Volume 3, No. 15: Reading Like I'm on a Walk

On Surprising Connections

Greetings, book and treat people! I’m on my beloved island for a few weeks. I’m mostly working, but I’m also taking a few days off at the end of this week. And I’m doing a lot of this:

I love walking on this island. Partly, this is because the landscape is so beloved to me. My heart lives in these moors and beaches and winding dirt roads, in the salt wind and scrub oak. Partly, it’s because walking on an island holds a certain kind of magic. Walk far enough and you’ll always arrive at the ocean. Island walks feel small, and they feel endless. Islands invite wandering. The loops I make across the dirt paths over the moors, the tracks my footsteps leave in the sand—it’s a kind of walking that slows me down. I pick a direction, I step off, something in me unfurls.

I love my reading life the most when it’s like this, too—when it feels like one long meander through a living, shifting landscape. A good week of reading feels like a good walk: unexpected, full of surprises, with a destination t…