Grey days & cosy moods
It’s November. The weather slips between crisp blues and woolly greys, and my predictable heart begins to crave every soup ever simmered.
& my body craves thick, knitted jumpers and fluffy socks, and my brain whispers tempting, taunting things. Things like, “what responsibilities? Your only responsibility is to keep warm, stay tucked up, and read something.”
So that’s what I’ve been doing - reading something. Lots of somethings, actually: I checked in on my Kindle app earlier today and it transpires I have read at least a book a day, every day, for the past sixteen days.
If you’d met me as a child, you wouldn’t have batted an eye at this news. I have always been a near-perfect, dictionary definition of “bookish”.
As soon as I learned to read, I loved it. It was a chance to escape into some kind of magical world (not always explicitly ‘“magical”, I’m talking “the magic of words”, here), to meet exciting heroes and sparkling heroines, friendly dragons and haunted mansions, and - oh, I read a lot of these over the years - orphans and associated other waifs living in Victorian poverty before a chance to make a new life in America comes along.
As a child I read widely, not necessarily through choice but mainly because my dad found it pretty difficult to keep up with my reading habits. He went to a local car boot sale nearly every Sunday and returned with armfuls of whatever he could find between 20p and 50p. This meant I had a lot of choice in my reading materials - it also meant I probably read a lot of stuff I shouldn’t have, at the age I read it.
By the way, this wasn’t all my dad’s fault. Sure, he brought me a huge Oscar Wilde compendium, which was inappropriate in that it was above my reading age when I was eight, BUT in terms of content, Victorian-era writers are kind of perfect because of all their moralising. I just spent a lot of time carrying both The Picture of Dorian Grey and a dictionary with me.
The real culprit in terms of giving me inappropriate reading material for my age was my dad’s mother, my Grandma Hilda.
Grandma Hilda was weird about books - I once asked if I could borrow a giant book she had about the Mitford sisters and she refused because I “wouldn’t appreciate it” because I wasn’t alive during the war. On the other hand, when I was eleven she handed me a slim paperback that I have since learned is a cult classic in some horror circles, but that I would argue no eleven year old should have to suffer through. That book was called Let’s Go Play at the Adams’. Before you click on that link, a content warning: this is explicitly a book at the kidnap, rape and general physical/psychological torture of a young woman. So. Apparently that’s what my grandmother considered more appropriate than a book about Nancy Mitford.
Also my mum let me read Clan of the Cave Bear when I was twelve, only slightly concerned that it’s, and I quote, “racy”. She wasn’t wrong; personally I preferred Valley of the Horses though, but I thought that series fell off a bit after The Mammoth Hunters.
My point is, I was a reader to the point that reading made up a large part of my personality. I was one of those kids that lived for the school Book Fair, and to this day my favourite gift to receive is a plastic card with the word “Waterstones” splashed across the front.
But, there’s been a change in my reading habits as I’ve grown older, which is perfectly encapsulated by the sixteen plus books I’ve read in the past two and a bit weeks.
As a kid, I’d read whatever was put in front of me, but as an adult… my gosh, I go through phases. If I find something I like, I want to immediately read something else exactly like it, but, y’know, not actually exactly like it. Just, enough like it to give me the same feeling when I read the initial thing I liked.
This November, it’s been romance novels - probably because I’ve just finished a Romance Writing course - but more specifically, the majority of the books I’ve read have been the Brides of Karadok and Vawdrey Brothers books by Alice Coldbreath. I’m feeling mediaeval, apparently, and I’m sure it’s not just because the single glazing in my attic flat has me feeling like a damsel in a high, stone-built tower.
I’ve got a real urge to play some Sims Medieval as well, and maybe even a little bit of Castle Flipper. Either that or wait with bated breath for Alice to write a couple more books…