Simon’s Visual Library

About this library

I started reading for pleasure again in 2020, for the first time in almost 20 years. In 2025, I began writing amateur essays about the fiction I read.

Writing lets me stay with a book after I finish it and decide what I want to take with me. I can go back through my favourite scenes, work out why they landed, and give them somewhere to live beyond the moment I close the book. I want to keep hold of the pleasure, beauty, surprise, and ideas that might otherwise fade with time.

I am also deliberately generous with ratings. I am more interested in paying attention to what a book gives me than in finding every reason it falls short. I want writing about books to make me more aware of the things I enjoy, and to carry that more positive perspective into the rest of my life.

These essays are my way of doing that: a record of what I found in a book, and a way back into the reading later.