Category: Contemplation

Contemplation, On Reading

Reading: Immersion into other worlds

I’ve been doing a lot of writing lately and, as always, I find that after a long, intense spell of being immersed in writing fiction I need a complete break.

This break tends to be baking (yum! everyone benefits!), gardening (nice looking sunflowers growing happily!) and, after a few days of being brought from mind to body, reading.

Photograph of five books: Trading Time by Owen Martin, Let me tell you what I mean by Joan Didion, The Unlimited Dream Company JG Ballard, The End Of The World is a Cul De Sac by Louise Kennedy, Yours ‘Til Hell Freezes: Kevin Barry by Síofra O’Donovan.

I’m enjoying the other world immersion and the mix of genres I’ve selected. I am enjoying, to quote Roland Barthes

the change in the level of perception…both reading and writing are redefined together.

I am also looking forward to my next few Writers Chat interviews which are based on reading some of the books in the photograph above.

Whatever you are reading – be it book, newspaper, online, hardcopy, paperback, on screen – after immersing yourself in another world, relish the change in your perception of your world.

Contemplation, Writers Read, Writing Life

Reading & Staying Put

Image of candle burning and eight books.

  • Magda Szabó The Door
  • Grace Wilentz The Limit of Light
  • Raymond Carter Cathedral
  • Margaret Atwood On Writers and Writing
  • Eva Baltasar Permafrost
  • Deborah Levy The Man Who Saw Everything
  • Edith Eger The Gift
  • the Paris Review Winter 2020 235

And this is my current reading pile, some of which I am reading for the second or third time, others which I have yet to start, and one which I am in gloriously lost inside. By tomorrow this stack of books will have changed again, grown, shrunk, and have been re-considered. Such is the reading life. So deeply connected to that of the writing life.

Wishing all readers, lurkers, viewers, writers and observers safe and happy reading, listening, writing…and being.