My reading compass, for the moment, is pointing decisively away from the business of books - Laura Waddell

After almost a decade of working with books professionally I have grown tired to my soul of reading to keep up with the commercial calendar

Around the bend of my staircase are approximately five hundred books arranged not alphabetically but where they happened to land in tall, jagged stacks, and all of them must go.

Their eventual destination is the charity shop, or more likely, spread between several as I wish to avoid the nightmare scenario of walking into my favourite second hand bookshop and seeing, in the newly donated section, a ghost reflection of my own discarded bookcase. It has taken ages to get to this point, to get rid of the weight of these books, and I don’t want to go back.

Before the remainder get dropped off, in carrier bags in dribs and drabs, I have been inviting friends to take their pick. I suggest, my tone rising to pleading, that they take as many as they wish. Bring a bag! I message beforehand, stressing the point.

Stragglers from the book world – fellow writers, academics, literary journal wranglers, pamphlet-peddlars, poetry-pushers and publishers – unsurprisingly take fewer than friends working in other industries, to whom the suggestion of free books – pun entirely intended – is still novel.

Perched at the top, looking over the railings, I watch a group of departing browsers pick their way down the carpeted staircase, tilting their heads to scan titles pushed against the wall. Bundled up in knitted beanies and boots to fight the wintry Scottish chill, it looks like they are abseiling down book mountain.

In my rented flat, the available bookshelves are insufficient for the reams of books I own. Don’t picture neat rows: it was rather a situation of columns. Packed to the gunnel, the deep wooden shelving that came with this place became more of a starting point for ambitious stacking than a recognisable display unit.

Regular readers of this column may recall previous fretting about the structural stability of the supports screwed to the wall. I’m happy to report they have held, even though since then more books arrived to be pushed into any available gaps, overspilling the shelves onto the floor.

Mostly these are books publishers send for review. With a practise of putting, to one side, the ones I might one day read, the day of realisation that I have neither the time nor space for all of them has come instead. Recently, these have piled up as stacks of unopened book-shaped envelopes that make me feel sad and guilty. With nowhere else to put them, they took over my own writing desk, rendering it unusable. Intolerable in the long run.

I sort through them on the floor. Keep to the left, donate to the right. Once I get going, editorial decisiveness kicked in.

I bin overhyped debuts. I bin some ‘wan little husks’, as Joyce Carol Oates once tweeted, referring to the literary first person narratives in fragmentary, experimental forms which, when they’re good, are good, but have too many derivatives. I bin a hell of a lot of books that are merely fine. Including Fine, Fine, Fine, Fine, Fine, by Diane Williams - definitely one of the more interesting ones - but it’s just that I’ve just given up trying to understand it, it’s time for someone else to have a go, and I will respect whoever takes it from my discard pile and tries, although I adopt a hands off policy, letting people choose what they want, without interference or suggestion unless they ask ‘any good?’.I’ve been drawn to the book as a physical object my whole life. No wonder, then, books became my career. But since that great seismic shifting in perspective that was the global pandemic, I’ve increasingly craved a private relationship with books - something I haven’t had for a long time.

A question often posed to students of literature is whether reading for study takes away pleasure. I never felt that. If anything, the opposite. The invitation to linger on words - a delight. But after almost a decade of working with books professionally I have grown tired to my soul of reading to keep up with the commercial calendar. My break from the publishing industry will make me a better reader, I am certain of it.

I am tired of industry trends. I am tired of algorithms. I am tired of hype. So much hype: so many longlists, shortlists, awards and prizes and reviews, social media sending everyone’s ego to bonkers places, books that promote their authors rather than the other way around, celebrity endorsements, celebrity in general, most of it divorced from quality, and all of it a sell. I feel a deep need to extricate myself and read, for a restorative period not yet quantified, whatever I want.Creative people speak wistfully about formative years practising and playing with their craft, with the freedom of experimentation, before shouldering the expectations and demands of the professional world.

We always want to get something back that we feel we’ve lost in trying to hammer innate creativity into the shape of earnings. When I was a child, I picked up the books that intrigued me, and considered them nobody else’s business.

It was a one on one connection: my eyes on the page, and nobody else’s. No reviews. No hype. No sense of duty to the literary community. Just words, and the brain quietly taking them in, to do with them what it will. My reading compass, for the moment, is pointing decisively away from the business of books, somewhere into the woods.