I went out one lunchtime hunting for Purple Rain. Walking to the record store I rang my mum, telling her about my plan to only buy albums that I love from start to finish, that I would put on and let them play. Purple Rain is the epitome of a start to finish album, a perfect example where the tracks blur into one another and the form of a big continuous disk makes so much sense. £15 got me a holographic special cover, I jokingly offered my mum the giant poster it came with.

Dodie’s Build A Problem was the first album I bought on its release day, taking part in the race for chart success. I wrote a review of the album and she printed it out to stick on her bedroom wall, so I bought her record, printed out her tweets about my review, and added it to my collection as a reminder of a beautiful moment of recognition over a beautiful piece of art.

My boyfriend bought me the Funny Girl soundtrack. I feel no shame in letting Barbra Streisand’s voice blast across my neighbourhood.  

Other albums I’ve acquired through various gifts and eBay finds include: Harry Style’s Fine Line, Lana Del Rey’s Norman Fucking Rockwell, a battered copy of The Moody Blues Days Of Future Passed, The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds and an ABBA Greatest Hits that I felt my Grandma would approve of. My younger self semi-swoons at the mix of classics and cringe cliché.

The list of albums I want to get grows constantly. Falling into a side hustle as a music journalist, new albums seem to get a fast-track to sentimentality. Writing about albums and artists makes their role in your life feel so intimate, a feeling I sense especially strong for new artists like Dodie and Lord Huron alongside icons like Prince and Jeff Buckley. I want a copy of every album I’ve ever taken the time to write about ideally, a way to physically remember a moment when I let a piece of work take up all my brain space for a day, a week, a couple of hours. I want to find myself holding a physical copy of the albums that has always been important; Patti Smith’s Horses, hear Leonard Cohen’s Chelsea Hotel no2 on a record, get my own copy of Joni Mitchell’s Blue, enjoy meals soundtracked by Miles Davis’ Kind Of Blue. I want to lug these albums from home to home, hear them begin to crackle, use them to decorate walls, learn exactly where my favourite songs start, be seen finally fulfilling the role of cool-girl setting the needle down and feeling my younger self get butterflies over me now.

Today is Record Store Day and I can get involved, planning my day around a walk to Vinyl Exchange to pick up a copy of Hounds Of Love. It’s not rare, it would still be there next week, but I can get involved today so I’m going to. I’ll hold the disk all wrong, sing along to Running Up That Hill, and think about all the words I’ve written about Kate, about old relationships spent learning her discography, months reconnection and how my love for her has morphed over the years like the record probably will. I’ve listened to the album for years, but now it’ll be mine.

My flat falls first. I notice the mound of clothes growing and growing with each day, each extra hour wasted away with wet hair post-shower scrolling through TikTok when I said I’d do X and Y and Z. I put coats on chairs and sit down before making the 5 steps to the hook. I become thankful for my massive cutlery collection as I forget to load the dishwasher again, too tired to collect the 4 glasses from my room. I’m aware of the disarray before I’m ever acceptingly aware of my mood, bullying myself over books by my bedside, I’m only just starting to see that the two come hand in hand. Tossing clothes on the floor at the end of the night, I say I’ll do it the next day, and the next day, and the next day. Until I did it today.

I lay in bed till 10 rolling my brain over weekend to-do lists, planning breakfasts, counting up coffee budgets. When I stand up, heaviness isn’t the first thing on my mind. I notice my skin in the mirror and think it looks beautiful and the happy thought makes the pile of clothes I trip on seem like an inconvenience rather than something that sucks my life force. I decide to ignore it momentarily, underlining momentarily as I make coffee in my favourite mug and mindlessly wipe down the countertops while I wait for halloumi to fry. I did step one without realising. When my brain clocks it the mental pat on the back feels like the first kind touch in weeks. I eat itching for more, turn off the TV with the last mouthful, ask google to play the radio as a sign of better times and decide to follow suit.

I think the kitchen is always a great first step. The sleek, shine of a freshly Dettol wiped surface is instant gratification, unlike the abstraction of dusted wood. The smell of bleach in the air works as a stimulant pushing you into further corners as the kitchen blurs into the living room. After 2 weeks, I wipe up incense residue and bin burnt-out candles, flooding my mind with soft daydreams of Saturday afternoons walks to pick up new supplies and a rose latte, cling to it as a reward I may or may not take.

Swapping wipe to cloth, the sparkling kitchen wills me to go on. I sing along to Taylor Swift now as I search for polish in the kitchen cupboard I keep stocked of empty ones, never quite getting far enough to sort it out. Dusting is a good measure, asking only for as much or as little as you want to give. You could move every object in your home and rid of the ring around it. Take every earring from your trinket tray and dust off each corner. Wipe your way around the maze of skirting boards or give a shelf a once over and call it a day. I find a middle ground, simply shuffling plant pots side to side, lightly brushing frames but making no real effort for corners or backs of things, not today.

(To be frank, for a moment, I’m writing this as a way to avoid the next step, which logically would be dusting my bedroom. But packed full of bits and bobs that make the act a nightmare, I’m practising creative avoidance…)

In the process of dusting, I’m confronted by the dying leaves of my neglect. Drooped and browning, for weeks I’ve been giving nothing but an occasional spritz. As the song switches, I muster up the energy to wet a cloth and wipe leaf by leaf, mentally apologising to the plants and I guess to myself as well. I water from the base like my mother told me to do and hope their joy comes back too.

Hoovering is the hardest part. As a child I’d cry when a hoover came towards me, terrified by the loud whirring voice that threatened to suck up my toes as my dad laughed. The fear changed into annoyance as I grew up and I’m still left wondering why they haven’t made them silent yet. When so much of my fuel relies on music and pleasant sound chosen by me, it’s always counter-productive in the act of mood-boosting. In my old flat, when I eventually caved to the activity, I’d carry my speaker in one hand and hold the handle in the other; a delicate balancing act between Henry the hoover and some man telling me stories about Jimi Hendrix. Today I resign to simply ticking it off the list, hyping myself up to press the power button and racing around the room, only caring about my favourite standing spots and giving the rest a lazy once over. It’s good enough, I feel some dopamine release.

From where I sit now, propped up on an unmade bed to franticly write this idea that came to me in that very act of hoovering, the pile of clothes hasn’t moved. Containing the outfit I’ve been wearing on repeat, the loungewear trousers I live in, and 3 different degrees of jumper put on and thrown off in an attempt to figure out the weather, it feels a bit like a diary of the last couple of weeks lack of self-esteem. Lazy and sloppy, its presence is back to feel confrontational as my now-awake eyes see flaws in my skin again, scurrying past the mirror quick. I know I should change my bedding, I know I’m doing my books a disservice leaving them strewn on the floor, I know my plants here need feeding too, and I think I’ll probably do it still.

Clinging on with final fingertips gripping to the daydream of light breezes and sweet drinks, maybe the clouds are rolling in again and maybe the jobs will be left undone. Throwing strops about the flux of life between tidiness and mess, clean dishes and dirty dishes and always having to decide on meals to eat that will, in turn, make plates mucky again, the roll of days feels exhausting still. But at least now I have a tidy kitchen, and I still think maybe I’ll manage to tackle the bedroom.

8:30pm on a Saturday and I’m complaining about the noise, turning down invitations because I’ve already taken my makeup off, dismaying over my tiredness as I promised to add another tick to my yearlong to-watch list. I complain a lot lately. I complain about crowds, offices, Instagram stories, busy brunch places. I stress about bookings and calendar dates, can’t keep up with the logistics of my life being stretched. Sometimes it feels like that medieval stretch torture, strapped to the rack of the month and they’re saying you will be taller! You will go out and be busy, have plans, get new clothes, keep up keep up keep up. With each bone crack I have to celebrate or it’ll make the new one seem worse, everything is about easing into to.

Life peels further from my imagination and I complain about that too. My dedicated time for rose tinting is squeezed and things are starting to slip through the cracks. I’ve spent all year missing uni, teasing myself with masters prospectuses, flipping through photos of my 18 year old self who now seems to me like the most social person ever, my peak. But 8:30pm on a Saturday in 2021 is cutting a bit close to 2017’s Saturday 8:30pms - ripping outfit after outfit from my body, getting hotter and hotter in my bedroom with music below, analysing the drink I made and uber costs and ease of getting home, selling my ticket and deciding to not go.

I could cancel on my best friends then if I had 50 minutes to falter. But the 18-year-old anxious flake looks like gentle when you’re in your 20s. Now it screams early retirement and I stress mostly about never getting it back as everyone dives in with such ease. Drunk girls are singing Valerie in the bar across the road, stumbling footsteps have returned to my weekend soundtrack – on Thursday the anxiety I got from 4 pints made me consider resigning myself sober.

Suddenly headachey and old, I keep looking at club pictures of my younger self and wondering if I’ll ever have fun in that body moving, chaotic way again. Surely we’ve all forgotten to dance? Or have we splintered off into those that threw themselves living room lockdown parties and those that didn’t? How long will it be until my approach to dancing can return? Liking to be the perfect level of unexpectedly drunk and dressed just casual enough that your presence looks just as spontaneous as you feel when you decided to go to a club at 1am. I barely remember 1am as anything more than a time to realise you’ve stayed up too late watching tiktok. 2am, 3am, even 4am are lost to me now. Should I be training for their return?

From the noise outside, I feel like I missed the reunion. Reacquainted with art gallery mornings, beer garden afternoons, café work days – It’s Saturday nights I can’t pry from the hands of my lockdown habits, clutching hard as the wheels turn and my bones stretch further. A more resilient person wouldn’t care, look down from the balcony with superiority as prawns cook and the 26^th film of the year starts.  But everything tells me I got old without realising, and everyone seems to be snapping back while I’m study wrinkles, wondering when I’ll get the chance to be 23 or if 23 is too late when 21 and 22 were sacrificed.

Far beyond clubs and bars, I complain a lot about people’s holidays, one way I can use the year’s moral compass as a wall between myself and plans. I turned FOMO into tuts as I add to the mental list of places to go, places I should’ve been, ways everyone is better than me. I’d like to go to Paris and wander round Versailles in a big dress. I want to go to every museum in Berlin, ride a bike in Copenhagen or Stockholm or Amsterdam, eat food in Italy. All these longings I’ve been putting off for a lot longer than a year, always waiting for something to say go as I was busy interning or working or stressing about working. It’s nice having a pandemic to blunt my own disappointments over my lack of travel, totally unable to empathise with people mourning the loss of their yearly holiday, but somehow knowing if travel opened up restriction free tomorrow, I’d probably still not go. I can’t figure out what I’m stalling for, but know the world’s pause was a comfort to me. It felt like a year to play catch up when I felt incessantly behind in big goal checkpoints. I relaunched a magazine, I started a newsletter, I wrote music articles weekly, I watched film after film, I performed poems, but my to-do list is long and the play button has been pressed. How am I supposed to go on holiday when I’m still writing my lockdown novel?

The rack is stretching me and I’m pushing back like it’s a leg press, like my strength alone could stop it. If I cut off my peripheral, I can be okay. Walk my path to and from where I want to go, figure out times when my favourite places are quietest and go, make my own leaps when I book tickets, take trains, make plans. But Saturday nights stay stubborn, too attacked by outside, too alien with the reluctance to make any plans to feel the empty space of no curfews. I am too old and too tired, affirming it with each early night and wondering when it will stop being true. I isolate myself in the house I built against FOMO, but they built a bar right outside. And when will it all come back?

I tried making a list, drafting a blog of ways to get your mojo back.

1.  Buy a new perfume but have no one be close enough to compliment it. Start doubting if it’s nice, because no one has said it is, with a subtly that won't travel 2 metres.
2.  Experiment with makeup. Do your eyeliner different on a day you don’t go out, worry too much to recreate it for the pub.
3. Go out to get yourself some new clothes. Buy nothing because you can’t try it on, fight a battle in every shop between the size you probably are and the size your brain thinks you are because you slacked on your hula hooping for a week.
4.  Get your fringe trimmed. Wake up at 7am and worry about your cool value in the world as everyone experiments with colour and you’ll never get the confidence to bleach your eyebrows.

I want to feel hot and cool, I got the memo that post-lockdown we were all glowing up, but it ended without me realising. I ask again, when will it come back? Starring at people from my balcony, head too busy creating a timed schedule for my movie night to even notice the tug to go out, the tug that would pull me into tiny tops in a moments notice and run out the door two years ago. Not ready to retire and not ready to go out, I'm lying in wait for some mental easing where spontaneity will take over the night shift from cosiness and 2am will be alive again. 

On days it eases and I let myself be excited rather than scared, I sit in a café with my friends. They talk about fake vaccine passports and people  who are playing the system to get to Portugal for an all-inclusive. I go home resigned to staying there for another year, turn down the evenings invitations, make a coffee and apply eye cream.

 I live in Manchester, alone.

My hair is my natural mousey brown with a slight gingery tinge. The year demanded my bleach as sacrifice.

My favourite things to wear are my Burberry trench, my white floral jeans and my grey lounge trousers. I haven’t been on a night out in over a year, but when I do, I vow to try harder with my makeup.

My favourite books this year were I’m With The Band by Pamela Des Barres and Platinum Blonde by Phoebe Stuckes.

In the last year I watched over 90 films so I can no longer have a favourite. But highlights included Babyteeth, the Before Sunrise series and the documentary about Leonard Cohen and Marianne.

My favourite albums to sing in the shower are Evermore by Taylor Swift, Purple Rain by Prince and Punisher by Phoebe Bridgers.

My favourite smell is the Twilight body spray from Lush.

My favourite thing is getting letters from friends, disposable cameras, Saturday morning pastries and cooking myself meals with wine on a Friday.

I’m in love with myself, my friends, the things I own, my brain, Taylor Swift and Patti Smith.

I sleep on the right side of the bed on my left side, with a pillow pressed up against my back and silently cursing myself for staying up so late on TikTok.

I repeat this mantra to myself; it’ll be fine.

I’m trying to implement a habit of drinking more water and going to bed earlier, still.

My 23^rd birthday passed unmiraculously, as they generally seem to when you get older. One day I’ll no doubt recount the occasion to future children with some grandeur of how the normalcy of seeing friends felt novel, how I got drunk off 2 drinks with the excitement of it all, and spent it wrapping in a cardigan made by the hands of a dear friend. But now I tell people it was nice, lovely even, fun.

By this point I’ve usually manifested, marked another year passed with a tarot card pointed direction and a fresh to-do list that masquerades as goals. Before I’d write holiday, published novel, empire. This year I can’t muster anything but holiday, haircut, tattoo, and I think I love it.

I turned 23 as the climax to a week spent out of office in the some-what second career I made myself in my 22^nd year. I think maybe I finally learnt the lesson of rest, ticking films off a bucket list and turning a book pile into a bedside. Rest and balance, as I ring in my 23^rd year with email chains that might as well be daisies as I smile down on pixel names I dreamed of as a teen.

It’s odd. As I turned 23 I thought mostly of 13 when I was sad, and dreaming, and read NME articles I now right. At the end of my 22^nd year I had no big conclusions other than younger me would think I was cool, I have no doubt on that. I think she’d be proud, exhale and drop some of the weight on her shoulders as from where she’s standing, everything looks so much better than just okay. I also have no doubt that at 33, I’ll write the same thing about me now. While I may hate ageing more than ever in a year that gave me my first wrinkle, I think I’ve finally settled into the comfort that self-development will happen without much input, all things generally flow to the place they should, and I will more than likely be fine, have a nice day, smile.

In my 22^nd year, despite it being spent mostly in lockdown which I clearly didn’t expect when I wrote grand hopes of 3 holidays; I was happy. In my last birthday blog, I reflected on building the life my 21-year-old-self hoped for, and I’m in a similar position as I email editors, gather by-lines and fall asleep spinning ideas around my head. I have a stack of zines with my work in, I have a portfolio, I have a (very humble) bank account with money from commissions, and my old self dreamed about it all. It hit me the other night that I have nothing to dream about at the moment, struggling to figure out a story to tell myself as I drift off without it turning into strategy or email templates. Development isn’t a romantic dream to have, but I think I love the smallness of it, giving me so much space around it where I’m realising life fits. That’s where new friends fit, and boyfriends, and calls with my mum on lunch times, nice Friday dinners I cook myself, new art prints on new shelves, Saturday morning pastries, days off, pub nights, plans that can’t be formulated into emails and existing without word count. So for 23 I have no big goals, just a holiday, a wild haircut and a silly tattoo, continuing with my work and rattling around the space called living.

I’ll be honest with you, so far my 2021 reading motivation has been minimal. My mind has turned to mush that thinks about nothing but Married At First Sight Australia, hula hooping and pub opening plans, so it doesn’t quite seem to have the capacity for a novel. 

This is the exact reason why I don’t set myself reading goals. I don’t have a particular number of books I want to read in a year or a quota per month, just letting myself read at my own pace and enjoy. The last couple of months I feel like I’ve been fighting off that old English degree feeling of force, settling down every Saturday morning as a slave to routine more than a book lover. The climax of the sensation came last week as I tossed my book aside in favour of TikTok again, realising that I wasn’t enjoy the read so why was I bothering? I’m sure it’ll feel liberating when I stop feeling so guilty, but more on that later.

Here are my first reads of the year...

#1 Nights Sky With Exit Wounds- Ocean Vuong 

Technically this was a 2020 read as I flew through it in the Christmas-New Year limbo, inhaling it in a deep breath and finishing with a reluctant sigh.

Within the first pages I knew Ocean Vuong deserved every bit of hype he gets. His phrasing is so vivid but also so simple I was almost kicking myself for not coming up with it. He effortlessly creates such sharp emotions and this collection moves through the whole range of them from grief to love to anger to heartbreak. It deals with huge and heavy topics like war, death and coming out, but it never feels overwhelming or hard to read. After each piece I wanted to take a moment to digest, but quickly found myself turning the page for more as the emotions are gripping rather than smothering.

Like with all my favourite poets, Vuong had me hooked with his use of simple English. His work is fuss free and easily engaged with, even his more experimental pieces don’t feel like he was in cahoots with a thesaurus as they flow so simply and naturally. It’s one of those poetry books that’s ended up covered in my pen, with so many perfect phrases underlined to remember later, phrases so good I wanted to applaud but settled for drawing a star next to instead.

If you haven’t guessed already, I adored it. It immediately took a place in my list of favourite poetry collections, and I’m excited to dive into more of his work. Put this one on your to-read list.

#2 Trying To Float – Nicolaia Rips

You probably all know about my obsession with The Chelsea Hotel, but for those who don’t: The Chelsea is a hotel in New York where people like Patti Smith, Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen all once lived. It’s haunted my academic life and was the topic of my dissertation, so I’ve indulged in almost every bit of Chelsea literature I can. 

I was gifted this for Christmas and I was excited as I hadn’t heard about it, being a memoir of a child that grew up in the hotel. I assumed it must have been written by an older woman, but about half way in I realised that Nicolaia is my age, maybe even younger and her experience of the Chelsea was way later than the era I’d studied. The essays in this book cover all corners of coming-of-age, colouring the classic dilemmas in the quirky tone of the hotel and its cast of odd inhabitants. I didn’t learn much more about the hotel other than the spirit of community continued into its later years, but this was a lovely read.

Lovely is definitely the right word as it’s easy and sweet, gets a couple of chuckles and feels like a friend telling you a story. 

#3 Chameleon In A Candy Store - Anonymous

If you read my last reading list post, you’ll know how much Anon hooked me in with Diary Of An Oxygen Thief. A modern sympathy for the devil narrative, the sleazy, awful narrator has such a unique voice that I finished the first book in a number of days. 

The second book ended up being the same. A slow start as it took me a little while to figure out where in the story you were and how much time had passed since the original book. But when this book gets going, I think I actually enjoyed it more than the original. It engages further with Anonymous’ awful personal relationships, and finishes up with such a cruel but kind of hilarious twist that made me even more desperate to try and figure out who the author is.

So much of this second book really dive into the meta element of it, referring a lot to the actual writing of the book and even pointing you towards Anonymous’ website and introducing his marketing technique which is possibly what led it to being such a cult read. It manages to be both smart and stupid at the same time which is exactly what you need sometimes.

#4 Eunuchs and Nymphomaniacs – Anonymous

Before I even finished the 2nd book, I pre-emptively ordered the 3rd so I could wrap up the trilogy. I dove straight in as soon as I finished the previous one, but something about it didn’t stick. Maybe it was my lockdown brain setting in as I seemed to lose the ability to focus on anything, or maybe it was that this 3rd book is quite different. The narrator is more pathetic than cruel here, balancing his usual behaviours with a heavy dose of heart-ache. In this book he’s more irritating and stroppy, still making his way through the women of New York while moping about his ex. 

The cast of characters in this one is quite hard to keep up with as so many women walk in and out of the story, but it still has the same hilarious moments that will make you guiltily laugh out loud as you fall into his gross mind. 

Not as good as the others, I really enjoyed getting stuck into a series which I haven’t done in years. This 3rd book closes up with a circle back to the beginning, tying up loose ends from the original novel, so it’s 100% worth persevering through all 3 to get a full view of Anonymous’ world.

#5 Orlando – Virginia Woolf

And here’s when it gets hard.

I read Mrs Dalloway in Uni and I remember struggling. I remember loving the themes and the idea behind the novel, but the task of getting through it was a slog with Woolf’s signature embellished narrative style of long sentences being hard to follow. But she feels like an author I should love. I love her letters and her shorter works, so I wanted to try again with Orlando, a novel that is so beloved by so many people in my life.

I sat down hopeful. My copy was small with only a 100 or so pages, but I was immediately put off by the tiny font that made following it even harder. I noticed the lack of chapters, only huge sections which always puts me off. But I was determined, I settled down on a Saturday morning with a coffee and a croissant planning to fly through it, but gave in after 6 pages and my head ached.

The follow day I tried again, sinking into the bath with wine and a hair mask that demanded time, but I soon found myself swapping my book for my phone. 15 pages in, it wasn’t going to happen as the protagonist had managed to do nothing but walk into a house in all that time. I didn’t read for nearly two weeks, partly out of a lack of motivation and partly actively avoiding the book. So I decided to give in.

I hate giving up on a book. I’m the same with films too, forcing myself to sit there and watch even if I’m bored. The act of putting a book back on my shelf unfinished makes me feel so guilty, especially when it’s a classic that I feel like I should have read. But when concentration is hard to come by anyway nowadays, I’m trying to not let myself slip back into that English degree mind-set of half reading a book out of duty. I don’t owe anyone anything, no one is demanding an essay on Orlando from me, I won’t fail if I don’t finish it, so why sap the passion from myself.

So I put the book down, I might return to it but probably not as I’m returning to the safe ground of modern classics and 60s America that I love.

Next Up...

✿Currently reading – Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion

✿Lady Sing The Blues by Billie Holliday

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