Cultivating a reading life

I learned to read perched on my grandmother’s knee. She was chair-bound, I was about four years old. I remember the shimmering scales on the book The Rainbow Fish and my nanna’s finger skating beneath each word as she read out loud. As a child, reading was at once a solitary journey — my first independent adventure — and an exercise in connection; a shared joy. This paradox remains just as true and thrilling today.

This is not to say that my relationship with reading is an uncomplicated one. Very often, reading is not easy. It can be difficult to summon the concentration. I’m sucked into the vortex of my phone. Or I dip fretfully in and out of five books before landing, grateful, on something that feels right. My