In the first iteration of this blog, many years ago, I occasionally wrote about books. But, being fresh out of university, I sort of felt that the books I should write about should be capital-L Literature.

Except that my everyday reading is more often lowercase-l literature, so I never really kept it up, no matter how much I tried. To be honest, a lot of Critics probably wouldn’t even allow them to be that, either. Which leads me to the most recent iteration. Evolution, maybe.

One of the advantages of getting older, even while studying capital-L Literature, is that you do rather get over such ideas and stop caring if the books you read, and therefore write about, fall under the very derogatory Holiday Reads category. Or, even, Mills & Boon. Let’s face it, even my beloved Georgette Heyer was published by Mills & Boon, back in the day before it became a sort of shorthand for novels more akin to the Bridgerton series currently taking Netflix by storm.

Some of the other reading I do falls into the “But aren’t you too old for that?” because it’s marketed at children. But I don’t hold with age limits on books. You read it, it brings you whatever you’re looking for in your reading, you go for it. Don’t let the marketers or anyone else tell you it isn’t for you.

And, having an escapist sort of summer after the capital-L Literature of the last year of study, I am rediscovering why I love reading, and the sorts of things I do, actually, love reading. As with all things this year, I’ve been rediscovering the everyday, lowkey sorts of joys of literature. For me, a bit less of the weighty, of the Wordsworth or the Conrad, and a bit more of the lighthearted and silly. A bit more of the things which can be read without too much thought, or which stand up to interruption by a Tiny.

Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed – well, Conrad, Collins, Christie, Milton, James, Desai, Clare and Shamsie; Wordsworth and Judge Dee I could take or leave; Poe, Godwinson, and the one I can never remember I prefer to leave. So that’s over half I enjoyed. A good score.

But, aside from Christie, and perhaps Shamsie and Collins, they aren’t what I might pick up in the general way of things. Jane Austen is my Proper Author of choice (which reminds me, I need to reread her books). Although I’m not sure if Christie falls into that category anyway: she’s too popular for that, her writing not high-brow enough. Never mind that she outsells basically every other author on the planet. I’d read Christie before the MA, anyway.

Having rediscovered the joy of reading, I’m returning to my Library Quest. For the lowercase-l literature as well as the capital-L Literature.

In other joys this week, we discovered a really easy recipe for pannacotta: start making a jelly as you normally would, but top up with cream or yogurt. It worked much better than I’d thought. To be fair, you could probably heat up cream for the first part of making jelly too, but I haven’t tested that theory yet. That’s on you if you do and it doesn’t work.