A Thinking Glossary (1)

The books I read this quarter - and what they cracked open

I started the year in Oman, then Dubai before heading back to London to dive back into the edits for my novel. I finished the third draft not long after I returned - an intense, emotional process that felt like a real deepening of my voice and vision. One that was possible because of the break, of what I had read while away.

In mid-February, I spent a couple of weeks with my family in Egypt - a moment to exhale before I slipped back into hibernation to begin work on the fourth draft - the one I would re-submit to my agent. I’d planned to return to London to do it, but when my friends at Road to Freedom told me they’d be flying to Cairo later that month - exactly a year after we first flew out together to deliver aid to Palestinians evacuated into Egypt - I decided to stay. That I’d do the draft from there. Be there when they arrived. Help however I could. I’m so glad I did.

Writing from Egypt - this place that holds so much of me, and so much of my character’s world - felt meaningful in ways I hadn’t fully anticipated. The backdrop of home and history, of memory and inheritance, threaded itself through the work. It gave the writing a kind of grounding, a clarity.

And it felt fitting somehow - to be editing while showing up in service. To be shaping a story while helping to hold space for others’ realities. Both are acts of witnessing. Both ask for care, precision, tenderness. Both require staying with discomfort and still choosing to act. It was a kind of parallel. A powerful one.

Last year, being there - standing alongside people who had lost everything, and still choosing love and hope - cracked something open in me. It showed me that helplessness is a tool of the oppressor. That we are never truly powerless if we can still speak, act, bear witness. It gave me the courage to start writing the book I had been too afraid to write. The permission to be braver. To care. And so to finish this chapter - both literally and figuratively - in the same place, a year later, felt like a kind of completion. A full circle.

In the midst of all this, reading was, as always, my non-negotiable and my constant. My grounding ritual. The first thing I do every morning. A way to come back to myself before moving into the day - into the edits, the world, the work.

This isn’t a traditional reading list, then - it’s a record of how the books I read this past quarter shaped my thinking, my writing, and my sense of self. A thinking glossary of sorts.

So much of what I have been writing about - power, detachment, desire, shame, embodiment, voice, womanhood - is present in these books. Some of them helped me articulate what I was already trying to say. Some helped me say it better. Some simply held me through the mess of it all.

Together, they chart a loosening. A deepening. A move from performance toward presence. From control toward something more honest, more embodied. A reckoning with the stories we’re given, and the ones we choose to tell instead.

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1. By Any Other Name, Jodi Picoult

I’ve read every single one of Jodi Picoult’s books. I love her. This one follows the speculative (but rooted-in-research) idea that Shakespeare didn’t write all his plays. That, in fact, some may have been written by a woman named Emilia Bassano - a real historical figure and a poet.

It’s about authorship, legacy, and who gets to be remembered. But more than that, it’s about a woman insisting on telling her own story, in her own words, in a world that’s determined to erase her.

It galvanised me. Reminded me why I write. Why it matters. Why telling our stories - especially the ones we were never meant to - is not just an act of creation, but of reclamation.

2. Love Marriage, Monica Ali

A tender, layered portrait of a Bengali family in London, full of clashing cultures, buried secrets, and quiet betrayals. I loved how non-judgemental it was - every character rendered with care. No heroes, no villains. Just humans, trying.

It was particularly beautiful - and brutal - on shame. How shame moves through generations. How it shapes our choices before we even realise it’s there. It was a reminder that even the most seemingly “quiet” family stories are never quiet. That what’s unsaid is just as loud. That every single one of us is carrying something inherited.

3. My Body, Emily Ratajowski

I read this in a single day while sitting by the pool on our last day in Oman. I had to keep pausing to breathe. The truths knocked the wind out of me.

So much of what Emily wrote hit something deep - about power, performance, desirability. The myth that being wanted is the same as being in control. She put language to something I’d been circling in my own writing but hadn’t yet been able to name: how easy it is to mistake proximity to power for power itself.

What stayed with me most was her honesty. Her ability to say the things she used to be ashamed of, without flinching. That kind of self-compassion felt radical.

“It had never occurred to me that the women who gained their power from beauty were indebted to the men whose desire granted them that power in the first place…”

It was a reminder that so many of the stories we tell ourselves about power, especially as women, aren’t really ours at all.

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The rest of this thinking glossary - featuring reflections on shame, girlhood, weirdness, writing rituals, and radical love - is for paid subscribers. These next 7 books took me deeper. If any of this resonates, I’d love to have you inside.

Authors include: Miranda July, bell hooks, Anaïs Nin, Melissa Febos and more. 💌