Well, what do you feel like?

This is what I always say when people ask me what they "should" read next. And it's also the question that I wish people would ask me when I am looking for reading inspiration.

This blog is born from a year (or so) of reading in fits and starts. Over the last eighteen months I have lurched from book frenzies, in the grips of which I engineer meals alone just to gobble down a few pages with my food, to being totally unable to settle, spending weeks listlessly reading - and not finishing - two or three books at a time. It seems there is no middle ground.

This reading pendulum has prompted more thought about how and why and when I read. How and why do I choose the books I do? And what makes one choice succeed where others fail?

Intuitive eating involves a decision to stop classifying food as 'good' or 'bad'. It asks you to listen to your body and eat what feels right for you. This suits me because I am a person who spends a long time thinking about what I want to eat next. Once I've decided - or once my body tells me what it needs - nothing else will do.

And it's the same with reading. Increasingly I have a distinct feeling about what kind of book I need in that moment. If I ignore this and pick up something I feel I should read rather than what I really feel like reading, I'll almost certainly be stuck in no-man's land (around page 30) a few weeks' later.

Part of this is because there are a number of pressures around reading. Pressure to read that Booker Prize winner everyone expects you to have read. Or the book someone you love gave you a year (or more) ago that you still don't feel like and you're not sure you ever will. Or - god forbid - that 'classic' writer they couldn't believe you had never even heard of and now you fear everyone is questioning your intelligence, your credentials and probably whether you are even who you say you are.

So much of our time now is spent wanting and needing to be productive. We obsess over making the most of our free time because we have less of it and because there is more to interfere with it. We end up turning free time into time spent improving ourselves, which for me can become (too quickly) about sitting down with a 'good' book rather than just a book - or even a 'bad' book, which usually means all the books I can't put down.

I am not saying that reading should never be demanding; there are of course times for a book that challenges you. But I do think that you have to pick and choose those times and it has to be the right time for you. I want to embrace those times and all the other times in between.

So this blog is about listening to what you feel like reading rather than what you feel you should read. It's about forgetting to feel smug or sheepish about what you've just read. And it's about choosing to read what feels right for you, now.