the book and i take a break

2025 · 02

Right, honesty. Half of what this notebook is for anyway. I've stopped reading the big novel. There wasn't a moment where I decided. I just clocked that it had been on the arm of the chair for two weeks and the bookmark hadn't moved, and that the bookmark not moving was the entire problem.

I'm about a third in. J. put me onto it in the autumn and I took it seriously, because J. hardly recommends anything and because it's one of those books you're meant to have read. And it's good. That's the annoying bit. It isn't bad. It's that every night I pick it up, get through two pages, realise none of it went in, and start the page again.

Everyone in it has three names and a house in the country and I keep flipping back to work out who's talking. By the time I've sorted that I've lost the thread anyway. It wants more of me than I've got right now.

So the bookmark's gone on the shelf. Putting it there is the lie I tell myself about coming back. M. says I do this every winter, take on something too heavy and drop it. Probably right. I've started a thin book of short stories instead. Read three of them last night in one go and it felt like getting away with something.

I'll come back to the big one. I will, just not this month.