The Books I Read And The Book I Wrote
I’ve got a full, curated bookshelf, twelve compartments, and honestly there’s nothing on it I would call filler anymore.
My Bookshelf, My Rules
A few months back I got a bit ruthless with the whole thing, went through every single book one at a time, did a bit of digging on each one, and if it wasn’t actually something I was interested in, or the reviews weren’t great, or it was one of those airport reads that doesn’t leave you with much, it went straight into the library donation pile. Four of the twelve compartments are already read, the rest is queued up, and that’s the bar now for anything new that lands on there.
And most of what’s on there I didn’t pay full price for, which I quite like actually. There’s a library in Meadowridge that sells books for R5, so every now and again I’ll wander in and grab a couple just because. There was also this woman in Muizenberg who used to put books out on her garden wall every Tuesday, completely free, and take whatever you like. I don’t live there, so I’d miss it more often than I’d catch it, but I still walked away with a good chunk of my collection off that wall over the years, and I actually have no idea if she still does it. DARG in Hout Bay is next on my list; they’ve got a little bookshop on the property selling books for R10, and I’ve been saying I’ll get out there for ages now.
I don’t really stick to one genre either: adventure, drama, horror, memoirs, or real history; if it’s good, I’ll read it, no real logic to it beyond that. I just finished Nefertiti by Michelle Moran and really enjoyed it, though I’ve got a bit of a bone to pick with it too. It’s fiction built on real historical figures, so there’s obviously a lot of gaps Moran had to fill in without hard evidence either way, and I get why she made the choices she did. What I didn’t love was how she painted Nefertiti and Akhenaten as power-hungry, emotionally immature, greedy, and selfish, with basically nothing to back that up historically. What we do know is that Nefertiti had real influence over Akhenaten and over Egypt at the time, which to me says she was a genuinely powerful figure, not the version we got in the book.
Wilbur Smith is probably the author I’ve read the most of, especially the Egypt books and the Courtney series, to the point where there are one or two I’ve gone back and read again. Though I will say, the more of his books I get through, the more this pattern bothers me: how young girls are sexualised in his writing. It’s not a once-off; it shows up again and again. I still enjoy his storytelling, but it’s pushed me to start looking around for other authors doing something similar without that baggage attached.
Reading for me happens at night, before bed, and it’s less about losing myself in a story and more about how it actually helps me switch off and fall asleep at a decent hour. I try to get through about twenty pages a night, which sounds small, but between a strict bedtime and not having much spare time during the day, that’s about a book a month, the same mission I mentioned in my usual working mom routine.
Weekends occasionally give me a bit more breathing room if the house is quiet enough, which is really the only “reset” I actually go in for. More on that here.
The Book I Wrote (And the One I Haven’t Published Yet)
Now the other side of all this reading is that I’ve actually written one of these myself. Altair and The Lost Stories came out of my Honours year, funnily enough, while I was studying modernity and sitting through lectures and talking it through with other students, and somewhere in there it just clicked into a story I needed to get out. It follows a boy called Altair who’s always questioning the traditions of his village, so he goes looking for answers in Aegis, a city built entirely on reason and science instead. He ends up with a spirit guide, goes through a set of trials, and slowly works out that the two sides he was told to choose between were never actually opposites; he doesn’t have to pick—he just has to learn to carry both. It’s up on Amazon now, and honestly I haven’t had much luck with that route; I wouldn’t really recommend it to any new author looking to actually sell copies. But finishing my own book, start to finish, was a proper achievement for me, and I think that’s worth saying out loud rather than brushing past. There’s already a second one written too, a continuation of Altair’s story, not published yet, but it was always meant to be a series.
So that’s where I’m at: a curated bookshelf full of books I actually love and one of my own out in the world, with a second one already waiting. I would love to hear what you’re reading at the moment or what you would recommend I add to that shelf next. And if you’ve ever written something yourself, even if it’s sitting unpublished on your laptop right now, or you tried the Amazon route and had the same no-luck experience I did, I want to hear that too. Even better if you’ve got a publisher you’d actually recommend, because I’m all ears at this point. Drop it all in the comments.
Still figuring out the money side of starting over?
I didn’t build The Honest Reset from theory; I built it from standing in the Checkers aisle doing maths that had nothing to do with a calculator. It’s a 38-page guide for facing your actual numbers, stripped of guilt and wishful thinking.
Read the full story behind it here: The Guide I Made For The Woman Standing Where I Am