I sit in front of my empty bookshelf, contemplating how I accumulated all these books and why I decided to take them all the bookshelf and sort them out – and by sort out, I mean look at them, flick through the pages and put them back in a slightly different, and (hopefully) less messy order.

Simple (or so I hoped) tasks like this always get me thinking about my love of books. The ways the words flow across the page effortlessly, the feeling of the pages, rough yet comforting, the smell I am so familiar with. I always think books have a very distinctive smell, they become sources of evocative emotions... they take me back in time to being a little girl with this childlike hope of the promise of a new journey into an unknown world, a defining feeling in my childhood. I remember the excitement of going to my grandparents to find my grandpa had bought a new book for us to read together and, after a morning of excitement of playing (whatever game I was obsessed with at the time), we would sit together and read a page of the book each which gave me the pleasures of hearing the words as well as knowing how they feel to say. Reading has always been a form of escapism for me, but as a child, I couldn’t help but get lost in the words of The “Magic Faraway Tree” by Enid Blyton or Daisy Meadows’ “Rainbow Magic” books.

As I matured, so did my reading taste, and so I became fatigued with this monontous childlike unrealism the fantasy genre held. I still adored the fantastical setting of Blyton’s novels, but I desired something realistic yet still just as enchanting. Elements I could relate to became something I looked for: Cathy Cassidy’s Chocolate Box book series became a favourite. It was the childhood equivalent to the guilty pleasure romance novels that I read now (that I maybe started reading far too young) - it really fueled my love of romance and realism within novels. I enjoyed reading books that were far more advanced that I should have read,  and I began to discover a love of reading in order to learn, so books like the “Short History Of England” by Simon Jenkins nourished my fascination for history. I also found that I was reading books like “The Girl on the Train” by Paula Hawkins or "Bridget Jones' Diary" by Helen Fielding whilst my peers were reading Harry Potter books and the Dork Diaries series. Of course, I still loved books aimed at children and pre-teens but It was really when I began to read more mature language that I appreciated the true meanings of the words as opposed to how they resonated to me - in hindsight, I do wonder how I ever thought I related to Bridget Jones at the age of 10!

In Secondary School, we began reading Shakespeare, like “Macbeth”, “Romeo and Juliet” and “Coriolanus” (which is a personal favourite) and Charles Dickens’ "A Christmas Carol" - Although I did take an instant disliking to it, It could have either made me fall in love with classic literature or never wanted to pick up another book again - and one of my favourite plays by J.B. Priestley “An Inspector Calls” , Priestly and Shakespeare allowed me to develop my love for gritty realism within the literary world but also the Theatre (another passion of mine) where the words on the page would transform into a visual spectacle, much like what was happening in my mind when I was reading them. I am grateful for the ability to read such interesting novels and plays, however it was a time where I could have either embraced the love of exploring new ideas but I often found school very restrictive. I had so many ideas that I wanted to develop but we had to analyse them the way exam boards wanted us to, which meant looking at them with tunnel vision. I found that I didn’t feel challenged enough and that I wanted to delve deeper into the realms of new worlds I had yet to experience. Many people in my classes developed a hatred for the books we were studying and is still a topic of contempt to this day, however I knew there was so much more to literature than dead white men (as my Year 12 English teacher called them!). My A levels weren’t much better, we were still very restricted as to what we could talk about but our minds were expanded by writers like Virginia Woolf and Mary Shelley, learning about true feminist texts and talking about topics that I couldn’t have even dreamed of talking about and I fell back in love with reading again. Our class was filled with people that shared the same passion for books and it fuelled me to think bigger and develop a more speculative approach to the books that were meant for just writing exam responses to. It caused me to want to read more classic literature and I was exploring different genres, my personal favourite at the time being The Gothic including Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber collection and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein - a book I re-read and I found an intense fascination with. My love for Shakespeare and Priestley had not disappeared, but my approach to them had completely transformed as my ideas had developed.

I started my university journey under the impression that I would read all these classic books that I secretly loved (despite assumptions that I only read "trashy" books), from the Bronte sisters to Milton (which I love and will still refer to at every opportunity I can get) but it has been very different. I have pushed the boundaries in terms of my reading and exploring new ideas. I recently read "The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo" by Taylor Jenkins Reid, a historical fiction that explores gender and sexuality in a way that I had never considered. Its not a book that I would have read before, the romance novels I had read had been entirely heterosexual and left no room for tragedy but allowing myself to read something slightly different allowed me to push my ideas further. Beginning to read a wider array of sub-genres allowed me to become more thoughtful with contemporary ideas within my academic writing. Reading journals and academic texts had become something that I enjoy doing in my free time, finding that reading about other experiences and new theories on how to approach texts became a fascination. I loved broadening my mindset in order to develop how I view the world and what I read and write academically.

Thinking in a newfound academic sense, led me to question how my writing would transpire when including these academic conjectures. I had always loved creative writing but never taken up the opportunity myself and naturally gravitated towards more academic ways of writing due to my education.

Looking back to my pile of books sprawled out in front of me, I pick up the most meaningful book I own, Ace of Aces by E.C.R Baker, a book by my great-grandfather and although its complexity has meant I have never truly understood it, I appreciate the sentimental value of it and am inspired by the power of writing that he evokes. This sense of sentimentalism gave me the motivation to get into writing myself. The accompaniment of academic exploration with using the inspiration from books that I have read helped me to craft very personal and definitive stories with an implicit display of my experience with reading: flicking between different genres, merging them and letting the words flow from my mind onto the page.

What will come from this, I don’t know but the appreciation for the craft feels enough for me right now.