Or not

It's coming up to Christmas, that time of year when we think about what we're most grateful for and what we want the new year to bring. Last year, Christmas was tough for me. I was increasingly sure my job wasn't working for me (I was a teacher, have I ever said that?), but I couldn't see a way out of it. I ground on, at the expense of my mental health. Five months ago today, the wheels came off. But as awful as that experience was, it did give me two powerful little words: 'Or not'. You can keep doing what you're doing, or not. You have a choice. It's not the easy option, by any means, but it is an option. So if you're thinking about what 2018 might bring and you feel like your options are limited, remember that five months ago I quit my job in spectacular fashion and I'm now happier than I can remember being for a long time. It hasn't been easy, but I'm me again, and I'd almost forgotten who that was.

So I'm grateful for the wheels coming off this year. And I'm also immensely grateful to the people who supported me through it. I hope you recognise yourselves in what follows. And if I don't know you in real life, I hope you have friends like this, or that you can be one of these people for someone else. That's my resolution for 2018. Pay it forward.

Thank you to the people who literally picked me up off the floor and helped me do the simple things when I was paralysed by the bigger picture.

Thank you to the people who sat with me, who brought me tissues, who took time out of their days to make sure I wasn't alone, to smile. You made me feel safe and I can't thank you enough for that.

Thank you to the people who stuck by me, who saw that this was a scary choice but one I needed to make, and who let me make it without judgement.

Thank you to the people that valued my contribution, and told me so.

Thank you to the people who talked to me positively about what the future might look like. You gave me ideas to dream towards.

And last but never least, even though they won't read this, thank you to my kids, my class, and their parents, for believing in me, for being my reason to get up in the morning, for making me smile, for being the kindest, most caring bunch of kids anyone could have the pleasure to meet. I will always be proud of you and our year together and I often think about you and how you're all doing. Go forth and be yourselves, always.

Miss C

Read me a story

Recently I've seen a bit of discussion on Twitter, and I think I've also heard it on a couple of podcasts, about whether listening to audiobooks counts as reading. I mean, let's be clear, it absolutely does - in my humble opinion - but that would make for a very short blog post, so I thought I might write about some of the audiobooks I've listened to / read lately, and what differences I find between listening to a book and reading it on paper.

So, to start with, some audiobooks I'd recommend:

The Kitchen House by Kathleen Grissom
I heard about this one when Kathleen Grissom was a guest on the What Should I Read Next podcast (episode 78). Although she has a very... let's say *interesting* writing process, the subject matter (the lives of domestic slaves on a plantation, as opposed to the ones in the fields) seemed interesting, and I happened to have an Audible credit free, so audio it was. That turned out to be an excellent choice, because the chapters alternate between Lavinia, a white girl raised by the black slaves, and Belle, one of the slaves, and they are rather brilliantly narrated by two different women (Orlagh Cassidy and Bahni Turpin), meaning you get a real sense of their voices and who is narrating at any one time. This is the first audiobook I've ever had to binge-listen to, because I was desperate to find out what happened at the end! Highly recommended.


Norse Mythology by Neil Gaiman
This is just excellent, in no small part because Neil Gaiman narrates it himself and I'm not convinced that a professional audiobook narrator would be brave enough to put that much sarcasm into Loki's voice. The characters really come alive so that the stories stop being oft-repeated legends and instead seem almost modern.

Storm in a Teacup - The Physics of Everyday Life by Helen Czerski
I love Helen Czerski's TV science documentaries and her particularly brilliant, everyday way of explaining physics, which let's be frank is not my best subject. This book was absolutely fascinating, with clear explanations and loads of examples that my brain could hook into, and Chloe Massey did a great job of getting across Czerski's enthusiasm in the narration. I really need a paper copy of this book so I can re-read bits! I listened to a lot of it in the car, and kept turning up to places enthusing about the latest thing I'd learned. Definitely a book to make you say "Oh my god, did you know...?"

The Wayfarers Series by Becky Chambers (The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet and A Closed and Common Orbit)
The second book in this series was brilliant on audio - another one where I was desperate to find out what happened! The two books have a character and the world in common but are otherwise completely separate. I wasn't convinced by the audio for the first one, and ended up alternating between listening to it and reading the paperback, which made for some amusing skipping and skimming when I changed over. (This is why they invented Kindles and WhisperSync!)

Last week, though, I realised that that was probably an excellent way to read that book, because there is at least one scene in it of a more... adult... nature (although pretty mild), and last week I discovered that having a sex scene read out loud to me in the first person is really not what I'm into, book-wise. That particular teachable moment came from Uprooted, by Naomi Novik, which up until that point had been excellent - dramatic, with a well-built world. However, I'm going to have to borrow it from the library and read the rest on paper, because now I've heard the narrator say those things, there's no going back! The odd sex scene doesn't usually put me off a book, but out loud... just no. I'm obviously a terrible prude.

How about you? What's the best / worst book you've ever listened to? Is there anything that would make you stop listening to an otherwise good audiobook? Are there particular genres that you have to read on paper instead of listen to? (I don't read very much horror - see previous posts about anxiety! - but I can imagine that listening to Stephen King would be even more terrifying.)

Next time: a September wrap-up, both of books and in yarn!

Miss C

Four books and a hashtag

So, I promised to share what I've been reading since the return of my reading mojo this summer. All the books I've finished so far have been excellent, so apologies if this turns into a bit of an "It's so good!" fest, but here goes.

First up, The Wonder by Emma Donoghue. I picked this up in Waterstones because I wanted The Essex Serpent and it was on buy-one-get-one-half-price, so obviously I needed another one. I loved Room, so although I didn't enjoy The Sealed Letter (another of Donoghue's historical novels), I thought I'd give this a go. I was staying with my best friend that weekend, not into the book I'd taken with me, so I started The Wonder that night... and then picked it up again in the morning, somehow breaking my terrible anxiety-induced reading slump (see my last post for ramblings on that). Which is strange, because of all the books to break a reading slump, this one kind of stagnated in the middle. However, the premise was intriguing enough to keep me going - Lib, a no-nonsense nurse who trained under Florence Nightingale, is summoned to a village in extremely rural and religious Ireland to try to ascertain whether a girl who appears to be starving herself but suffering no ill effects is a miracle or a liar. Of course, being a no-nonsense nurse, Lib is determined from the outset to prove that the girl is somehow getting some food into her, but as time goes on she begins to question her role in the situation. Although I think this is maybe laboured for a bit too long, the ending is certainly page-turningly gripping, so altogether a solid 3 stars.

Next, The Book Thief by Markus Zusak. This is one I've had on the shelf for many years (I think it belongs to the aforementioned best friend) and I've seen some mixed reviews of it. Those who love it seem to really love it, and those who don't seem to be put off by the fact that it's written in an unusual way, (it's narrated by Death, who interjects little facts in various places and likes to repeat himself a lot). If you haven't heard about it by now, or seen the movie (which I haven't), it's about Liesel, a young German girl in World War Two. She isn't Jewish, her father isn't a soldier, she lives in a fairly ordinary town, and this was actually the thing I liked most about it - it offered a perspective on the war that you don't often get in books. Obviously the war and the Holocaust come to touch her life, but in small personal ways, so even though it's not told from her perspective, I really felt like I was experiencing it through her eyes. I quite enjoyed Death as the narrator, and the unusual literary devices, and by the end I really couldn't put it down, so 4 stars from me.

Then a more recently published pick - Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi (another loan from my best friend, who is an excellent supplier of books!). I loved this. It's a tiny bit frustrating at first, as each chapter is told from the point of view of a different character in a different generation, and at the beginning I felt like I wasn't getting to find out the end of the story, but the point is that it's one long continuous story that plays out over the generations, and I loved seeing the differences as time passed. I also really appreciated the opportunity to find out more about the stories of Africans who weren't shipped to America as slaves, but who instead suffered under colonisation. This was a new perspective for me - a really interesting exploration of identity, and confrontation of the various different roles that the British played in African history, something that was really glossed over in our history lessons at school, which I think just perpetuates the issues. I'd like to read more books from diverse perspectives, and more people should read this - it's well-written, interesting and important, and I can't really recommend it more highly than that. 5 stars.

Finally for this post, To The Bright Edge of the World by Eowyn Ivey, chosen by my best friend for my birthday last year because we both loved The Snow Child. (As a result, I'm very lucky to have a beautiful hardback edition signed by the author.) It's about an expedition into the unexplored interior of Alaska in the late 1800s led by Colonel Allen Forrester, and about his wife Sophie, left behind at the barracks, all told through letters and journal entries. Like The Snow Child, there are wonderful and also really dark elements of magical realism in this, and although it's quite quiet (plenty of dramatic things happen, but because it's told in letters and journals, you're kind of one step removed from the drama), there came a point where I realised that I was really quite attached to these characters and wanted to know what happened to them. I read a significant portion of it for #cosyreadingnight, which is a fantastic concept invented by the Booktuber Lauren and the Books that I happened to discover was a thing on the morning before it took place, on a weekend when I had the house to myself and could therefore read for three blissful hours completely uninterrupted! The idea is that people cosy up with candles and snacks, follow the hashtag and read all at the same time, sharing what they're reading with each other. This sounds obvious, but how often do you set aside a whole evening just to read? Well, I'll be doing it a lot more often from now on! To The Bright Edge of the World was also a perfect choice because it's all about snow and ice, and there's nothing guaranteed to make me feel more cosy. Looking at my reading journal, I've given this 4 stars, but I might upgrade it to 5... it's not as important as Homegoing, but I really enjoyed it.

I've also finished two audiobooks recently, but I'll save those for another post. Currently I'm taking a break from historical fiction and reading Flight Behaviour by Barbara Kingsolver. (I did start The Girls by Emma Cline, which has come highly recommended by lots of people, but I just couldn't get into it.) How about you - what are you reading?

Books vs brain

I've seen a lot of articles recently entitled something like "Seven reasons why knitting is good for your mental health". No surprises there. But I don't see a lot of articles about the relationship between reading and mental health - something that's become painfully personal to me over the last year - so I've decided to fill the gap.

Firstly, the title. Following convention, it should be something along the lines of "Seven reasons why reading is good for your mental health", but if I was following convention then I shouldn't be writing this at all, because the stigma surrounding mental health would quite like me not to bother anyone with my mental. Well, hard cheese. I'm going for this:

Why mental health is good for your reading, and why reading is good for your mental health.

Ok, so it's not that snappy, but again, hard cheese.

So, why is mental health good for your reading? Well, it's very difficult to concentrate on a book when your thoughts are racing at a million miles an hour. Even if you manage to get your thoughts about everything else to pipe down a bit, then you get the thoughts about reading itself. For the last year - really since I stopped being able to update this blog regularly (not really a coincidence, now I think about it) - every time I've tried to pick up a book, my brain has gone down a rabbit hole along the lines of "But is this the right book? Will you enjoy this book? See, look, it's not immediately a page-turner. You were too tired to read yesterday so you'll have forgotten what's going on. There's no point trying to pick it up again tonight. It wasn't that good anyway. Pick a different one, it might be better." I've lost count of the number of books I've picked up, read a chapter of, then put down again. I stopped going to my monthly book club because I "wasn't enjoying" any of the choices. Now, some of them were probably not for me. But since I've sorted out some of my mental health issues, I've finished at least one of the ones I previously rejected and really enjoyed it, so I think the fault lies more with my brain than the books.

And the worst thing about all of this is that all along I thought it was me. I've been a reader all my life. It's pretty central to who I am. One of the ways I know that is because even throughout this whole period, I haven't stopped WANTING to read books. I haven't stopped donating a significant portion of my salary to Waterstones. I haven't stopped listening to book podcasts and playing with different ideas for tracking the books I wasn't reading. I haven't stopped evangelising about the power of books. So this weird reading slump was deeply confusing. Am I not a reader any more? Have I... grown out of it? Who am I if I don't read? So when I started to be able to read again, when I finished that first precious book, and then the second, I was just deeply grateful that the reading slump was over. I thought it had something to do with having some time off. And then my therapy group were given a case study about a man who was so anxious that he couldn't concentrate on reading, which was something he had previously enjoyed, and suddenly the whole thing made sense. I hadn't lost my identity at all. It was a symptom I hadn't even noticed. I feel like I've found myself again. And that is such a profound relief. My mental health is good for my reading, but it also turns out that reading is pretty good for my mental health. That link just got a bit broken for a while.

So, what have I been reading since I found my sanity again? More on that, and the wonder that was #cosyreadingnight, next time.