In my mid-twenties, I grew anxious when I realised that I often couldn’t recall much about the books I’d read. This seemed to me a great character flaw: why would I spend my waking hours reading, if the knowledge I gained soon vanished? In a desperate attempt to fix books more firmly in my brain, I began to draft short summaries as I finished each one. (This effort soon devolved into an iPhone list of ‘Books I’ve Read’ and has now become an even lazier Goodreads list, which does not even bother to use the star-rating system provided.)

I was therefore relieved to learn that my inability to recall a book’s detail does not render the act of reading a senseless waste, because the books I’ve read have imprinted ‘wraiths of memory’ in my neural pathways (I can’t vouch for the credibility of this pop neuroscience, but it’s reassuring nonetheless). I’ve since taken to picturing the recesses of my brain as a vast library, dimly lit and wood-panelled, where the books I’ve read lurk, dusty and forgotten, until the Librarian—a stern figure who’s always shushing me, drowning out my protests that I am the sole patron of my library—is summoned to fetch a particular title and lend it out to my consciousness. I thought it might be worth making the trip down to these archives to see where the Librarian has shelved my latest reads.