As we enter 2020, and I enter your lives as a regular columnist, here are my reading resolutions for the coming year. First, I have to read more. The political climate feels mighty exclusionary, and reading narratives unlike our own seems the best way to access different perspectives, and to remind ourselves that the society we live in holds so many different stories.
Resolution two: as someone who mostly reads non-fiction for fear of accidentally adopting someone else’s voice, I’m getting back into fiction (fear be gone, Candice, get over yourself), plus poetry and plays. Inua Ellams’s powerful transposing of Chekhov’s Three Sisters from Russia to Nigeria at the National Theatre reminded me that a script offers a unique narrative; movement and tone are still there, but the starkness of description allows us to focus on exactly what’s being said.
My third resolution is to stop reading a book if it doesn’t vibe with me, give it to someone else, and to remember that guilt is a wasted emotion. But before all of that, let’s try and get through winter. Why is summer seen as prime reading time? What else are we going to do in January but lock ourselves away and read? Or listen. I’m listening to Tomi Adeyemi’s Children of Virtue and Vengeance. Bahni Turpin’s voice brings the words to rich and transporting life.
• Candice Carty-Williams wrote Queenie and co‑created the Guardian 4th Estate BAME short story prize.
