Having a baby recently has caused me to read in a different way. Not in a metaphysical sense—I don’t think I can claim any great new insights or sensitivities as a result of motherhood—but in a purely physical way, my reading has been transformed. These days, the only chance I get to read is while breastfeeding, and I’ve not yet mastered doing that with a paper book in hand, so my reading for the last seven months has been limited to e-books, read one-handed on my phone (largely in the chair pictured, the comfiest one for feeding).

I’ve just started re-reading Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, which is a revelation every time. McCarthy is a flawed writer; his depictions of female characters are often troubling (or simply absent), and his baroque language sometimes reaches absurd levels of portentousness and convolution. Despite these issues, he is, I think, one of the great contemporary novelists, and certainly one of my favourites. I read him with that double-edged feeling that plagues writers when reading the greats: admiration (you can do that with language!) and despair (but everyone else, including me, might as well give up writing immediately, because McCarthy is just so good!). Blood Meridian’s ‘the judge’, the monstrous, mysterious polymath, is one of fiction’s genuinely terrifying figures. The final lines of the novel have are the raw material of many of my nightmares: ‘He never sleeps. He says that he will never die. He dances in light and in shadow and he is a great favourite. He never sleeps, the judge. He is dancing, dancing. He says that he will never die.’