Throwing a spotlight on humanity

There are two high street presences that cause my family to groan when I spy them.  The first is an estate agent's office.  If we're on holiday somewhere and I see a display of houses in a window, they're often halfway down the road before they realise I've become lost in an imaginary world of home ownership in our latest setting. The other establishment, which represents far greater peril to our timetable, is that most worthy of retailers, the bookseller.  If I slip through the door of a book shop, I may never be found. This is particularly true in Hay-on-Wye, where the density of book shops means that if they fail to spot which one I've sidled into, their searches are prolonged and often only end when I emerge with something to add to the library. The Japanese have a lovely word to describe this compulsion, Tsundoku, which loosely, is the phenomenon of allowing reading materials to pile up in a home.

Umberto Eco refers to this habit as an Antilibrary, and is purported to have over 50,000 books across his apartment in Milan and his vacation home.

While nowhere in Eco's league, I am guilty of serial book acquisition, with the caveat that I do intend to read the content of my little library. To aid in the process, I have developed a quirky system and accompanying spreadsheets. The image below is my active to be read pile.  Although it consists of 19 books, in my convoluted system, that represents a TBR pile of 38 - there are other sources, both physical and virtual, from where I choose the alternate volumes.

They are the unread novels that sit on the shelves at home (387), books that occupy a spreadsheet I compiled from a variety of top 100 lists in the UK, the US and France (277), and my Goodreads 'Want to Read' list (53). These numbers exclude the multiple volumes that I have loaded onto my Kindle in advance of Amazon's announced redundancy of its older models.

Most authors are prodigious readers. Consequently, the influence of others naturally seeps in to what we write.  Some of what I read informs my writing, not through plagiarism, but through imitation.  I can read a brilliant novel and discover that I have lost my 'voice' in the immediate aftermath and become a pastiche of another writer. Of course, when that other writer is brilliant, that's not necessarily a bad thing, but it's impossible to sustain for the time it takes to write a novel.  Invariably, I rediscover my writing style during the editing process, sadly casting away some lovely paragraphs that resemble the prose of someone else. If you've read my work, you'll know that I enjoy delving into the lives of my characters, most of whom are unremarkable on first blush, but on closer examination, have life experiences worth exploring.

It's the type of story I also like to read, and recently I finished The Beekeeper of Aleppo by Christy Lefteri which left me in awe of her ability to capture the complexities of human nature in her storytelling. Her book is nothing short of extraordinary. It's both heart-breaking and up-lifting and if you wanted to gain a glimpse of what life must be like for genuine refugees, then I urge you to give her book a read.

Although a fiction, her book draws upon real life experiences, which serve as a reminder that many of those seeking to enter our country have endured horrific hardship.  While populists suggest that our country's woes lay at the feet of immigrants because it suits their purposes, it is worth remembering that behind many applications for asylum lie unimaginable tragedy and heart-breaking loss.  Lefteri's book gave me pause to think that we should perhaps be a little kinder to those who are hoping to join us for a better and safer life.

That's it from me. Cheerio for now Craig ======= Craig Brown is an author living in Newbury.  To follow his work visit craigbrownauthor.com Facebook/BlueSky/Threads/Instagram: @GOMinTraining Copyright © Craig Brown, 2026 28 May 2026