IF you need me this Christmas, I'll be reading. On my bedside table there are two piles of books. One is a ubiquitous, teetering skyscraper that sits there year-round, seemingly never diminishing in size, even with my voracious reading habit.
The other is my special Christmas week stack that I have been carefully curating, fighting the urge to peek inside the pages (I'll admit I have succumbed on a few occasions and ravenously devoured a few paragraphs before tearing myself away).
What's in there I hear you ask? Mostly thrillers. Bit of festive schmaltz. A couple of showbiz autobiographies. There are also some book-shaped presents wrapped beneath the tree that I can't wait to tear open come Christmas morning.
One such treasured gift was a collection of classics from my parents in my mid-teens. My mum's arm muscles must have been bulging like Popeye's by the time she lugged them home on the bus from Edinburgh.
Among their number were Austen, the Brontes, Dickens and Hardy. Over the past quarter of a century, I have carted these books with me from home to home. They have been to student flats, crossed the Atlantic twice and followed me to umpteen pads from Basingstoke to Bellshill.
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As I type, they sit on a nearby shelf. Their spines are cracked, the pages dog-eared and yellowed. Far From The Madding Crowd has the time-worn remnants of a faded bookmark tucked in at a beloved passage.
I can still remember the joy as I unwrapped them. I began reading straightaway. As we ate dinner on Christmas Day, I surreptitiously dipped into the pages of The Return of The Native between courses. That night I climbed into bed and read into the wee small hours.
I was always on the hunt for books growing up. Mainly they came from trips to libraries around West Lothian, a well-trodden circuit that took in Broxburn, Linlithgow and Carmondean in Livingston.
Reading brought adventure and escapism, stoking my imagination and a chance to get lost in new and exciting worlds.
While books have remained important throughout my life, this year – as we have weathered the pandemic – I found myself craving them with the same fierce intensity I did as a child.
If you are looking for reading material this festive season, I can recommend The Midnight Library by Matt Haig, A Dark Matter and The Big Chill by Doug Johnstone, The Memory Wood by Sam Lloyd, Earthlings by Sayaka Murata and Christmas Is Murder by Val McDermid, all among recent favourites.
There is a wonderful tradition in Iceland called Jolabokaflod, which translates roughly to English as "Christmas book flood", where all across the country, people exchange books on Christmas Eve. How lovely is that?
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As for me, the phone will be off the hook ("airplane mode" engaged) and my social media accounts largely idle. I'll see you on the other side. Hopefully, several books lighter.
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