A Year in Reading: Ella Baxter

I read widely but abandon books quickly unless they captivate me. The lowest standard I hold for a book is that I want it to be so psychedelic, so completely discombobulating, that I am torn asunder. I want to read words that turn my bones to dust. I want to be unravelled, drowned, absolutely smote by a book. I wish I wasn’t like this. I wish I could just learn to relax, but those days are over, they are dead. Every day I am grateful that books exist and if you were to cut me open, I would bleed all the words I have banked inside, from all the books that have destroyed me, eyeballs first. 

At the start of by , a book on shamanism, and a copy of something else, perhaps a story about Tibet. I moved house so the books are still in tall stacks along one wall, and I can’t seem to find the titles to tell you their serious names.