I’ve been home alone this week. I’m happy in my own company, so for the most part I really enjoyed the time to myself. I’ve puttered around, cooking what I want, tidying things as I want, and lounging in front of my favourite television shows. I don’t want this all the time (Tyler, yes I did miss you), but for a week it was very nice. 

One night, however, was not so nice. My friend Suzanne gave me Beloved by Toni Morrison for my birthday recently. It’s a beautifully written book, if dark and disorienting (or confusing by design, according to the author’s foreword). It’s also haunting – figuratively and literally, with one of the central figures being the ghost of the main character’s dead baby daughter. It’s certainly not a book for the faint hearted. So while I recommend it wholeheartedly, I’d say pick your moment – I can only read it now because the daffodils are finally out and we can see spring peeking around the corner. 

One night while Tyler was away I found myself very freaked out after reading this book in bed before turning out my light. I was spooked, twitching at every sound and convinced that the mark on our bedroom door was a malign hand curling around the edge. My logical brain was right there with you, thinking “how silly – she’s just freaking herself out thinking about this at night”. But there we have it. The book took me to a place where logic decidedly did NOT reign supreme (although I’ll leave the discussion of how much time I spend in this logic land for another time…). 

I did get to sleep, eventually. After a couple of hours of jumpy hyper-alertness, I turned the light back on, fetched Cally to sleep on my bed (for ghost protection of course, good boy Cally) and started a new book. This book – The Correspondent by Virginia Evans – was exactly what I needed. A lovely, engrossing story interestingly written. No ghosts. I slept like a baby for the rest of the week.

I felt quite sheepish about this experience. I’m thirty one years old, after all. But when I mentioned it to my book club friends, they said they’d had the exact experience when their partners were away. Jane, my step-mum, told me she traps scary things inside her books by stacking others on top of them. It’s comforting to know that it’s not just me! 

To be honest, while I would have liked an undisturbed sleep last Sunday, I kind of loved it. It’s a reminder that books can take me out of myself. I’m not a big believer in the paranormal. (As an aside, I once went on a first date where the guy spent an hour telling me about his paranormal experiences. This was in California (of course?). While I can get behind ‘different strokes for different folks’, this didn’t feel like first-date territory to me. No second date was scheduled.) But regardless of my daytime thoughts on ghosts and the like, Beloved had turned me into someone who couldn’t say with certainty that my house wasn’t haunted. That’s pretty cool, right? 

The world of ghosts and spookery isn’t the only way books take me out of myself. I love rereading books, and some of my favourite ones to revisit are those that remind me of where (and who) I was when I first read them. My childhood favourites, like Harry Potter and Roald Dalh’s classics, take me back to being curled up on a beanbag at home, perched in the sun on our corrugated iron roof, or parked under a sleeping bag in the garage, reading and listening to the rain while my dad tinkered away. When I think of A Little Life by Hanya Yanigahara, I am taken to a particular cafe in Sydney I visited when I first read that epic, traumatic novel. I Am Pilgrim by Terry Hayes takes me back to writing up my PhD during a covid lockdown, and it reminds me of the relief of an escapist page-turner. A good book draws me into its universe, or it can take me to another time and place in my own.

Tyler is back, so I’ve happily picked up Beloved again. I wonder where it will take me this time.