I recently emptied out the laundry basket that sits under my bed that holds—along with the requisite unread New Yorkers and optimistic scarves and beanies of a sub-tropical inhabitant—all the books I’m currently ‘reading’. I use this word in the loosest term. I dislodged a month’s worth of abandoned tomes, nearly all of which were review copies, as my job is the kid-in-a-candy-store vocation of buyer for an independent bookshop. Alongside being an amateur writer myself, I get to sit down with publishing reps ever month and—get this—they give me free copies of books that haven’t even come out yet. Awesome, right? Yes and no.

I pulled ten books out of my laundry basket (necessary protection from my cat who likes to ‘eat’ books to get me up in the morning), of which only two I considered myself realistically finishing. The one downside of getting to peek ahead in the publishing world (with a view to deciding what to stock on the shelves at the bookshop) is that I feel duly pressured to be across it all, which means I often lug home six or seven books every weekend, saying to myself this time I will read them all. Unfortunately this means I give too many books to little attention, and quite often means reading becomes quite the opposite of what it should be: that is, a pleasure.