What is a book blog without any books?

And no, there is no punchline here. It turns out a book blog without any books isn’t really much of anything at all.

This year has been a most unusual one all things told. For starters, I finished reading a book the other day and it was the first one I’d read since March. It was only the 19th book I’d read this year and my reading muscle was so withered that I could only cope with a book I’d already read twice before (Hilary Mantel’s Beyond Black – if you haven’t, do).

While I wasn’t reading, I was growing a tiny human…

Hands

But my version of pregnancy was most definitely not what you see in films. There were no floaty dresses and I didn’t glow. No laughing over funny cravings, while glowing, and then marvelling at how lustrous and thick my hair had become. From about week 5, it was nausea and vomiting, relentless and all consuming. The vomiting eased up from about week 26 but the nausea never went away. And that was it. Just the thought of reading a book was enough to make me dry heave. It would have been like being forced to read in the back of a car while experiencing horrendous travel sickness. There’s a lovely tall, double-stacked bookshelf of my ‘to read’s in the living room and I couldn’t even bear to look at it after a while.

It all sounds terribly sad but I actually didn’t miss the books. I missed the days of ‘not feeling sick’, of course, but that was about all really. But for someone whose life was so dominated by books it was a bit like being someone else for a time.

Then when my tiny person got to be about 3 weeks old (she’s nearly 6 weeks now), I was sitting feeding one day when I picked up Beyond Black and thought I’d experiment with a paragraph or two. And it was like holding a match to a pile of dry kindling. Whooomph! Before I knew it, I was utterly consumed by my desire to read ALL THE WORDS as quickly as possible. So much so, that while temporarily stranded without a book the other day I read and reread the instruction leaflet for our new Snufflebabe nasal aspirator a few times over.

Of course, having a tiny person makes reading ALL the words hard to achieve and I do still need to carve out plenty of time in my day for staring at her like a love-sick puppy. But at the very least, there are now a few books. And that means there might just be a book blog.

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2 thoughts on “What is a book blog without any books?

  1. Oh, you’re back! That’s splendid!

    I’m sorry you had such a horrendous time while you were pregnant. Not only the relentless vomiting but also feeling as if you were someone else is a fairly horrific combination. BUT – congratulations! A baby! That’s so cool!

    Pro tip: babies make ideal book rests when they’re feeding. Also, now you get to cram your house with even more books because you’re ‘buying for her’ too, and you have an excellent excuse to reread all your childhood favourites too. Really, it’s nothing but good.

    I hope that life is happier for you all now. 🙂

    Like

    • Thanks Helen. It’s really nice to BE back and not only am I hoping to do some blogging, I’ve been really enjoying catching up on reading the blogs I follow – yours included! I’m glad you mentioned the ‘buying for her’ excuse because I’ve been using that one a lot lately. We’re currently working on ‘her’ library of essential books that we don’t already own… She’s showing her gratitude by attempting her first smiles and throwing up on a lot of my clothes 🙂

      Like

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