What do we read and why?
Is it random, the attractive cover, a good review or personal recommendation? Or do we choose our reading material to confirm, enliven, escape from, or inspire our own lives?

For the first time in months,I have a totally free weekend and want to read a book – but standing in front of my bookshelves I am flummoxed. I don’t know what I want to read.

Running my fingers over the spines, hardback, paperback, feeling the varying thickness and quality, some plastic coated, others old and wrinkled, a few crisp and virginal -- all dusty, I realise with a shock how much the content of my bookshelves reflect chapters in my life.

Where did it start?
My parents were avid readers but they didn’t own any books apart from the obligatory row of Readers Digest summaries, that accompanied the flying geese and lava lamps of the 50’s and 60’s. Every week my mother returned from the library with six books – four thrillers for herself and two Westerns for my father. In twenty years the pattern never changed, neither number nor genre. Surely over the years they digested the small local library’s entire stock? My mother must have been able to solve every murder by page 10 and my father must have known that the bad guy would die in the last gun-fight. It puzzled me why they never wanted to try something new. It was the same with the Daily Mirror crossword, which my mother whipped off every day – why not try a different one? These questions were never answered, primarily as I never quite got around to asking them.

I too was a voracious reader but, in a distant echo of today, I would stand in front of the library shelves not knowing where to start. Aged 11, I decided to read the complete works of Charles Dickens but on returning from the library discovered my chosen tome was by Monica Dickens and I didn’t like it.

At secondary school, I chomped my way through safe Thomas Hardy, and passed into adolescence with the help of risky DH Lawrence. At 16 I had my first literary love affairs, swept off my feet by the passion and complexities of the heroes of Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Turgenev. I cried with Anna Karenina and for Prince Myshkin, transported from my council estate in Sussex to 19th century Russia. “The Greatest Masterpieces of Russian Literature” were the first books I owned and how proud I was of the red and gold Heron Books that fell through my letterbox every month.

At University I didn’t have the time or money for both music and literature. Music won and my only books were dry weighty history textbooks.

In the following years of marriage and children, any book would do as long as it was not too short, not too demanding and could transport me from nappies and endless ways to turn half a pound of mince into a meal for five. The stories of Maeve Binchley, Mary Wesley and Rosamund Pilcher, were perfect--oasis of calm in the turmoil of domestic chaos. Roddy Doyle made me laugh.

Next came a dark period of unhappiness, self-doubt and ultimately divorce, when romance, either fluffy or tragic, would not do. Other people’s reading habits can be a surprise and one day a friend of many years standing revealed her extensive fantasy library. Seeming to sense what I needed, gently she led me into her secret world via Jean Auel’s Clan of the Cave Bear. Once hooked, I borrowed fat books by the carrier bag full and for a couple of years my nose was buried in tales of wizards, dragons and warlords. The multiple volumes of Raymond Feist, Stephen Donaldson, and David Eddings transported me to Belgariad and the Kingdom of the Isles, while my own world tumbled down around my ears.

As I passed into a new era as a single parent with a full-time career the reading, too, evolved. Crafty wizards were superseded by clever women – Margaret Atwood was top of the list, plus Doris Lessing, A S Byat with Zadie Smith following later. I was Kate, I was Mara.
My world began to expand and I flew with the Wild Swans along The Famished Road in search of A Suitable Boy.

As the children abandoned the nest, I began writing in my spare time, and reading for pleasure became a luxury confined to holidays and long train journeys.

Now, with a major writing task just completed, I have the time, but here I am, still bookless. There are lots of unread gems on my shelves-- Gorkys and Pushkins never opened, an eight volume Robert Jordan fantasy given to me by the husband of my friend when she died, quite a few charity shop epic sagas, loads of non-fiction….
Yet….my hand hovers, nothing draws it, and it wanders away to type this piece instead.

Is this a sign? Am I about to enter a new chapter of my life? If so, I wonder what books will accompany it?