I've not read any books
(I'm exaggerating)
I have been tracking my reading for 17 years although up until 2013 it was just a list of book titles and authors in a notebook. I started working at The Bookseller in 2014 and from then on I’ve kept a pretty detailed spreadsheet. The details ebb and flow depending on what I’m interested in at that time - when I was a journalist there was a lot more information about the publishing side of things and now I’m more interested in why I’m choosing to read them.
We’ve just reached the end of Q1, as the city boys say, and I’ve never read so few books by this point in the year. I’ve only read seven books so far this year which is unprecedented for me.
In 2015 I had read FIFTY THREE books by this point but I was a full time books journalist drunk on the fact that I was sent so many books for free. I was also broke and newly moved to London and really all I did was read and go to every publishing event I was invited to so I didn’t need to spend as much money on groceries.
In 2014, 2016 and 2017 I didn’t keep track of the month I was reading in (annoying of past me). 2016 and 2017 were weird years anyway as I was working as a literary scout three days a week so a lot of what I was reading was manuscripts not published books.
In 2018 it was 29 books, in 2019 it was 20, in 2020 it was 23.
It jumped up to 38 in 2021 during the third pandemic lockdown.
I read 31 books in the first quarter of 2022 and 23 in 2023 (neat).
Then we start seeing the impact on being on a more-than-one-book-a-year publishing schedule as I read 16 in 2024 and 21 last year.
So you’ll see that seven is noticeably less. I thought I’d muse on why while telling you what I thought of the ones I did read. (Links go to Bookshop.org.uk which supports indie bookshops.)
I started the year off with the last of a project from 2025, which was reading all of the books selected for the Waterstones fantasy and sci-fi book of the month. You can read what I thought about all of them here.
I didn’t quite finish this before Christmas and so took this last one on tour in the US with me. I was promoting the US publication of Alice a Why and visited Alexandria (Virginia), Chicago, Boise (Idaho), Dallas, and Houston across 10 days.
I’m quite particular about what books I take with me on tour, especially US ones, because I have a lot of time on planes and in airports but am also exhausted. So I need things that are very engaging without sacrificing any quality (see the next book). And I’d started the Great When so knew that it was dense and wordy and weird but I really wanted to get the project finished. It did take me until Texas to finish it (see exhaustion but also I got tonsillitis while on tour which was obviously fairly grim and I basically was sleeping any time I wasn’t doing events) but I found it really absorbing despite (because of?) its style. As I say, there’s more detailed opinions in the linked post but I absolutely liked it enough to pre-order the sequel, I Hear A New World for when it comes out in May.
Red Seas Under Red Skies by Scott Lynch
I then moved on to the book that satisfies my traditional tour criteria and indeed I read the first book in the series, The Lies of Locke Lamora, when I was on tour for the Chronicles of Whetherwhy in the US in May 2025. It ended up being one of my favourite reads of last year so I was keen to finish the series. I read the first third in Texas and on the flight home. I actually found out that my book had hit the New York Times list minutes before I put my phone into airplane mode and so ended up celebrating that with a bachelorette party sat next to me who adopted me, then watchimg Sinners and then sleeping the rest of the way.
While not quite as magical as the first part, I really enjoyed this and will definitely read the third and final book (probably next time I’m on tour). I really enjoy Lynch’s writing style and world building and the way he writes male friendship. Although bonus points as he also writes women really well, something many male high fantasy writers seem to struggle with. It’s a long book though and I read it mainly while recovering from tonsillitis and tour so it took me a few weeks to finish it. And that was my January reading done at two books.
Death of a Bookseller and Let the Bad Times Roll by Alice Slater
Permit me a mention of my podcast. Bookwandering is a podcast where I speak to other writers about their most beloved children’s or YA books and has featured guests including Max Porter, Emily St John Mandel, Nikita Gill and Leah Williamson. I have a new series coming in the summer but I have a cheeky little extra episode with the brilliant Alice Slater out next week and most of my February reading was prep for that.
Alice and I have known each other tangentially/online for years and years now and I knew she’d be a great guest. I was however a little nervous about reading her books which she describes as “horrible little books”, not the sort of thing I’m usually drawn to. But much like with Eliza Clark’s work, Alice’s books are proof that when someone’s a great writer, the books are good regardless of how they track with your usual tastes. Yes, both of them are about horrible people (different levels and styles of horribleness) but they’re brilliantly written; clever and sharp and witty and I raced through both of them. They both also have an incredible sense of place whether that’s a down on its luck London bookshop or New Orleans (Let the Bad Times Roll made me desperate to visit). I’d really recommend them both and Let the Bad Times Roll is newly out in paperback.
Alice chose Melvin Burgess’ seminal 1996 YA novel Junk to discuss which I’d never read. I won’t say much as I’d love you to listen the episode when it’s out which was a joy to record; we get into what makes a book YA, how it differs from YA today, the way Burgess writes his female characters and sexuality, and Alice’s journey from bookselling to being an author.
Lily Tripp: Diary of an Accidental Time Traveller by Amelia Tait
I finished off February with the proof of my friend Amelia’s debut children’s book which I wanted to read in a useful timescale so that I could blurb it if I liked it. Thankfully I loved it and there’s a little quote by me on the cover now. It’s always slightly nerve-wracking reading books by friends, especially debuts, but Amelia is an excellent, very funny, very clever journalist (and an excellent, very funny, very clever person) and so I knew the odds were good. This is a charming, funny diary style book about a modern girl who is shunted back to random periods of time where all her friends and family are the same but she’s the only one aware they’re in a different time period. If you’re a millennial who grew up reading Georgia Nicolson, or you’re the parent of a tween who loves Lottie Brooks, I’d really recommend pre-ordering for when it publishes in June. A really lovely balance of silliness with warmth and sense about friendship and growing up. Spoilers but Amelia is a guest on the summer series of the podcast with a great book pick.
Most of March was taken up with finishing the first full draft of my debut adult novel, a romcom called Read Me Like a Book. It’s out next spring and is about an unbookish woman who ends up with a job in a failing indie bookshop where she finds a portal into Pride and Prejudice - a novel she hasn’t read. We (ie my agents and I) sold it on a partial last autumn, which was very exciting at the time but comes with huge pressure to deliver something that lives up to what the editors bought. I am not enjoying waiting for them to read it!! I’ve really, really enjoyed writing this book; it’s a love letter to romcoms and to bookshops and to Pride and Prejudice. It’s also, I hope, romantic and silly and funny. But writing in a totally new genre for a different age group has of course been quite the task and taken up basically the entirety of my brain. Usually I read on breaks between work but last month I just played Switch (I have completed Hades II, please talk to me if you’ve played it) or did jigsaws; my brain was simply not up to anything more.
At one point towards the beginning of the month I had an absolute crisis of confidence over my book and it just not being right or good enough. I decided to read an Emily Henry to remind myself of a good romcom but this was such a daft plan because I obviously just freaked myself out over how good she is and how beloved her books are. Having said that, I did still enjoy it. I really liked the flashbacks to how the characters got together and I love a book about a friendship group. I also really craved lobster rolls while reading it due to it’s Maine fishing town setting.
I should’ve read something wildly different to what I was trying to write but I’d started and didn’t go back to five separate novels, including some of my most anticipated books for this year (that no doubt I will go back to at some point).
Essentially there’s no great reveal of why I’ve hardly read anything this year; it’s exactly what it seems like which is that I’ve been writing non-stop and when I’ve not been writing I’ve been travelling and doing promotional book events. (And when I’ve been doing neither of those I’ve been playing Hades II.) And also for the last several years I’ve been trying to read as much of the Women’s Prize longlist as possible at the moment which I’m taking a pause from. But I really miss reading more and my brain misses it too. While the next few months feature a lot more deadlines, and mainly podcast reading (there are some GREAT guests on the summer series) I’m determined to squeeze at least a few books in that aren’t for work and I’m dreaming of the summer when hopefully I’ll be able to do a stint of uninterrupted reading for pleasure.