It feels good to read books set in or originating from the places you visit—the added depth creates something like immersion; an extra layer of understanding. This works in both directions—your understanding of the book is tied up forever with your experience of the city. In London, I read A Room of One’s Own. In it, Virginia Woolf describes London as being ‘like a machine. We were all being shot backwards and forwards on this plain foundation to make some pattern.’ Running the foot race that is the first week of a holiday, with its equal measures of panic and liberation, I felt the force of the machine of London ricochet through my body.

Woolf became a ghost shadow beside me in that drizzling almost-summer city. Bloomsbury charmed me with its blue plaques and pavers, its well-tended gardens and student housing. I visited Persephone Books, and gravitated towards a copy of Woolf’s diary extracts. Later at the London Review of Books bookstore, I felt a magnetic pull toward a white, gold, and blue covered book titled Too Much and Not the Mood (by Durga Chew-Bose) which, on further inspection, turns out to take its title from something Virginia Woolf wrote. Woolf walked beside me in London, and it was a comfort. Her presence made an unfamiliar place feel more like home.