Matt Haig

Out today. One person will win this graphic novel version. Adapted by genius Fred Fordham. Simply comment below for a chance to be chosen. Happy Thursday.

I hate the whole judgemental thing we have going on in book world about people who don’t read books or who read a few books or not as many as whoever is judging. This is not how you get more people to read books. This, in fact, is how people stop reading books. They don’t do well at school and feel books are part of the academic world they didn’t fit into so they never read again. Or that books are for posh people. Or whatever. And everyone in book culture plays a small part in how they are seen. If we laugh at what people say in bookshops or mock people for not reading we are the dumb ones. There are no non readers. Everything is reading. Stories began as a spoken form. Everyone has heard someone tell them a story. And reading doesn’t have to be words. Reading pictures is reading. Reading expressions or humour or silence. Life is reading. Books are a special deep kind of reading but just a concentrated italicised version of what life is. And it’s not what you read but how. You could have a massively more profound response to a piece of graffiti than a booktokker reading Kafka or Dostoyevsky for the dark academia cred. Someone could get more meaning from The Little Prince than War and Peace. I used to know someone who loved to say they hated The Alchemist. Then it turned out they had never even read The Alchemist. It’s not what you read. It’s the mind interacting with what is read. Some of my favourite novels are songs. The Boys of Summer is a poem. ‘Deadhead sticker on a Cadillac’ says more about the decline of hippy values into capitalist ones than a million theses. Everything is reading. I am meant to be promoting the fact that The Midnight Library graphic novel is out today but it turned into this. Sorry publishers.

A reviewer recently said that my sentences are too simple and that I could do with knowing some more words and so this is a quote for him because he is probably right but I like simple words as they make me calm

Very impressive book. To take an incredibly depressing premise about a man with Alzheimer’s and planning euthanasia it is strangely not depressing. I say this as someone with a v close relative going through similar right now. I think what Emma Cline shows is that if you write anything sharply enough the end effect is life affirming because you see things sharper. And writing about life on the edge of death can bring that energy. Unflinching boldness. Didion via a modern sass. A very clever and sometimes funny novel about cognitive decline. Brilliant writing pencil sharpening the mind

Somewhere along the way men decided it is better to aspire to be a lump of granite than, say, a woman with empathy