Since getting the job as Emerging Book Critic a few months ago, I’ve had to be very intentional about what I read because I realised I take much longer to get through a book than I used to. Working with deadlines is great in making sure I am deliberate and strategic about my reading.

I finished Rachel Kushner’s The Mars Room recently, which was sensational. I felt really ashamed that I’d never read anything by her before. She has an extremely well-adjusted tenor for pacing and speech. By this, I mean the narrator’s speech—not the characters’ dialogue. The best line in the book is definitely this one: ‘Eva’s mom was white. Her dad was Filipino. Her mom was a heroin addict. Her dad was strict’. She should be given the Nobel Prize for those lines alone. It is so, so brilliant. I had it going in the car too as an audiobook. I had a cased CD set of Rachel reading it. She’s got such a girly, juvenile voice. It was weird. I found it off-putting at first, but quickly got into the tone of it. The main character, Romy Hall, doesn’t sound like someone who’d sound like Rachel. I listened to it, and read it (at different times) and liked experiencing the story like this: two different ways, both offering me something new and fresh. Ideally, I’d like to consume a book as a paperback while having it read to me. I think that’s the ultimate way to read a book. But I didn’t have a CD player at home, so I had to experience the audio version of it while I was driving.