What I Read This Spring

At the start of the year I made a quiet promise to read more and scroll less. I did not set a number, because the moment reading becomes a target it starts to feel like homework. Instead I got a library card again, after years of not having one, and started picking up whatever looked interesting on the returns shelf.

The best book of the season was a slim novel about a lighthouse keeper and his brother, which I read in two sittings on a long train journey. Not much happens, and that is the point. It is about weather, routine, and two people who love each other but cannot quite say it. I finished it somewhere past a grey coastal town and just looked out of the window for a while.

I also worked my way through a big history of salt, which was far more entertaining than it has any right to be. Empires, taxes, preserved fish, roads built to carry the stuff across deserts. I now bore my friends with salt facts at dinner, which they have been very patient about.

Not everything landed. I abandoned a much-praised thriller around page ninety, because every character seemed to be explaining the plot to every other character. I used to force myself to finish books like that. These days I let them go back to the library without guilt, and somebody else can enjoy them.

A collection of short essays about gardening rounded things off. I do not have a garden, only a narrow balcony with three pots of herbs and an optimistic tomato plant, but the essays were really about paying attention to small changes over time, which applies to almost anything.

A few habits that helped: keeping a book in my bag at all times, reading for twenty minutes before bed instead of looking at my phone, and not being afraid to read two books at once. The library card has easily been the best thing I have spent nothing on this year. Summer list is already forming, and it is mostly travel writing and one very long novel I keep putting off.