🗺️ Location

This year’s reading retreat took place in a city I chose specifically because I had no interest in it. No pressure to explore, no cultural guilt – just a quiet space with a kettle, a bed, and enough amenities to get by. Perfect. Oh and a Marks & Spencer for the perfect hotel room-nic. IYKYK.

It offered exactly what I needed: a place to leave things behind, the housework left by a summer of family visits, the maintenance projects of home, the weight of work, the low hum of weariness. It was the wood between the worlds, minus the pools (yes the Magician’s Nephew is my favourite Narnia book).

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📚 Books Brought vs Books Read

I travelled light this time, not just in luggage, but in expectations. I didn’t aim to finish piles of books. I just wanted to be with them, and let them be with me. I like to bring extras incase the mood changes – nothing worse than being stuck with a suitcase of non-fiction when all your brain wants is long, lyrical, poetic fiction…

Here’s what I read:

• 🧭 Main Book: Vulture by Phoebe Greenwood: Raw, taut, emotional. It held me firmly in its grip and mirrored back some of the still-unprocessed weight I had carried into the weekend. Gaza is top of mind at almost all times, this book offered a different lens for my thoughts.
• 🌌 Secondary Book: The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin: Expansive, cerebral, a total shift in scale. Where Vulture felt like close-up photography, this was satellite imaging, useful contrast, but I dipped in and out rather than getting swept away. Having said that, it has rather consumed my reading time since.
• 🌿 Between the Lines: A Recipe for Sorcery by Vanessa Kisuule: this became my ritual reset. When I felt full or scattered, I’d read a poem or two. Like opening a window. A breath of wind. Poetry was the punctuation I didn’t know I needed.

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🌀 Reading Rhythms

Mornings were the best — a warm drink, quiet light, no pressure. Rain outside providing the perfect excuse to not search out that trending coffee shop…
Evenings were heavier, less focused, but still comforting, a quick room service G&T helped the reading along.
I noticed I moved not just between books but between modes of attention. It helped to have different genres to meet those shifts without guilt.

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💭 Standout Moments

From Vulture, I won’t forget the way grief and observation collapsed into each other. The writing gave no easy out, and I respect that. It made me reflect on some of my own ‘on the edge’ travel experiences, where things don’t feel real (my privilege in operation), but you are face to face with the real pain of others. Places I was not 100% sure I should be, but witnessing felt important.

In The Three-Body Problem, the idea of distant systems and incomprehensible rules echoed something I’ve felt in real life lately: the sense that not everything can be solved or even named. Working in emerging technologies tends to feel like an open world video game, creating a narrative as much as exploring what is there. Familiar but completely unknown.

And in Vanessa Kisuule’s poems, I found small, alchemical truths – recipes, indeed, for turning the intangible into language. I will certainly seek out more of her work.

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✈️ For Next Time

• I’ll take more poetry. Always.
• I won’t force myself to “finish” anything – wandering was just as valuable.
• I might even pack a blank notebook next time, not for journaling but for catching sentences.
• And maybe I’ll choose a slightly nicer hotel…one that encourages long baths and late checkouts. One is the countryside or right on the beach.

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🌳 Final Note

This weekend wasn’t about escaping into fiction. It was about stepping sideways into something slower, stranger, and more generous. A wood between the worlds, and just enough time to float.