This is a conversation space for paid subscribers and founder members - kind of like a group chat or what I’m told even the young folk are no longer calling a live hangout. I’ll post questions and any bits of news that come my way and I think might interest you or be useful and you can jump into the discussions anytime.

Hope to see you there!

Lucy xx

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Hello and welcome to a bit of a relaunch now that I have got some semblance of a grip on this here Substack thing. I’m so glad I started The Bookwormery. I’ve met such lovely people here, and I look forward all week to sharing my biblio-thoughts and my latest book discoveries with you.

Which means, however, that it is taking up more and more of my time and I’m having more and more ideas of what I want to do here, which will take up more time still. And that means that I’m about to do The Thing and set up paid subscriptions. There will still be occasional free posts but paying subscribers will get at least four newsletters a month, we’ll start the chat ball rolling too and do Q&As about different topics, plus of course you’ll get access to the archive. And if you become a founder member, you can choose whether you would like a book bundle (a mixture of new and pre-loved-but-that-I-can-just-about-bear-to-part-with) on top of that or to have a Zoom call with me. The latter doesn’t have to be entirely about books. Short of financial, medical or sexual advice, there’s nothing we can’t discuss. If you’re peri/menopausal too, we can just sit and cry together or smash things. I am a broad church.

What Money Means

I’m hoping that going paid will allow me to spend more time here, and allow me to delve deeper into other book-related matters. I’d like to talk more about writing as well as reading, and indeed about creativity generally, perhaps tied to what I’m learning in real time as I try to write my first ‘proper’ novel.

In fairness, I must warn you that I can also feel myself moving into my gardening era (but is not gardening an expression of creativity too?!) so there could be plant talk incoming. God, maybe I’ll even start a real wormery! I am FASCINATED by compost…But I digress. I blame the aforementioned peri/menopause, about which there may also be future talk. I cannot contain this amount of rage forever. It’s not safe.

So! Please consider becoming a paid subscriber if you can. But whether free or paid, do keep liking, sharing, commenting as much as you can so we can reach the rest of the quiet army of bookworms out there and let them know that there is the world’s quietest mess hall here where they can come and relax in peace. And always, please, let me know what else you want to see, so I can shape this place accordingly.

And now – if I have done things correctly, and I think we all know there is no guarantee of that whatsoever – comes the inaugural paywall, and beyond it my thoughts on the boxes bookworms and the bookish are put into, my attempts to build a library of alternative delights for my friend’s new baby (and leave it to the devoted parents and grandparents to furnish the Hungry Caterpillars, Wild Things, and Each Peach, Pear and Plum), and of course my own week’s consumption. I really hope to see you on the other side but wherever you are, as ever – happy reading!

Love,

Lucy xx

PS My latest book, Bookish: Love Letter to Reading is 99p on Kindle all May

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Anyway. Act II is now behaving itself and all I have to do now is write it up. That sounds like a bitter-laughter line and it is, but not entirely. Because it’s the plotting that kills me. The working out of when things should happen and, oh God, the working out of why. I now have three pages of yellow A4 covered with black writing, green annotations and then red footnotes to the annotations that are more precious to me than life itself. It might not look like much reward for a week’s industry but it is drawn from innumerable pages of handwritten notes, 34,000 words of nearly indecipherable typing from my Notes app1 and a handful of uncatalogued WhatsApp messages to my husband and I couldn’t be happier.

(Actually I could. Please see my other ongoing project below - the Great Annual Sock Reunification 2026, with accompanying feline assistance. No, of course I don’t mean to live like this. I just do.)

The writing, comparatively speaking, is a doddle. A pleasure. Or at least, something I know much better how to do. I know what’s in my wheelhouse (jokes, set pieces) and what is not (emotions, interiority - journalism is not good training for this). I know what I’m likely to get stuck on (metaphors, mostly) and the parts I can expect to go relatively smoothly (see jokes and set pieces above). All of which means that I feel in control and can pace myself properly - if I know a hard bit for me is coming up, I will do it in the morning before I am buffeted and knackered by the day’s vicissitudes and other work can take the afternoon non-premium slot, and vice versa if there’s an easy narrative stretch coming up. Plotting is like running myself repeatedly into a brick wall hoping that it will crack before I do. Writing is not. Thank the Pope, as my grandma used to say.

But! On the downside - must there always be a downside? Yes, my friends, yes there must. My grandma was quite clear on this too - I have not been able to read. I have only been able to watch Melissa McCarthy films and reruns of Superstore2. This happened the last time I had a good week with The Book so I feel able to label this tentatively as a legitimate phenomenon. Journalistic practice holds that there has to be three of something before it’s a trend but given how long the gap was between the first two good weeks with The Book, I don’t have time for that. And anyway, I can feel the truth of it and that counts for something here.

I can feel the same, or very similar, or very much overlapping part of my brain at work during either activity, you see, and I can only presume this is because reading and writing are both creative activities, drawing from the same tank - the latter at a higher rate than the former, perhaps, but both depleting it.

At the same time, I was longing to read. I needed to read. But my brain was clearly trying to protect its deeply limited imaginative resources. It took me a long time to work out the solution to this conundrum - you are probably there already - but then it took me many years of having one and a half cups of coffee in the morning (one not enough, two just too much) and throwing the rest away before I realised that the answer lay in using a slightly bigger mug, so that’s how that happens.

The solution, of course, was to dose myself with non-fiction. Duh. Even more radical than that, it was to dip into non-fiction. And then out again! And then maybe back into the same one later, but more often than not, a different one. And then start working my way round in a sort of unofficial, very unstrict rota system. Thus I have made inroads into Roland Ennos’s The Wood Age and Merlin Sheldrake’s Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change our Minds and Shape Our Lives3 (both of them fascinating and soothing at the same time), The Green Ages: Medieval Innovations in Sustainability by Annette Kehnel, Islands of Abandonment: Life in the Post-Human Landscape by Cal Flyn (both of these slightly counting as research, which also helped calm me down), Simon Barnes’ The History of the World in 100 Plants (because who could NOT read a book called The History of the World in 100 Plants? Also, the second chapter was on wheat, so that counted as research too), and Going Infinite: the Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon, Michael Lewis’s take on Sam Bankman-Fried. Though I may have to put the last one away for a bit because my appetite for hearing about the inner workings of a tech billionaire’s life/mind/company is inversely proportional to the probably moral duty to face it. I will return when I have got Act II written and am therefore feeling invincible.

Buy books I HAVE written here

A Date for My Diary, Certainly, and Maybe Yours

Alice Jolly and I are at the Swindon Literary Festival on May 9 (tickets here) talking about Bookish, The Matchbox Girl, the power of books generally and children’s books especially so do come!

There is also Winnie-the-Pooh’s centenary this year, marked by a a special edition of the honeyed works, events in Ashdown Forest and doubtless merch aplenty. I am going to celebrate by reading the books for the first time. I didn’t have them as a child (I don’t know why. Maybe my book supplier - Dad - didn’t like them or have them on his radar, or maybe he worried that if Eeyore and I met we would disappear into a depressive sunset together) and I somehow haven’t managed to catch up since. So, come the summer and a shady tree, we shall meet at last.

Happy reading, everyone

Lucy x

And a second apology - I am also a week off sending the Bookish copies from the giveaway. I’m so sorry. I will be back on top of things as soon as possible.

And now, to other business!

Affairs of the Heart

Over the fortnight, as if to make up for the roiling stupidity of life going on elsewhere, I fell in love. It’s wonderful when it happens, isn’t it? A rare and precious delight. My new beloved is Laura Wood. She specialises in romance novels, which are still a new area for me and my only worry is that now that I have found her I will stop playing the field and exploring other excitements. But I have learned from my sex life, and will not make the same mistakes again.

But Laura! Oh, Laura! I have torn through Under Your Spell, Let’s Make a Scene and A Single Thread of Moonlight in the last few days and been both transported and comforted by them all (and am looking forward to devouring A Snowfall of Silver and A Sky Painted Gold at the weekend) but it is the Aviary trilogy that truly has my heart. The Agency for Scandal, A Game of Scandal and A Season for Scandal are set at the tail end of the Victorian era and centre round a secret detective agency – said Aviary - run by women, led by the redoubtable Mrs Finch, for women. It protects those whom the law overlooks and delivers, should it prove meet and right to do so, a deeper, more…bespoke justice wherever possible. Each book centres round a new recruit to the Aviary. In the first, there is impoverished aristocrat Izzy, left to provide somehow for her family in the wake of her fiscally irresponsible father’s death. The middle volume deals with mathematical genius Felicity who is denied by social convention the life of the mind she craves in and the final (so far?) story is about the ebullient florist and gardener Marigold who escapes the clutches of a fiancée who seeks to make her smaller and less colourful in every way, but who is left with the problem of providing for her family without a husband’s income too.

Deeply satisfying adventures ensue, infused with humour (real humour – organic jokes, character-led gags, you know? Real stuff) and romance. Each of our heroines meets her perfect man during their employment with the agency, and the real joy and genius of the books is that each is perfect for her and her alone. Wood doesn’t deal in ciphers, she deals in soulmates and it is balm to one’s own soul to read and root for them.

Technically the Agency books are upper-age-limit YA, but they are good for what ails ye at any age. And if – ahem – you are old enough to dream of being the all-seeing, all-powerful, patriarchy-suborning Mrs Finch rather than a starry-eyed new recruit full of vim, vigour and optimism, let me tell you you can do that too.

And if, like me, you are constitutionally incapable of not recoiling when you see, hear, read or otherwise contemplate the word “romance” please join me in overcome this (natural, instinctive) mistrust/disgust. Modern romance is not the sappy, pukesome thing of long ago – if indeed it ever was (the older I get, the more I see that misogyny, both external and internal, has led to most things being labelled wrongly). As I say, I am only at the beginning of my exploratory operations but I haven’t hit a dud offering yet. Jenny Colgan, Harriet Evans, Stephanie Butland, Sarra Manning and Beth O'Leary are all good, safe places to start if you are daunted, suspicious, easily nauseated or any combination of the above. Enjoy! You will, you know.

That’s what I love most of all about books, I think. Their patience. Their willingness to wait. They don’t change their contents, they don’t compromise for you – they say “We’re here, if and when you’re ever ready.” You can take them down off the shelf every now and again and see if you speak to each other yet – and if not? No harm, no foul. You both just go about your day. In an increasingly shouty, insanely reactive, judgmental world I find this a greater and greater solace.

My books are available here

Thing Two! I Am Now a Conspiracy Theorist

Last week – or rather, last post, sorry again – I ranted about the announcement by Amazon that support for the older models of Kindle, be they ever so physically fit for purpose, would be withdrawn on May 20, thus rendering about 2m of them more or less useless. The next day, my Kindle stopped working. My entire 3,000-strong library vanished. The content came back with a hard reset but has not functioned properly since. Coincidence? I think not. Jeff’s coming for me. I shall barricade myself in my bookroom, of course.

The Week in Books

Well, it was Laura mostly, wunnit? But I did also read the new Karin Slaughter in proof. The Secrets We Hide is out on June 18 and oh my God, this woman never misses. Truly a god amongst crime writers.

In lieu of other things I’ve read, here are books which I haven’t ready but are out soon and that I am looking forward to, in the hope that they might pique your interest too:

A Creative Compass: Finding Your Way to a Creative Life by Emma Gannon – because I want one of those

The Black Death: A Global History by Thomas Asbridge – because I loves me some plague

Anxietyland by Gemma Correll – because I’ve got to give it to several hundred people

You’ll Be Sorry by Lisa Gardner – because she’s another crime writing god. But - *drops voice to a whisper* - she sometimes misses.

Time Travel for Beginners by Jaclyn Moriarty – because time travel! Via a special agency! Maybe I only read about agencies now?

The New Dark Ages: The End of Reading and the Dawn of a Post-Literate Society by James Marriott - because, duh

And last but by no means least - the new Laura Wood of course! Kiss Me Like You Mean It is out on August 13. See you in the queue.

And Finally – hero of the week and possibly all other weeks

This guy - Gary Hollis

Why? Because he was arrested for re-entering a Barnes and Noble bookstore in Oregon after it had closed to finish a book he’d been reading there. The shop had closed as he reached a plot point that was “completely untenable to sit with overnight.” We raise a glass, and possibly funds for a statue in the fullness of time.

Happy reading, wherever you do it, everyone

Lucy x

Not exactly the same as someone coming to take all your knickers (not least because I would in many de-elasticised cases be profoundly grateful if someone would take them off my hands and lay them decently to rest at last, whereas if someone tried to winnow my book collection – well, that would be an ill-advised move). And partly because Amazon is not attacking the books as their carrier, but I couldn’t find an analogy about setting fire to shelves without having to explain that it was a conflagration that wouldn’t immediately consume the books and it all got a bit complicated…

Let me start again, and knickerless, as it were. And have a picture of a Reeve’s pheasant my husband met in Norfolk, in the meantime. (I am at my mother’s so there are NO BOOKS) and many thanks to Alex Rafinski, who identified it for us.

Amazon has announced that on May 20 it is going to stop supporting any Kindles released (I nearly said ‘born’ then) during or before 2012, which is about two million of them currently in use (including, I think, mine but I haven’t checked yet because that’s hardly the point.) Owners – though that now hardly seems the mot juste - will continue to be able to read e-books they’ve already downloaded and to access their accounts and Kindle Libraries via the mobile and desktop app, but they can all say sayonara to buying or borrowing any new content.

Now, as someone who is not even entirely clear on why electricity does not leak out of sockets and who thought the much-mocked American politician who described the internet as “a series of tubes” sounded like a tech god, I do not pretend to understand the ins and outs of all the stuff I have read about the necessity or otherwise of Kindle updates, whether the amount of support provided over the last 14 years or more compares favourably with that offered by other corporations and conglomerates. I know this and only this: we were right. All of us here, my fellow bookworms, we were all right. The book is a perfect piece of technology. The codex, that little stack of paper bound at one edge and printed with any one of an almost infinite array of letter combinations, beats code. We always suspected it. Now we have proof.

More proof, I should say. Or proof of how much deeper the rot goes that we realised. Even the least tech-savvy of us have been aware since at least 2009 that everything we have on Kindle is only on licence. That was the year Amazon pulled copyright-infringing copies of 1984 – I know, the irony makes this story so delicious it’s got to be fattening – that it had accidentally included instore from the devices of people who ‘owned’ them (and refunded them), without warning, explanation or permission.

But I must say it had never occurred to me until now that Jeff could also effectively pull the physical device too. But of course he can! And of course he will! And of course he has! The enshittening of life is real and it continues apace, usually at the behest of a billionaire.

My book collection* is beginning to look like the best investment I ever made, and not just because as a freelance writer for the last 20 years I have made no others. It – obviously – provides a range of delights and entertainment and reference material. Nothing in there has been created by AI. I own it all outright – including the shelves. No one can take it away from me. Even bailiffs, should my lack of traditional investment come back to bite me in the arse after retirement – there’s no resale value to what a man who once came to interview me for a magazine once described as “a jumble sale hoisted on the walls.”

Were it not for the fact that it stands not only in mute testimony to guaranteed reading pleasure e’en unto death but also to the aforementioned enshittening of life in every other way, I would be feeling pretty good right now.

Let’s have a picture of a Norfolk camellia now to cheer ourselves up.

The Footnote

*I would usually call this ‘my library’ rather than ‘my book collection’ but I was recently accused in a (different) magazine column of “left wing boasting” by doing so. Like most people, I don’t want to be seen as boasting, especially when I’m not (actually, is that true? Would it not be worse to be seen as boasting when we ARE? Answers on a postcard – no, in the comments! – please).

Either way, if I’ve ever come across as a boasty-boaster (to borrow Marian Keyes’ excellent phrase), left wing or otherwise (if it helps, I’m possibly more of a centrist these days, but honestly things change so fast I can’t be sure) – I apologise. When I mention my library meant to be a sharing of the delight I take in having realised this lifetime ambition, and at worst – I think – a bit of a celebration. If I’ve misjudged my tone rather than my audience – who at least at book events ask after it and seem to like to hear about it like people like to hear about how a baby or a new pet is getting on – then I can only apologise. But I reckon I’ll proceed on the assumption, especially here on Substack, talking to people who have willingly subscribed, that most people take it the right way and I can count myself amongst friends.

A giveaway!

If this is not more boasting – I have just been sent my author copies of Bookish: A Love Letter to Reading from Pegasus Books, my US publisher. There are ten (hardbacks - same cover as in the link but the book is maybe a little bit bigger?) and I have no friends left who have not already had forced upon them either the UK hardback or paperback author copies, so – would you like one of these? They’re very nice. If so, send me a direct message and I shall send them out on a first-come-first-served basis, and hope very much that you like them.

The Week in Books

I’m afraid I don’t have time to do links this week – Mum is ill, deadlines are pressing and assorted other shit is hitting the fan – but do head to uk.bookshop.org or Waterstones if anything takes your fancy, won’t you?

Meet the Newmans by Jennifer Niven – very much in the Lessons in Chemistry vein (50s/60s housewife finds herself) but I enjoyed it a lot more

The Bestseller by Jenny Kingsby, out in June – twisting, clever, compulsive thriller about a therapist, a patient, a best friend, men and coercive control

The Sequel by Jean Hanff Korelitz – the sequel (you see what she did there?!) to her brilliant bestseller The Plot. Almost as good. Not quite.

Go Gentle by Maria Semple, out tomorrow – feminist romance-art-heist-caper with a primer on Stoicism thrown in. No, really. I wish it had cohered a little more, and I will definitely take a full-length novel about the ‘coven’ (of the entirely non-supernatural kind) living in an Upper West Side apartment block that it looked like it was going to be about, but I enjoyed myself hugely nevertheless.

Happy reading!

Love,

Lucy

Second of all, a follow-up to last week’s post. I mentioned that I’d bought the world’s greatest pen and a lot of you have asked for further details. It is The Wren pen from Tom's Studio and I love it. It was not cheap (£35) but I had been looking for a refillable, non-disposable but non-fountain-pen-pen for AGES and I’m calling it an early birthday present to myself. I got it in Ivy and it looks like this:

And we will talk about the very important matter of stationery properly soon.

Meanwhile, to this week’s thoughts.

So - I handed in 20,500 words of the first draft of my new book (20,559 actually – but who’s counting?) to my agents just before the Easter weekend and, as I am now experienced enough to expect and anticipate with joy, my reading mojo came back with a vengeance.

By reading mojo, I mean the full measure of love I have for and joy I take in reading. I (almost) always have some – even in the depths of despair or grief, because reading is a solace – but it took me a long time to realise that it becomes eroded while I am writing a book.

(Maybe it also does while I am writing columns or book reviews but because I have done that daily for so long I no longer notice, and it should now just be counted as my baseline mojo? If I ever take two weeks off and can determine anything through the panicked haze brought about by not working – will everyone sack me while I’m gone? Will I ever work again? Will I have lost the ability to write at all? – then I will be interested to find out.)

Some of the reasons for this erosion are relatively obvious. You need to get away from the printed word for a bit, just as you need to get away from your desk or, if you are a teacher, children, an accountant Excel spreadsheets, or an Evri customer complaints handler the whole world.

Then of course there is the problem of the unstoppable running comparison and commentary your stupid, treacherous, self-sabotaging brain makes between any book you settle down with in the evening and the abysmal words THE DRIVELLINGS OF AN IDIOT you have just put down on paper LIKE THE ARROGANT MISGUIDED FOOL YOU ARE or typed onto a screen AS IF YOU’RE SOMETHING SPECIAL during the day THE WASTED WASTED DAY WHEN YOU SHOULD HAVE BEEN DOING A PROPER JOB INSTEAD OF DRIVELLING.

I mean, that’s a given.

But generally, after a bit, you can switch that inner voice off. You can tell it that you are not comparing like with like – a published book has generally moved miles from its first draft form NOT ALWAYS SOME PEOPLE MANAGE TO GET IT RIGHT FIRST TIME WE CALL THEM PROPER WRITERS? and been shaped by many helping hands along the way, from beta readers to agents to editors NOT THAT THEY’LL BE ABLE TO DO ANYTHING WITH THE PAGES YOU HAVE WHICH YOU MIGHT AS WELL HAVE WIPED YOUR BUM ON and what you hold in your hands is the product of much more time and work than you have yet spent on your creation OH CREATION IS IT? GET YOU. UP YOUR FUNDAMENT MUCH, ARE YOU?

Or you can drink wine and pop a pregabalin filched from your late father’s collection after he died and quiet things down that way. I imagine.

Slightly less obvious but more interesting – and a little less soul-destroying – I think is the connection it suggests between reading and writing as both creative acts.

(OH CREATION AGAIN IS IT – Shh. Shush now)

Because as some clever and succinct internet person once put it – reading is staring at slices of marked tree and hallucinating vividly for hours. But those hallucinations are not effortless. We induce them. We read, interpret, understand and then – imagine. And all differently. Elizabeth Bennet and Mr Darcy (at least until the 1995 adaptation of P&P arrived), Heathcliff (at least until you see Laurence Olivier in William Wyler’s 1939 Wuthering Heights, because lemme tell you – Jacob Elordi could never) and any other character, or place, or landscape or bed or chair or cat or dog we ever meet in our minds courtesy of another person’s evocation will never be the same as your neighbour’s interpretation. Unless he or she has also seen the right P&P and WH on screen, but this is a needless complication and we shall move swiftly on.)

The point is, you use a lot of your brain to read. I think we sometimes forget that when we feel bad about not doing it more, or worry about the status of reading as a pastime in the modern world. Modern life is demanding. Too demanding. I am no fan of modern life, outside its medical benefits and Brooklyn Nine Nine. It does not leave anywhere close to as much space or peace as it did for earlier generations and that we need as human beings simply to preserve all our equilibria, let alone forge ahead with art and culture and making more Brooklyn Nine Nine (even that dropped off in season eight).

And so, of course, It doesn’t mean we can’t or shouldn’t push back against The Way Things Are and reclaim as much of space, peace and other valuable things as we can, but it does mean that doing so takes energy too - we are not pushing at an open door - and that, regrettably, we have to accept some of it as another inescapable new normal. And not feel bad when we can’t manage as much of the hallucinating at tree slices as we’d like or think we should.

This Week’s Books

So, as discussed, I’ve had a great week.

I read – yomped through, really, in as close to single sittings as it is possible to get these days – the following:

The Housewife by Natalie Barelli - so much fun, so well worked out and with a genuinely off-kilter heroine, which is so hard to do. Now keen to read her others and she seems pretty prolific, so colour me happy. Love a new discovery with a back catalogue. Takes me back to that heady day when I discovered that Enid Blyton had written slightly more than than the three Secret Sevens my parents’ friend Bunny had passed along from her grown up sons’ collection.

Everyone is Lying to You by Jo Piazza - trad wife thriller. Terrific. Now eager to read Techbitch

Her Beautiful Life by Brianna Labuskeses - another trad wife thriller, not quite as terrific but I still really enjoyed.

And then polished off:

Holly Seddon's Try Not to BreatheHolly Seddon’s Try Not to Breathe (I’m now halfway through her Don't Close Your Eyes)

I’ve started Lost Lambs by Madeline Cash because everyone’s been telling me to for ages and I now find myself in the right mood (maybe it’s just the Easter connection in the title and I’m about to come a cropper – we’ll see)

And I’ve started No Body No Crime (no comma either, apparently, which is paining me but maybe I will mentally swap it with the extraneous one in Harry Styles’ Kiss All the Time. Disco, Occasionally album and be able to sleep at night once again) by Tess Sharpe and am enjoying that hugely.

As for buying – well, here’s what I have acquired since the start of the Easter holidays, also known as Why I Need to Move to a Bigger House Again.

The Bourne, Sharpe and Blake were from a new discovery - Norfolk’s only mobile bookshop, The Heartbound Van, which is a big van lined with new and secondhand books in Billy bookcases and will be at North Creake Farmers’ Market May 2 and doubtless elsewhere before that, what with being mobile ‘n’ everything. New bookshop, basically - hurrah!

Happy Easter, and happy reading!

Love, Lucy

My new book is available here

(More overflow shelving. And I still haven’t worked out how to do captions)

I’m sorry this edition of The Bookwormery is a bit late – such a dereliction of duty so early in the endeavour and my CHAGRIN is ABUNDANT. My excuse is that I have been out on manoeuvres. I went to Tiverton – exactly here, to be precise – to do the first of a few book events this year for the paperback publication of Bookish.

It was wonderful. Not least because as I arrived, the owner Tara Fraser (on here as @TaraFraser and Instagram as @tarafraserwrites) grabbed me, flung my backpack in the vague direction of the front door and propelled me off into the grounds saying “You have to come! There’s a secret garden!” Which, frankly, is how I wish to be greeted at all new venues from now on.

And do you know what? There was! The ivy has been cleared off some of the (gorgeous, red brick, lightly crumbling) walls now but when they arrived the wooden door to a sort of miniature valley had been firmly hidden therein. You go in and gaze past ancient pear trees and down onto vegetable beds and archways and tumbling and climbing plants of all kinds that I might, later in the year when they will be in bloom be able to recognise but for now can only say were definitely excellent secret gardeny-plants and, Tara swears, do play host to a bright-eyed robin, as decreed.

There was no sign of Dickon, but the sight of a proto-sex god when I was already in such a state of high excitement would have been too much so his absence was probably all to the good. I forgot to ask if there was a hollow tree trunk to roast eggs in too, but I bet there is.

Then came the event and all I can say is thank you so much for coming if you did, and I hope you had as good a time as I did.

Because you never can tell how these things are going to go. It’s the same with any kind of performance, of course (and talking about your book is a small kind of performance – it has to be. You can’t ask people to come and watch you sit unwashed in front of a laptop for four days or cry under a blanket on the sofa, or any of the other things that would be a truer representation of the artistic experience. It would not be fair and by the end of the four days I think you’d also be in breach of some pretty serious health and safety requirements). You can (I do) prepare and put your best foot forward but after that, it’s essentially alchemical. The audience gels with you – and kinda with itself too – to a greater or lesser degree, and generally you can count on a solid hour of fun but sometimes, despite everyone’s best efforts, things fall a bit flat. Or, at the other end of the scale – as at Tiverton, unless I’ve baaaaadly misjudged the situation – it really takes flight and you can be buzzing from it for hours if not days afterwards.

It’s a bit like reading itself, I suppose. If you’ve chosen a book with any kind of intent, you are pretty much guaranteed a good time. But sometimes it is just a good enough time. And sometimes it is the best time you’ve had in months with a story and you go round telling everyone how brilliant it, and reading, and life are and how stars are God’s daisy chain until someone quite rightly tells you to put a sock in it and you recollect yourself.

But! The great thing about having your own weekly newsletter in the modern age of democratised dispersal and hoojikumflip is that you can publish your enthusiasms and recollect yourself only at leisure – so here, without further ado, is my week in books

The Week in Books (told you)

After Tiverton I went to stay with my sister for the weekend. She lives in Dorset and because she loves me very much and because I promised not to come and stay with her for at least another year she took me to Bridport, home of not just a Waterstone’s and an indie absolutely overflowing with choices (The Book Shop Bridport – Independent Book Shop in Bridport) - both of whom let me sign the copies of Bookish that they had in stock, for which, many thanks - but two secondhand ones too. There is Bridport Old Books at 11 South Street, just across the road (I think – it’s a bit of a happy blur to me, to be honest) from The Book Shop and from the other secondhand emporium Wild & Homeless Books – a bespoke vintage retail experience (secondhand bookshop). BOB is a beautiful, spotless, carefully-curated place and W&H is your more traditional dig-in-and-get-your-hands-dirty kind of place. I’m happy with and in either, but because my sister was with me and is liable to start evacuating any premises she deems too chaotic, I largely skimmed the latter. But in BOB I bought a lovely hardback edition of The Gentle Falcon by Hilda Lewis, because even though I’m pretty sure I have a paperback copy somewhere and I really do try and save my money for things that are not simply upgrades, I just fell in love. It’s the story (aimed at children, but in the days when children were cleverer than modern adults or at least knew a shedload more basic history, on which authors were then free to build complex narrative edifices) of Queen Isabella, Richard II’s child bride, told from the perspective of one of her almost equally young ladies in waiting. I’ve only just started it, but I’m loving it.

(Look how beautiful! I had to, no?)

Which of course means, I’m afraid, that although I already have a number of Lewis’s historical novels for adults I cannot possibly contemplate reading them until I have acquired and consumed her other two for children: Harold Was My King (Godwinson) and Here Comes Harry (set in 15^th century London and who knows who that can be about). Unfortunately, the latter does not seem to be for sale from any of my usual suppliers and the former is at least £35 secondhand…or £2.99 on Kindle. So. Hard decisions need to be made in the House of Mangan, that’s for sure.

I also bought I Chose Caviar by Art Buchwald because although I have never read any Art Buchwald and do not think I even own any Art Buchwald and don’t think I know anything about Art Buchwald, he somehow nevertheless falls into the rough mental category for me that contains Leo Rosten, Herman J Mackiewicz (and therefore is affiliated too with Dorothy Parker et al). I could be absolutely showing my arse here, but that is why I bought it and so let it stand and you can laugh at my ignorance in the comments, no problem.

In The Book Shop I bought Call Me Ishmaelle by Xiaolu Guo and David Szalay’s Flesh because – well, because I’ve read all the reviews and my interest is piqued and my reading glands are juicing. Sometimes my reasoning is so simple it barely amounts to reasoning at all.

And then as we passed through the Saturday market on our way home, there was one of those fantastic stalls that sells nothing but thrillers, crime novels and romances, divided into authors and plastic crates and of course it was necessary to pick up a Harlen Coben I have not (I don’t think) yet read – The Match – for £2. See non-reasoning, above.

Then when we did get home, I ordered - unstoppable now, you see - Woman Alive by Susan Ertz from Manderley Press because it is a 1933 dystopian tale about the last woman in London left alive after a poisonous gas wipes out the rest and you know what, I’m only human.

A deeply pleasing spree. I also bought what may turn out to be the world’s greatest pen, but if I start getting onto stationery now we’ll be here all week. And I must stop, because tomorrow is March 31 when I am supposed to hand in 25,000 words of the first draft of my novel. I have written 18,500. This is my way of telling my agents. So if I’m not here next week, you know why.

Happy reading!

Love, Lucy

Share The Bookwormery

This week’s picture from The Bookwormery is of the mixture of read and (mostly) unread books in the little Ikea bookcase atop my desk. I built this myself, it is STURDY, and I am very proud.

I had a request (my first! But please do keep them coming! And excuse the proliferating exclamation marks here. I always find myself genuinely excited to write a post to you) from a reader to write something about how I find the time to do everything I’d mentioned in a previous post – my job, parenting, writing a novel, reading, plus (I think I implied at least) running a home, being a wife and all the wretched life admin that being a responsible adult requires.

So, the short answer is: I work seven days a week, I never go on holiday and my house is a shithole.

The longer answer, if you’ve got time amidst your own job, domestic responsibilities, wretched admin etc is as follows:

1. Luck

My main job comprises writing four television reviews (for The Guardian) a week and two columns (for the ipaper) a month. Obviously I have to watch the television for the reviews too, and I usually write one or two other features (most recently for Good Housekeeping magazine, but often for the Guardian, usually covering for John Crace or Emma Brockes who alternate writing the weekly Saturday diary there) a month on top of that. And now, I also write this Substack once a week, which I count as a job because although it is a joy it is also something I bring my whole brain to and try hard to do well.

It’s a job, or they are jobs, that I’m lucky to have in all sorts of ways but for our purposes, the main advantage is that my work can be chopped into parts and to a very great extent done at times that suit me. I can, within limits, choose what to do and when and maximise my efficiency that way. I try to write the reviews in the mornings (after I’ve got my teenager off to school, fed the cats, had a coffee, taken my tablets and seen whether the New York Times Spelling Bee is going to bring me joy or sadness that day), then have lunch and go for a walk. In the afternoons, I try to do book work. This is what I call it instead of ‘writing a novel’, in an attempt to trick myself into thinking this is a thing I can do. It helps a little bit.

After that, I start watching the programme I’m next reviewing. Depending on how well the day’s gone and how much or little I’ve been interrupted by emails, a husband who also works from home, WhatsApp messages from my mother on the Mother-Daughters group (usually followed by lively private exchanges between me and my sister), I finish in time to make dinner or I go back to it after we’ve eaten.

I try not to get myself into a position where I have to watch and write the programme on the same day, because I think it’s fairer AND results in a better-written piece if I can have a bit of time in between to digest it. But if screeners come in late, or it’s been a chaotic week, it can happen. But I try to militate against it.

2. Being a cow

Or not being a people pleaser. Or having boundaries. You can call it a number of things but basically I mean that I say no to things all the time, I do very little for charity or other people, and I’ve given up feeling too bad about it. I just don’t have time – especially for the feeling bad part. Yes, sometimes a wave of guilt crashes over me about my various inadequacies (as a wife, mother, writer, general member of society, you name it, I can be shit at it), but this is still better than the spiralling hours I used to spend beating myself up for everything.

In the end, ladies (especially) – you have to be a cow. Which is to say, you have to learn to be a little bit, or a lot, selfish, in order to prioritise correctly and protect your time. More on prioritising correctly in another post, if you would like, because I feel a lengthy rant coming on that would be better elsewhere and not as a digression here.

At the daily level, this means not paying any attention to anything bar emergencies involving blood and/or police until I’ve finished at least the TV review. Then I admit a few questions from my husband, answer a few emails while eating lunch, then think about what I have just written or am, hopefully, about to write while I’m on my walk. Then I’m back into ‘Fuck off, I’m writing’ for book work (there’s more swearing than usual in this post. I didn’t know how weirdly enraged I am either while working or talking about working. I’ll add it to my list of things to ponder when I’m not working.)

Evenings – if I’m really up against it, my son cooks for himself or his father cooks for the pair of them and leaves me something for later or I sort myself out.

It’s not that work comes first. It’s that earning money comes first.

I jest. No, I don’t really. Get the money.

3. Also, I do not shower every day

This, I feel, is self-explanatory.

4. My house is a shithole

Ditto

5. Seven days a week

I don’t work for eight hours a day. But if you’re writing, the constraints are slightly different. What I do do is write to my maximum capacity of about a thousand (decent) words every day of the week, because that’s the only way I can meet my obligations. Every so often I find I have accrued enough extra words over the previous few weeks to take a day off and then I just walk and read (not at the same time, because I am unfortunately no longer six years old with a father to hold my hand and allow me to do exactly that) and it’s lovely. But if it’s longer than a day – or maybe two days – I begin to get itchy and fretty and need to write something again.

So – I don’t take holidays. But that’s okay because (and this really should go under ‘Luck’) my job is not stressful. It has its stresses, of course, but it is not stressful. This is because I have, in comparison to most jobs and especially those that allow a middle class standard of living, bountiful freedom (see the chopping into parts note) and I answer to no one but myself and a single boss who has the same, simple goal as I do – get a coherent review in the paper the next day. I work from home. I have no commute, no office politics, none of that misery-making stuff that drains so many people.

Of course, I’m not on staff at The Guardian or ipaper, so I have no job security, sick pay or holiday pay or (back in the day, maternity pay) so there are downsides. But there are upsides you – almost – can’t put a price on.

6. Reading time

I need it. You – I’m guessing/depending on selection bias here – need it. It’s one of the things I’ve learned that I need to protect.

One of the reasons I’ve never read any Martin Amis is that I read, at some point in my 20s, an interview he gave in which he described how he spent two hours every morning reading in order to “restock the tanks” (I think was the phrase he used). Even at that tender age I immediately became impressively bitter. “What a life he must lead,” I thought. “To be able to do that. I wonder who’s doing all his shit?” It’s a grudge I have held ever since. Yes, I know. I’ll add its removal to my list of things to be done when I care enough. I have bought a copy of Money, if that’s any help.

I cannot get up early to try and give myself more time in the day. But I can and do stay up late. And that’s when I read. I don’t watch much television because the day job takes care of that, so once dinner and work are over – that’s about 8pm at the latest, unless it’s a very bad day indeed – I crack open my current read, or fire up the Kindle (we can talk about them another day if you’d like, too. Just let me know. Mi Substack, tu Substack, innit) and start absorbing my fix.

I talk about the fix in Bookish and how it always reminds me of the description by Brick in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (oh, I think this calls for a picture of Paul Newman in the role, don’t you? I’ll find a way to work Gene Kelly in next week, and I should have mentioned Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights when it came out so I could have completed my heart’s trifecta with a shot of Olivier as Heathcliff) of needing to drink enough to feel ‘the click’.

I don’t know if my fix is best measured in pages or time, but I would say two hours feels about right (my GOD, Amis and I are practically TWINS). Anything after that is a bonus. If you include reading after I’m in bed, I probably manage about four hours a day, which gets me through two or three books a week. I read and write fast. Not deliberately, it’s just how I do it. Everyone has their natural rate for everything and if you try to speed up or slow down for very long, you destroy your pleasure in it. Obviously I savour particular sentences or passages but otherwise I’m galloping through. And because I am a cow, I insist on my right to do so. I’ll enjoy my time how I enjoy my time. Thank you and – as I turn off my Kindle, set my alarm, squirt nighttime Xailin in my bad eye and switch off the light – goodnight.

So, that’s how I do it. Roughly. It works for me but different strokes for different folks, obviously. I do recommend being a cow, though, for almost everyone. You’re all being too nice, I guarantee. But we can come back to this.

The Week in Books

After a relatively fallow week last week, I am fully back on my reading horse. That’s a mixed metaphor, I think, but no matter. Read fast enough and you won’t notice.

Five by Ilona Bannister – 300-odd pages devoted to the last five minutes before a train crash in which one of the five characters we meet will die. Oh my God, it’s fantastic. Completely gripping. So meticulously realised, so beautifully and precisely written. So perfectly plotted and paced. It’s out on May 5. Run, don’t walk, I’d say. And tell your family you won’t be making dinner that night.

My current thriller slot is now taken by This Story Might Save Your Life by Tiffany Crum, about a podcaster who disappears under increasingly mysterious circumstances. I’m halfway through and finding very enjoyable, if a little hard to follow - but this may very well be a menopausal me problem and no-one else’s.

I’ve started Janice Hadlow's The Other Bennet Sister after watching the TV adaptation for review, and it is a delight. A perfect spring read. Or a perfect read if you are feeling low. Let it lift you.

I’m enjoying Lavie Tidhar's The Hood. As ever with Tidhar, it’s slightly out of my comfort zone (even though I am a total Robin Hood-head) but that’s what I got it for. No complaints. It’s dense, crazy, brilliant stuff. His is a singular sensibility.

I paused Receipts From a Bookshop by Katie Clapham because I realised it was the wrong kind of book to be reading on my Kindle (see potentially-forthcoming post on Kindles for expansion on this important point). And then, what arrived through my letterbox but a proof copy! See ‘Luck of job’ above.

Also in the Books About Books category – I’ve just started Robert Douglas-Fairhurst's Look Closer, which uses his 20 years of teaching students to advise (in a totally non-hectoring way) how we can bring different techniques to bear on reading and get the most out of what we’re taking in, especially with the classics. I see one of the techniques is to slow down, so I may have to fight him but I’ll wait til I get to the chapter first. Shouldn’t be long *feud eyes*

With time to kill before my train from Charing Cross, I went into Waterstones in Trafalgar Square and immediately had to buy The Mythmakers by Tamzin Merchant because I am not just a Hood-head but an Arthur acolyte and this is a book about a girl called Gwyn escaping from King Uther’s court, pursued by his son, and them meeting a wild boy in the woods called Merlin…I mean, need I say more? Okay then - it’s also funny, charming and subtly detailed (a line about a ‘hare’s breath’ instead of a hair’s breadth made me literally hug it to my bosom.) So lovely.

(I also saw the paperback of Bookish on a buy-one-get-one-half-price display table, and was so thrilled I found the courage to ask if they wanted me to sign them. They did, so I did. Always a surreal but completely brilliant moment. Then a few days later I did the same in the Battersea Power Station branch. It’s good to feel like a real author occasionally. It’s effectively another ‘book work’ trick.)

(Bookish in the wild! And next to the only self-help (adjacent?) writer I cleave to - Oliver Burkeman.)

Until next Monday – happy reading! Don’t forget to be a cow when you can. It gets so much easier with practice.

Also – do send me more questions, suggestions, do let me know what you’d like to hear and talk about. And of course please tell me if there’s something on a tech-y level that I should or shouldn’t be doing. Someone told me there’s also a chat facility here somewhere, so I’m going to work that out next. Onward!

Love, Lucy x

You can buy Bookish here

At the signing afterwards, a woman approached with her book vey apologetically and said “I’m afraid I have a confession.”

“Oh yes?” I said carefully, because you never know.

“Yes,” she said. “I’m afraid – well, I’m afraid…I’m a sociable bookworm.”

I just looked at her. It didn’t compute for a moment. In my mind, all my life, you see, I have treated “bookworm” (or “bookish” or any such derivative therein) as synonymous with “quiet”, “introverted”, “Cut-me-open-and-find-the-words-‘leave-me-alone-I’m-reading’-running-through-me-like-a-stick-of-rock’. I never really considered that it could be otherwise and I was gobsmacked to find that it could be.

And then, of course, I felt terrible for taking myself as the sole point of departure and talking to audiences as if we were all one socially-disinclined-verging-on-inept whole. I tried to make amends at Event 38 and then on last year’s tour for Bookish, and I hope I’ve clawed back some ground but part of me is still struggling personally to come to terms with this revelation seven years later.

And I’ve become even more confused lately because…God, I don’t really know how to put this. I suppose I have a confession to make too, because I…I have recently started to find myself wanting to socialise more.

I wish to make it clear at the outset that I mean socialising within strictly defined terms, which are:

1. It’s with people I already know, so there’s no small talk (or “arsing about” as I inwardly term it) or risk that we won’t get on

2. It’s nearby or at someone’s house – ideally both

3. If it’s in a public eaterie of some kind, then there is either no music or nobody who will object if I grab a waiter and say “Darling boy, I am 106 and can’t hear a thing above this caterwauling business on the speakers. Be a love and turn them down til I’ve gone on my croneish way, could you?” Or words to that effect.

Then I want to hear everyone’s news, have a laugh, several drinks and be home by 9pm at the latest, so that I can recover from all the talking before I have to go to bed.

This is an extreme advance on my former position, which was to see A Person for two hours once every six weeks or so in order to retain technical membership of the human race and stay indoors with my books the rest of the time. This worked for nigh on 50 years.

Someone once asked me – possibly one of the interviewers at a Bookworm event – if books, especially during childhood, had been a substitute for friends. And I was, and remain, quite serious when I replied that I think it is the other way round – for most of my life, and early life in particular, friends were a substitute for books.

Real people didn’t, couldn’t really compare to the pleasure of a book, the satisfaction of a good read. A book was so much better a bet. I never found a book that didn’t teach me something, or fascinate me in some way or entertain me to some degree – sometimes wildly, sometimes quietly, but never never. Whereas people – well, you’ve all met people. You know.

There was an argument between me and my mother when I was about 15 that has entered into family lore. There was A Thing going on at the local youth club (loft room over the church hall) and such friends as I had were all going. Foolishly, I must have let slip something of this to my family. My mother was therefore determined – because what is parenting if not forcing a child into activities it does not want to do, cultivate talents it does not have, strengthen its weakness and try and make it into a more fully-rounded person than it would ever become if left to its own paltry devices? – that I should too. It culminated in a fight in the hallway as she tore my current favourite book out of my hands (The Cricket Term by Antonia Forest – “Victor Watson calls her the children’s Jane Austen!” I would have cried, if I hadn’t been 25 years off learning this useful fact) and yelled “You’re going to that disco if I have to drag you there myself!” I did, because she did. I endured 30 minutes of watching people dance to noise amidst a fug of teenage hormones then walked home, vowing that I would never again let any information about social events occurring within a twenty mile radius of school or home pass my lips again. I never did, and led a life of relative peace thereafter.

I made my first real and lasting friends at university, amongst people with very similar histories. Our relationships were built on going round to each others’ rooms, chatting, having coffee, and then leaving to go back to our own rooms and read. It was idyllic.

When this became impossible, because you have to move out of college and off campus and go and be grown ups scattered across cities and countries (a system surely invented by extroverts, a word which is synonymous with ‘idiots’), I just stopped seeing people nearly as much. When I worked in the city – as the world’s most useless trainee lawyer - meeting up with folk occasionally was still quite easy, but once I was a freelance journalist just sitting and typing at home? Forget it.

I had – I have – too many friends on my shelves to miss the flesh and blood sort too much. They are so near! So endlessly rewarding yet undemanding! So quiet! So near. You don’t have even have to get showered or appropriately dressed to meet them. You don’t have to bother waiters with demands that they create an environment appropriate to your needs. And you can read for as long as you want, and books don’t get offended if you’ve suddenly had enough of them for now, plunk them down and walk away.

But I think now I may have taken things too far. I am trying to reconnect with non-papery people. It works better now everyone is almost as old and tired and crotchety as I have always been. I know I’ll always have support on the muzak thing, for starters. And we have so many book recs to swap now, after years of honing our tastes and – to a surprising degree – converging. I’m up to a dinner a month now, sometimes with as many as two other human beings. I still need the rest of the month to recover, but who knows what the future holds? Maybe by next Monday I will be urging you to live, laugh, love and go on a raw juice fast. I can promise you only one thing. There will be no dancing. Never, ever will there be dancing.

Love, Lucy

Sitting room bookcase full of unread beauties. I’ll get there. I’ll get there.

Events, dear boy, events

I’m at the Tiverton Book Festival on Friday 27th March - do come! I think a few tickets are still available if you click here

This Week in Reading and Recommendations

I have been completely knackered this week. I don’t know why. My monthly dinner was three weeks ago so I’m almost fully recovered from that. Hormones, or the lack thereof, I guess is the most likely culprit? It’s taken all my energy just to meet my writing deadlines and I’ve hardly been able to read, which is just what you want when you’ve just started a Substack called The Bookwormery, is it not?

It also means I haven’t been able to reply to most of your lovely comments and welcomes yet – and I think there are private messages too, but they seem to keep disappearing on me. I have a young person coming round soon to help me but in the meantime THANK YOU for everything and please stick around while I figure all this out, won’t you? I can also see so many accounts (do we call them accounts? Or newsletters? Or just Substacks? Or, like, coolly – ’stacks?) that I want to read and doubtless recommend but you are going to have to tell me how everyone finds time to get through the acres of interesting stuff on here and still hold down a job and pay some occasional attention to one’s dependents. I still haven’t even managed to watch Breaking Bad.

So this is a slightly non-standard week in books. I got halfway through and gave up on Dennis Lehane’s Since We Fell that I borrowed from the library last week because when I borrowed it I had forgotten that Lehane interrupts his traditionally-patterned thrillers occasionally with ones that follow a single character’s life story in depth and read more like literary fiction. Since We Fell is one of the latter. Which would be fine – nay, great, all his books are great – if that is what I had intended to get. But it wasn’t. So I’m putting it back and we will doubtless meet again at some more fruitful time. I am glad that I am of an age now to be able to do this. I used to persevere with all books to the bitter end out of some unhelpful blend of stubbornness and misguided loyalty. No more. Life’s too short AND – you can come back to books! They wait, quite happily! See patience, above, and advantages over people.

I’ve refilled my thriller slot with How to Get Away with Murder, by Rebecca Philipson and a brilliant choice it is turning out to be. Clever, funny, compelling and loads of other good things.

I did finish The Blonde Identity by Ally Carter but that was quite a close run thing too. The spy caper element worked just well enough to compensate for what felt like a slightly awkward, laboured romance plot – something slightly off with its pacing, something slightly repetitive and blunt about its evocation. But I am nevertheless looking forward to the sequel, The Blonde Who Came in From the Cold, because there was a core of delight there and I’m intrigued to see if what seem like eminently fixable problems with the first one have been fixed for the second.

I’ve started A Lady and Her Husband by Amber Reeves, because where else should I turn for restoration at times of low mood and general depletion than wonderful, wonderful Persephone Books? I’m only a few pages in, but I can already feel it working. More on wonderful, wonderful Persephone next week, but I must go and meet some deadlines now.

Happy reading whatever you’re reading!

The week in writing

I have managed very little book writing, because of The Knackeredness but here is what I did for The Guardian and the ipaper

The Other Bennet Sister - justice for bookish Mary! And yes, of course I bought Janice Hadlow's book afterwards

A Woman of Substance - Barbara Taylor Bradford's ditto

The Claudia Winkleman Show - let us not dwell

Into the Manosphere with Louis Theroux - beyond maddening

Royal Rubbish - on poor bloody Beatrice and Eugenie

Even a school visit when I was seven or eight from Michael Rosen didn’t tip me off, though this was maybe because I found him terrifying and spent most of it trying to hide under a gym mat.

Children are better informed now (one of the rare benefits of the internet to the juvenile population perhaps), and so am I. People write books! I still fundamentally believe that real writers do it in a week or so - that they sit down, start at the beginning and write 80, 90, 100,000 words straight through, without a hitch, and that it is only me who fails to do so but my rational brain (and avid perusal of real writers’ accounts of how they actually work) will catch up eventually.

But however you get there, it remains an extraordinary experience to walk into a bookshop or a library and see, incontrovertibly, right before your very eyes, your own book. The collection of words you chose, ordered, erased, rewrote, gave punctuation and chapter names to, put between covers - that someone designs especially for that collection and that collection alone! - stamped with your name, and put out on shelves and tables for people to buy. It was astonishing to me the first time. It has become, if anything, even more astonishing each time thereafter. (Almost as astonishing as the fact that I think I’ve succeeded in putting bespoke buttons linking you to it somewhere here below. But I’d probably better not make myself such a hostage to fortune.)

How am I actually celebrating the day, you may possibly be wondering? Well, so far, by:

1. Not having a shower before the plumbers came and shut all the water off to try and fix the leak that has been ruining the ceiling below since December 10

2. By falling behind on the day’s deadlines for TV reviewing

3. But also!

4. By buying Lavie Tidhar's The Hood because I will read anything Robin Hood, because Tidhar is a nutcase-genius and because I can’t wait to see what he does with the man, the Marian, the legend

5. By buying a completely unnecessary new case for books/notebooks/pens/stationery/makeup/all of the above by the time it’s been in my bag for a month from the Tate, within whose calming walls I wrote yesterday’s quota of the new book. Here it is:

   

I should probably have chosen something more photogenic but the heart wants what it wants and I have no regrets.

Thank you so much for signing up to The Bookwormery. You’ve been so warm and welcoming I feel like I’m being tricked. But if it IS a long con, it’s already been worth it to me for all the book recs and stories in your comments, which I hope we can discuss soon, once I’ve met these disappearing deadlines.

Happy reading, everyone

Love, Lucy

Buy the book at Waterstones!

Buy the book at Bookshop.org!

But onward!

Mood Magic

How many books do you buy - or otherwise acquire - in an average week? I borrowed a Dennis Lehane from the library (Since We Fell) and bought Mick Herron’s Slow Horses from its sale rack because it was the pre-TV adaptation edition, which was the one I remember my dad (who died three years ago) reading, and I was missing him. I bought The Blonde Identity because I began reading its sequel when I was in Waterstones to spend a book token my son had won at school (I didn’t steal it - I gave him the cash, after weeping exhortations to get him to enter a bookshop and buy something, anything that caught his eye failed utterly). I bought Cabin by Will Jones because its subtitle is “How to Build a Retreat in the Wilderness and Learn to Live with Nature” and retreats in the wilderness are my obsession and the book is FILLED with diagrams and pictures than feed my very soul. And finally, having already overshot the book token amount, obvs, I bought The Expansion Project by Ben Pester because it looked to be slightly out of my comfort zone (“A fever-dream of a book…[A] surreal trip into a Severance-esque corporate world” says the blurb - I normally dwell in the firmly realistic) but doable. And then in the charity shop I passed on the way home I picked up The Brothers Karamazov, because I started reading it on my Kindle because my friend raves about it in an entirely genuine and not “I have read all the Russians and think I might be Lord God King because of it” way, and then realised that this is the wrong way to do it. Some books can be read on screen without loss. But classics and historical fiction have to be the proper dead tree thing for me to enjoy them fully.

I received some proofs too, as is the way when you are a lucky bugger like me and publishers send you things they think you’d like before they reach the shops. There was On the Mark by Florence Hazrat, a history of punctuation (which reminds me that I’ve just read someone somewhere saying you should never use brackets on Substack because they look smug. I don’t see how this can be true - does it resonate at all with you?) which will pair well with a proof I started reading a few weeks ago, about the world of printing - Rogue, Widows and Orphans by Rebecca Lee. There was Receipts From the Bookshop by Katie Clapham, which I have already started and it is exactly as I’d hoped; a tale of a life selling books, like Notes from a Bookshop by Shaun Blythell without its weirdly aggressive tone.

The lucky buggerness continued because I was also able to download the new Shari Lapena Getting Away With Murder from NetGalley, along with Two Sisters by Laura Dockrill, about two very different sisters learning to find what they need from each other) and Odette Rising by Julianne Edwards

That’s ten. In a purely practical sense, that’s too many. I read two or three books a week. So that’s a giant surplus. I’m building up a massive backlog and I will never catch up.

All correct, but beside the point. If you are a mood reader, as I am, then there’s no such thing as a surplus. You choose your next read because it appeals to you then and there just a little more than the rest. You knew, perhaps, that you wanted a romance rather than thriller, but moods have infinite gradations and what a joy to be able to choose within multiple romance options the one that will truly satisfy.

Choosing my next read is one of my favourite things. It comes down to a moment, really. You hover over a few, read the blurbs, read the first few paragraphs or pages of each and then just let them percolate until your (ironically, wordless, ineffable) inner self or lizard brain knows, just knows - like other people just know which lamp should go in that corner, what colour cushions will pull an entire room together, what extra ingredient to add to a recipe to make it sing - which one is right for the you you are right now. It’s a precious, delicate magic working and I love it.

Or maybe I’m just a greedy cow who can’t stop buying books and is constantly in search of justification for her avarice. We may never know.

Here is a picture of my desk, to see if I can successfully put images in this thing. As you can see, I am a devotee of Marie Kondo.

A Good Question

Can we talk about writing a bit here, as well as reading? I hope that’s okay.

In my first post, I said that I was currently writing my first ‘proper’ novel. A couple of people in the comments asked me what I meant by that, and why my first work of fiction (Are We Having Fun Yet?) didn’t count.

So. Mostly I write non-fiction. I’m a journalist, and people frown on making things up there (though not as much as they did, because the world is going to hell in a handbasket, but let us not dwell). My books are all non-fiction and mainly drawn from life (especially the reading memoirs Bookworm and Bookish). And that means simply translating into readable, enjoyable prose something that already exists. You’re rendering an account, not creating something. That’s not to say it’s not hard, not demanding, not skilled - but it is different from writing fiction, from making stuff up out of whole cloth.

Are We Having Fun Yet? is too close to my life for me to feel that I truly created something. I did make the diarist’s daughter Evie up entire and I enjoyed that - and her - very much. David, her son’s friend, too. But I felt the difference between the two processes deeply, and the rendering (plus jokes) outweighed the creative to a degree that means I always feel I have to qualify the book as not a proper novel.

It also - as many Amazon (I feel I should strew some decorous asterisks there - *ma*z*n?) reviewers have kindly pointed out - doesn’t have a plot. The book is in diary form and I thought the structure of a year would be enough, particularly as I had not one single idea for an actual plot, but it wasn’t and isn’t. I think it’s a fun read - it was shortlisted for the Bollinger Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction, which blew my tiny mind - and it captures some of the things I wanted to capture, but if I’d known more, if I’d really dug in, I could have made it a much more satisfying read for everyone.

Now I’m working on a ‘proper’ novel. It has been plotted, which has been agony. I have read the books that everyone else in my line of work seems to have been reading for 20 years and absorbing their lessons into their bones. Into the Woods by John Yorke is the classic, and that plus the more recent Save the Cat Writes a Novel by Jessica Brody were the most useful to me. There is also an absolutely wonderful account on Instagram run by a woman called Sarah Waterman who distills so much unassailable wisdom about writing and editing into her every post that it feels like sorcery. I cannot link to her because Instagram is refusing to work on my laptop but she is a3w_editorial and a genius.

Some Brief Recommendations

Brief not because my enthusiasm is bounded, but because I don’t want to ruin my last remaining pleasure in life by having to read with a critic’s eye. At the same time, if I’ve loved a book I want you to know about them, so:

I completely loved Daisy Buchanan's All Grown Up. It’s billed as a modern reworking of Little Women but it is also entirely its own thing and that thing is warm, clever, kind, engrossing and uplifting without being twee or sentimental. I’m afraid it’s not out until June 4 but I promise you it will be worth the wait.

I make the same promise with The Night Stairs by Erin Kelly , out on July 9. It is a brilliant psychological thriller, with all of Kelly’s customary fierceness and focus. But this one also manages to be a study in guilt, of what it means to have a conscience, and lapsed Catholics (hi!) will be destroyed by its evocations of…I can’t even put it into words. The vestigial but constant gnawing of the soul we have? That kind of thing.

This may be just me - and I will be very interested to see if is - but Kelly’s writing always seems to be powered by a kind of nameless fury. It has such energy, such denseness, such rich, acute detail (second only to Tana French, perhaps), but a trace of anger is somehow always there beneath the surface. If it is just me, I can only apologise and start either reading up about projection or adjusting my HRT doses.

That’s all for now. I don’t really know how comments and conversations work but I shall get there and look forward to meeting you!

Thank you for reading

Love, Lucy

Things I Wrote This Week

A review of Steve Carrell's Rooster - my love for Carrell runs even deeper after this

A review of the TV adaptation of Julia May Jonas's Vladimir - I’ve been on the fence about reading the book but this has put it firmly on my TBR

A review of Red Light to Spotlight - a documentary about sex workers in Kolkata that seemed oddly uninterested in the women’s stories

A review of DTF St Louis - a grown up dramedy about grown ups and proving that Jason Bateman is a master of his craft

My iPaper column, about the medieval birth of my son - nearly 15 years on I am still enraged (and my coccyx still broken)

I have been wanting to do this for ages. At least, I think I have - this is the thing that’s basically podcasting for people who don’t like talking, isn’t it? I hope I’ve got that right.

I’m starting now, after months of hesitation because the paperback of my latest book, Bookish: A Love Letter to Reading, is due out very soon and the need to usher my baby into the world with as much support as possible felt like one parental duty I should not sidestep. So here I am, out of my comfort zone because I am dealing with technology but hoping that it will enable me to connect with like-minded folk - I would say, roughly “introverts, cusping ‘hermit’” - so that we can chat (by which I mean, write, read and exchange written messages) about books old, new and forthcoming, about the process of writing my new book (and first ‘proper’ novel) if I find I’ve learned anything that might be of interest or use to you, and maybe too about some of the smaller things in the news occasionally? (If you are looking for intelligent, expert analysis of the larger, God bless your continued capacity and willingness to learn but please keep on your way. The most I can muster is a sort of exhausted howling from the fetal position).

I will aim to post something weekly. That’s “aim” as in “fully intend but don’t like to promise anything because life just LOVES that, doesn’t it, and immediately starts looking for some hellish obstacles to chuck in your path.”

Hmm. Make that “introverts, cusping ‘hermit’, pessimism rising.”

If this sounds like something you might enjoy - or at least wouldn’t do you any harm and might distract from some of the more minor cares and woes that habitually attend existence in this year of ungrace 2026 - do sign up! And/or tell your friends and then they can perform the same set of careful calculations and see if it’s worth their while too. Let’s be nodding e-acquaintances! Then maybe a community! Then maybe e-friends! The important thing is that at no point in our relationship will any of us have to leave the house. This much I CAN promise you.

I leave you with a picture of part of my favourite place in the world - my library, or The Bookwormery, if you will (you needn’t). I tried to put it at the top of this post but I don’t know how. I’m on a perilously steep learning curve here, so abundant apologies in advance and please forgive the state of whatever turns up in your inboxes!

Love, Lucy

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