It's a Whole New Year

Happy New Year!

Welcome back to my blog, which has been dormant for most of last year. 2017 was a bizarre and busy year that didn’t leave a lot of time for reading or blog writing. For the last few months I’ve hardly picked up a book at all, which I’m sure you will know, is not like me. Since my late teens I’ve struggled with frequent migraines but last September they increased like nothing I’ve had before.

Since then there haven’t been many days where I’ve been headache free. One of the annoying things about that is that I haven’t been up for much reading. I haven’t had the concentration for it. But happily for me they have started to decrease over Christmas and so book reading is back on my list of things to do for 2018.

As is this blog.

One thing that I started last year was to focus more on writing fiction with my good friend Sally. In my reading famine I’ve had the privilege of reading her work, which I hope she will one day share with the world. She has a blog of her own and I highly recommend you travel down this link and have a look; https://booksbythewindow.wordpress.com/

If you’ve been reading this blog in previous years you will know that I’ve not got on well with poetry. Well, some things change and although I’m still not claiming to be a fan there have been some poems that I’ve fallen in love with in 2017.

Maybe it’s a concentration thing but I’ve needed stuff that’s short. More than ever I’ve been able to remember short phrases or ideas. I might have struggled to read words, but there’s been nothing wrong with my imagination, and I’ve sustained my need for story by using concepts from those poems as a launch into creating worlds inside my head. And it’s not just been poems, sometimes I’ve heard people say phrases that are so poetic that I’ve stored them away to use them as story titles later on.

Charlotte Bronte’s poems written after the deaths of her sisters, Emily and Anne are new discoveries for me and maybe this year the poetry of the Bronte sisters is something that I will explore. I’ve also rediscovered a poem by Robert Frost that I haven’t revisited since I studied it at A-level. Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening was one of the first poems that I understood and loved. You should look all three of them up sometime; the two by Charlotte Bronte are On the Death of Emily Bronte and On the Death of Anne Bronte. But maybe have something light hearted to read afterwards – it’s a heavy way to start the year.

Over the next couple of weeks I’ll let you know what I was reading last year up until the point I crashed out. After that the possibilities are endless. There are so many books I want to read this year.

So let me know what you’ve been reading while I’ve been gone. What are your recommendations? What did I miss?