Reading
“Books are the plane, and the train, and the road. They are the destination, and the journey. They are home.” Anna Quindlen I am going to be doing a lot of reading in the next couple of years or so (probably swiftly followed by a lot of writing). To prepare for submitting a formal application to undertake a PhD I need to marshal some coherent thoughts and ideas about the topic I plan to study. I also need to underpin my thoughts and ideas with references from published literature and that’s where the reading comes in. As a child I loved nothing better than to lose myself in the pages of a novel and, if I am given the chance, I will still fly to distant imaginary lands with my nose in a book. I’m lucky. I read quite quickly and can tune out the external world reasonably easily: although there is a down side to this skill as a numerous missed bus/tube/train stops attest and even one almost missed flight. Things we read that pull us in do so because th