My Autumn Reading Plans: An Ambitious TBR and a Two-Day Retreat at Home

I have decided that what I need is not really a holiday. What I need is forty-eight hours in which nobody expects me to be useful.

More specifically: I want to read. Not read for an hour after I have done the washing, answered something, fed something, put something away and somehow found myself reorganising a drawer. I want the sort of reading day where I look up and discover it is three o'clock and I have been in another world since breakfast.

Fortunately I already own the venue. My library is here. My bath is here. My bed is here. The kettle knows me. I can wear pyjamas all day without frightening hotel staff. So I am turning home into a two-day reading retreat.

The annoying truth: the retreat starts several days earlier

I know myself. If I wake up on Thursday and there is a basket of washing in sight, I will think I will just put that on. Then I will notice the bathroom. Then I will realise we need milk. By lunchtime I will have done six useful things and be furious that somebody has stolen half my reading retreat. The somebody will, of course, be me.

So the trick is not discipline during the retreat. It is removing the opportunities for distraction beforehand.

From Monday I start clearing the decks. Washing gets done. The rooms I am actually going to use get properly tidied. The library gets cleaned because dust becomes fascinating the moment I am supposed to be relaxing. The bathroom gets done because there will absolutely be bath reading.

By Wednesday night I want the washing basket empty, the bed freshly made and new pyjamas waiting. This is wildly unnecessary and therefore essential.

Food is part of the infrastructure

I am shopping on Wednesday. I do not need forty-eight hours of pre-portioned meal prep lined up like a wellness influencer, but I do need to remove the question 'what shall I eat?' from the middle of the day.

I want easy savoury things, afternoon-tea-ish snacks, tea, and chocolate. Hotel Chocolat has somehow become part of the project brief. There may also be cake. Nobody has ever improved a reading retreat by under-catering it.

Dinner can be simple and Andy can deal with a fair amount of it. He is supportive of this arrangement provided I do not describe something involving six pans and seventeen ingredients as 'dead easy' and hand it over.

I am outsourcing the livestock

The cats and chickens are not difficult, but they are excellent at puncturing a day. Somebody wants feeding. Somebody wants letting out. Somebody has made a noise that requires investigation. Somebody is standing on the book.

For two days, Andy is chief animal officer. I will obviously still interact with them because I am not moving into a sealed reading bunker, but I am not going to keep stopping at all the little domestic punctuation marks.

The cats, naturally, have not been consulted. They already believe every comfortable surface in the house exists for them and will presumably regard my retreat as an exciting new lap-based initiative.

There is no timetable

This is important. I am not setting page targets. I am not deciding that I must finish three books. I am not making a colour-coded schedule for recreational reading, because that would be a productivity challenge wearing a cardigan.

I will make a stack. I enjoy making a stack. I may spend a frankly unreasonable amount of time making the stack. But it is a menu, not a contract.

If I start one book and want another, fine. If I reread something instead, fine. If I sit in the bath for two hours with the same thirty pages because I keep getting distracted by YouTube, technically less pure but also fine. I am not being graded.

The library is headquarters, not prison

I have a beautiful library and I intend to use it. But I am not forcing myself to sit upright in one chair for two days because that is what Serious Reading is apparently meant to look like.

There is the library chair, the day bed, the bath, the sofa and eventually bed. I can migrate. The entire point is to follow whatever feels comfortable rather than turning leisure into another set of rules.

What I really want is the luxury of reaching the end of a chapter and simply starting the next one. No glance at the clock. No mental calculation about whether I should go and do something useful first.

Wednesday night matters

The final preparation is absurdly mundane: charge the Kobo, charge the tablet, locate the headphones, make sure there is nothing wet quietly dying in the washing machine, put out clean towels, make the bed, put the pyjamas somewhere visible.

Then Thursday morning does not begin with admin. It begins with tea and a book.

Why stay home?

Because when I actually interrogated what I wanted from a retreat, almost none of it required travel. I did not want sightseeing. I did not want restaurants. I did not particularly want a hotel. I wanted uninterrupted time, books, good food, a bath, comfort and permission to be unavailable.

Home has all of those things. The problem is that home also contains every unfinished job I have ever noticed. The preparation is really just a way of making those jobs shut up for forty-eight hours.

So that is the plan: two days, no targets, a suspicious quantity of snacks and one husband temporarily promoted to hotel staff.

I am already enjoying the planning, which will surprise absolutely nobody. The only real danger now is that I add twelve unnecessary jobs to the preparation list in the name of making it relaxing.

What I’m actually planning to read

Every autumn I become convinced that darker evenings have somehow added another four hours to the day. This is the only explanation for my reading plans.

A perfectly normal thought such as 'I should pick my next book' becomes a campaign involving multiple fantasy series, book-club obligations, rereads, new releases and a stack of physical books silently judging me from across the library.

I know this about myself. It has never once stopped me.

Silver Flames, again

I have just finished rereading A Court of Silver Flames, and I liked it more this time. That is one of the things I enjoy about rereading: the book has not changed, but the information I bring to it has.

Knowing what comes later makes throwaway lines look less throwaway. Relationships read differently. Things I barely registered the first time suddenly wave little flags at me. It turns reading into a sort of archaeological dig conducted from the bath.

This is also how one reread becomes a problem. Because now I want the rest of the context again.

First, the book I am actually supposed to be reading

Book club has chosen Stacia Stark's We Who Will Die. It therefore occupies the official currently-reading position, which is a ceremonial title meaning 'the book I should be concentrating on while thinking about six other books'.

I am deliberately not giving it a verdict halfway through. I reserve the right to have opinions once I have actually read the bloody thing.

Then there is the Maas situation

I want to read Crescent City before the next ACOTAR book. Written down like that, it looks completely manageable. Unfortunately Sarah J. Maas writes books that could be used to reinforce a small bridge.

Still, I want to go back through them with all the extra context now rattling around in my head. I like spotting connections. I like realising something mattered long before I knew it mattered. I like the ridiculous satisfaction of seeing a thread and thinking HA, I KNOW WHAT YOU'RE DOING.

And because this was apparently not ambitious enough, I have also put Throne of Glass into the plan.

This is where the plan stops being a plan and becomes a threat.

My TBR is not a moral obligation

There are already plenty of unread books in the library. Owning a lot of books has not, somehow, cured the periodic feeling that I have nothing to read. Mostly it has just increased the number of books I can reject before choosing something completely different.

I do not feel guilty about that. The TBR shelf is not a legally binding document. I bought the books because I wanted possibilities, not because I wanted another manager.

Mood matters. Sometimes I want fantasy big enough to disappear into for a week. Sometimes I want romance. Sometimes I want something I can finish in a bath. Sometimes a book I have owned for three years suddenly becomes the only possible choice for reasons I could not explain under oath.

The reading retreat may either help or make this worse

I am also plotting two whole reading days at home: clean house, fresh bed, new pyjamas, food sorted, bath available, Andy handling the animals and no useful tasks allowed to sneak in disguised as 'just five minutes'.

In theory this should make a significant dent in the autumn list. In practice there is every possibility I will use my carefully prepared retreat to reread something I have already read four times.

That would not be failure. It would be extremely on brand.

So what am I actually reading?

Right now: We Who Will Die. Then Crescent City. Throne of Glass is standing behind it looking hopeful. The rest of the TBR can wait its turn or stage a coup.

I make reading plans because planning is part of the pleasure. I like choosing, stacking, anticipating and imagining the version of myself who apparently reads twice as fast as I actually do.

Then I change my mind.

Fortunately, the books do not seem offended. The cats are another matter. Orwell and Brontë have appointed themselves the Library Committee and their current policy remains that all comfortable furniture belongs to them.

What I’d Pack for a Two-Day Reading Retreat at Home

Owning a lot of books has not prevented me from periodically having nothing to read. This seems unfair.

A little more on this The whole point of a reading retreat at home is that I should not spend half of it wandering around looking for a charger, clean pyjamas or something to eat. If I am going to pretend the house is a tiny private hotel for two days, I want the boring logistics handled first. My version is deliberately comfortable rather than aesthetic for the sake of it: books and Kobo, chargers, headphones, bath things, a blanket, drinks, proper snacks and anything else that lets me stay put. The luxury is not owning special retreat equipment. It is having thought about ordinary needs before I sit down with the first book. Draft notes — remove before publishing WORKING IDEA — NOT READY TO PUBLISH Core idea: the cosy/practical companion to the existing reading-retreat plan — what I actually want within reach so I do not spend the day finding chargers, snacks and clean pyjamas. Dump in here: books/Kobo, bath pillow, hot chocolate, insulated bottle or mug, chargers/power bank, headphones, clean/new PJs, blankets, bath bits, snacks, perhaps Hotel Chocolat, and anything that genuinely makes long reading comfortable. Affiliate angle: gentle and selective — this should still feel like a reading-life post, not a shopping list.

I make reading plans with the confidence of somebody who has never once changed her mind about a book.

The room exists for the reading, not the other way round.