My year of writing has been accompanied by a year of reading. I have always been an avid reader. As a school student, I was able to walk to and from the train station each day without looking up from the page. I could read in the car, even on winding roads, and on boats, when it was choppy. Nothing hindered my reading.
Until I met Stu. For some reason, perhaps the whirlwind romance sweeping me off my feet, I stopped reading. Then, in 2022, I decided to get back to it and set myself a soft goal of 15 books for the year. I just made it, but I remembered how much I love reading.
When I made the decision to spend a year writing, I read some craft books. The first one was Stephen King’s On Writing. This is such a great book. It really changed my thinking about many things. Most significantly, reading. He proposes that if you want to be a writer, the two most important things you can do are write and read.
From that a-ha moment of epiphany, reading no longer feels like an indulgence. Now, it feels like a necessity. I regularly schedule guilt-free time in my day to read. I read fiction and non-fiction, classics and contemporary. Almost any genre, and many translated titles, too. I also listen to Audible while I’m driving.
In 2023, I set the goal of reading 40 books, thinking that was ambitious. I read 52. I read lots of female memoir and biography, given this was the type of book I would be writing. I read Joan Didion, Elizabeth Gilbert, Heather Rose, Maggie Smith, Annie Ernaux, Jayne Tuttle, and Helen Macdonald. Every one of these writers challenged me and made me think. These women pushed me out of my comfort zone and into new territory.
This is what I love about reading. Books are a doorway into another place and offer a different perspective. Reading helps you to find deeper meaning in things in your own life. It gives endless opportunity to empathise, to understand, and to experience emotions from the safety of your chair. Reading is exploring, adventuring, and time travelling. Every book changes the reader in some way. I savour this small change as I finish the last page of everything I read.
My year of reading was a happy accident, attached to my year of writing, and it has undoubtedly supported me to grow. Therefore, I am now planning to continue writing. My writing year is morphing into my writing life. My year of reading has reminded me of who I am. I’m an avid reader and a bookworm. So my reading year will become my return to reading life. Now I just need to reignite Stu’s passion.
Kylie Eklund-Denman 