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I Found My Way Back to Reading Joy and My Path Was Backlist
Or, how to dramatically improve your reading life in 2022
For years now, I’ve been reading only bang-up-to-date, of-the-moment books. I’ve been writing for Book Riot since 2015, and listening to the podcasts since long before that, and this community gets excited about new books. That excitement was, and is, infectious.
Because I realised I didn’t know anything about what was happening in the world of books back home, I started the Brit Lit Blog in 2016 and then the Brit Lit Podcast in 2017. And I was, inevitably, drawn to the buzzy books: novels like Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman and The Lido by Libby Page (known in the US as Mornings with Rosemary) were all over my Twitter feed. Both of those I read, and both were excellent and have become favourites. But those are the examples I remember, and here’s why: around that time, I also read, or bought and never read, lots of buzzy books that I haven’t thought about since.
When I first started seriously reading again, more than a decade ago, my book discovery was more organic. I was learning to write and reading books about the craft, and they would point me to books from recent years or long ago. I was walking around bookshops, seeing what took my fancy. I was obsessively reading books…
