The first part of tour was intense, with four gigs in four days and lots of driving about, so I didn’t get much down time for reading. Often when travelling and gigging, there are lots of awkward time gaps that reading can nicely fill, but it just didn’t turn out that way at first. So The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson was a longer-term companion than I had expected, extended in my perception through the fact that for this entire stretch nothing scary had happened in the horror novel. Living in suspense of, quite frankly, more suspense, was a little weird - I really lived out the waiting.
The first shift to real horror began the first night I was camping, which I was doing alone. It really was not the right material to be getting into. But, having survived the night in one piece, I read a large chunk the following morning, and very quickly finished it.
The rest of the tour went by incredibly fast, and I whizzed through three other books: Trans Mission by Alex Bertie, Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury, and Turtles All the Way Down by John Green. I enjoyed all three, to varying degrees, but I also enjoyed the variety this brought me over the last stretch of my tour. Trans Mission is Alex Bertie’s telling of his experience coming out as a trans man, Fahrenheit 451 is a novel about social and intellectual control, and Turtles All the Way Down is a story about mental health.
Away from the normal responsibilities of life, and with little charge on my phone and laptop, it was so lovely to take a break from screens and fully escape into these books, filling the idle gaps of time with reading. I hope I bring this habit forwards with me, spending a little more time with books, a few pages at a time.
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