A contestant on a quiz show I was watching earlier talked about being a voracious reader (she read anything from 1 to 10 books a week) and how her favourite books to read were autobiographies because she liked to know about people’s lives. This made me think, particularly as I’d spent the afternoon as the cinema watching the excellent Hidden Figures.

I read a lot by most people’s standards. I don’t read a whole lot of nonfiction though. Most years I read in excess of 100 books and less than 10 will have been nonfiction. There’s no good reason for this though, I love a good autobiography (like the woman on the quiz I love finding out about other people’s lives) and am slowly getting to grips with essay collections.

I’m currently reading an essay collection by Alana Massey (very slowly, since stopping my daily commute I’ve seen a significant drop off in reading) and am putting the Hidden Figures book on my must read soon list. I’m going to try for the rest of the year to make sure that the proportion of nonfiction ends up significant more than normal. I want to make sure it’s a good mixture of nonfiction too – it’d be easy to just catch up on some of the autobiographies I’ve been meaning to read for the last few years but instead I’ll try to make my nonfiction reading more rounded in the same was as I do with my fiction reading. It feels increasingly important that facts and truths and knowledge are at the centre of everything so I’m ready to get reading and learning.