What Reading Taught Me
I have reviewed a lot of books now. More than twenty for IOL, and somewhere in the middle of them I stopped being the same reader I was when I started.
Reviewing is different from reading. You cannot drift. You have to notice why a paragraph works, where an argument thins, which sentence you will still be carrying at midnight. You read with a pen in your hand and a deadline behind you, and slowly that attention stops being something you switch on for work.
It follows you out of the book. You start noticing how people say things. You catch the moment a conversation shifts. You see the light change in a room.
Reading closely is just practice for living closely.
The books did their own work too. Jet Li on what remains when fame falls away. A memoir on what we inherit and refuse to name. A quiet guide to finding calm in chaos that arrived exactly when I needed it and not a day sooner. Books have a habit of doing that. They rarely announce themselves. They just turn up and rearrange something.
Tea with Ree came out of that habit. All those months of reading closely and writing carefully left me with more than fitted into a review. Thoughts about ecology and stillness, about travel and the odd machinery of modern life. Things nobody commissioned. So I built somewhere to put them.
That is the whole origin story. No grand plan. Just a reader who kept noticing things and eventually needed a bigger table.
The reviews are still there and still going. This is where the rest lives.