Kathy Hamilton 
They tell you to write about what you know and what I know is books. I love books, I love reading them, I love writing about them, I’ve literally paid money to know more about books…You could call it an obsession, but I prefer life calling! For the past four years at University my day to day life has revolved around books. I’ve just finished my Masters and honestly, I didn’t want it to stop so I decided to start a blog about books and so here I am.
The thing about studying English is that it can really convince you that there is such a thing as “proper” fiction. This really annoyed me because most of the books I truly love were never ones that fitted neatly into “proper”. I wrote my dissertation on romance fiction, and although my tutor was really enthusiastic about this she also told me that even five years ago it wouldn’t have been considered an acceptable topic. So although academia has done so much to remove itself from the dusty old men with moustaches stereotype it seems like it still has a little way to go. I suppose this didn’t really surprise me but it did get me thinking; I recently came across a quote by Oscar Wilde and it seems to capture what I want this blog to be about, he said: “It is what you read when you don’t have to that determines what you will be when you can’t help it.” At university we used to joke that none of us has read a book because we wanted to in years, all of us looked forward to the holidays so we could read anything, it’s silly when I think about it. So this blog is an experiment. It’s an ode to the books I love (and the ones I don’t).
Thank you for taking the time to read this, I hope you’ll enjoy reading the blog as much as I enjoy writing it, I’d love to connect & hear from everyone, you can find me here or on twitter, and remember, if you have any thoughts, feeling or opinions please don’t keep them to yourself!
