At the age of five I won a fancy dress competition dressed in a green curtain as a bookworm. It was a fitting start to a lifelong love affair with books – as the teetering pile of titles waiting beside my bed to be read confirms.

I read to be entertained or distracted, of course, but also because one lifetime isn’t enough to visit all the places I want to see, to understand the experience of the billions who have inhabited this beautiful planet, or to delve into the depths of my own soul and truly know myself.

I’ve triple tagged this post because I couldn’t decide whether making time every day for reading – as I sit in bed with a mug of tea and the silence of the early morning – fits best in the grow, expand or explore category of Best Year.

I think it’s actually all three.

Since the start of this year I’ve explored the dusty shelves of threatening atmosphere of The Stationery Shop of Tehran thanks to Marjan Kamali. I’ve walked Alpine lanes jewelled with wild flowers with author Eva Ibbotson. And I’ve studied Howard Carter as he excavated the Valley of the Kings in the pages of Sally Beauman’s The Visitors.

I’ve understood a fraction more about how different my life and experience would have been if I’d been born with black skin, in Brit Bennett’s brilliant The Vanishing Half. Or if I’d been born female in another century – Elizabethan England say, through Maggie O’Farrell’s delicious Hamnet.

And I have nodded in recognition and gratitude to those writers able to capture in words some of the things I’ve felt, who’ve made sense of things that confuse me, opened my eyes to new ways of thinking about my life and life on earth. Above all, who have empowered me to want to live as deliberately as they seem to be living their lives.

Thank you Brene Brown for Braving the Wilderness, Glennon Doyle for Untamed and Julia Baird for your beautiful book Phosporescence. In their own way each of them has made the morning light a little brighter and expansive as the world awakes.

May we NEVER stop reading, learning and sharing our truths with each other in order to grow.