Matt Haig

Okay I feel I need to update you on our plans for The Golden Bookshop, Especially as a lot of clever sleuths in Brighton have noticed that the sign that said ‘Under Offer’ last month now says ‘To Let’. So yes, we had a place in Seven Dials in Brighton and it was potentially perfect. We had an offer accepted. We got plans together. We got the builder around. We got some architectural plans underway. But then, suddenly, we had a warning from the lawyers. These weren’t any old lawyers they are some of the best in the country and they were doing this work for us because they wanted to (I had done an event for their law firm a while back) and they told us WAIT A MINUTE. They said that they had never seen a contract like the one we were being asked to sign. There were, let’s say, some unusual conditions and clauses. I literally can’t say more than this for legal reasons. But however much I am looking forward to setting up a bookshop café it has to be right. Although it goes against every ADHD instinct of mine to hold back I am also not stupid enough to ignore a lawyer when they tell you they haven’t been able to sleep because of a contract. So, basically, we are having to find somewhere else. This has set us back by three months. Maybe more. But we are still as passionate as ever - more so - about setting up a bookshop. We just need to be sure the place is right and that the contract isn’t so strange it causes lawyers to have insomnia. In other words I am for once in my life being a professional. I am sorry. But we are looking for somewhere new. Brighton probably but right now other options are on the table. We ideally want to set it up for someone to run. I still want to write books and see the world, but also have the resources to set up something non-profit that can truly give back to a community. It’s still very on. Just not where we thought it was, so dear people posting letters and applications through that letterbox, you can stop now. Running a bookshop is hard enough without having to make it harder with bad terms. We want it to be perfect. And watch this space. Sorry. Thank you for your patience. I am not a business person and this is all new. Matt x

The government wanted a report into neurodiversity to prove it is overdiagnosed and it proved the opposite. The government-backed review shows that the prevalence of adhd and autism in the population has remained largely the same over decades. The only change has been in terms of awareness and understanding. Correct diagnosis would ease social problems, from addiction to mental illness to prison rates. Only the most narrow minded politician would think diagnosing fewer people would save money.

Me via @youngmindsuk

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.