My books of the year...

Of course it's daft making such predictions in February because who knows what the next ten months will bring, but I can't imagine much beating the very different books I have on the go at the moment.



Twyla Tharp is one of the great choreographers in America, and her book, The Creative Habit discusses the lessons she's learnt about creativity. Even the design of the book seems to let the light in - it feels inspiring just to look at. I've been thinking about space and writing a lot at the moment. I keep wanting to cut open up my sentences and breathe. In The Creative Habit, there are so many paragraphs and sentences I've underlined and marked throughout that it's obvious it deserves a post of its own soon. I always scribble on my favourite books, I treat it as a compliment to the writer - (provided they are my own books, of course) but it made me laugh when about half way through the book, Twyla Tharp said: 'you have written on this book, haven't you?' It summed up the feel of the book for me, like having a conversation with the kind of wise mentor you dream of.

My second book is All We Know by Ciaran Carson, which is not just a 'novelistic' sequence of poems, it is one which - and I'll take this from the blurb - gestures 'towards a conventional sonnet sequence - the poems consist of fourteen lines, or multiples therof, in lines of fourteen syllables.' And if that wasn't enough, it references film noir, Cold War thriller, fairy story, and the art of the fugue. Best of all, you can forget all of the above when you're reading it and just enjoy it. This is one of the best books I've read recently about everything to do with love. Trust me.

And of course, there is this one, which just keeps getting better and better and more frightening and funnier as I read on.