We’ve all been in love (I hope!) and we’ve all fallen out of love, but falling out of love with my books was something I never expected to happen.

Throughout my teenage years, my love for reading didn’t grow in the way that I’d anticipated it would. Don’t get me wrong, I relished the new release of the next Sweet Valley High book, that I’d spend endless hours chatting with my girlfriends about, wishing our school was just like in the books. Heck, we even formed a cheerleading group, we choreographed and performed dances for the school sports day and entered a talent competition, to ‘Hey Mickey’ and ‘Vogue’!

We lived for those magical, warm summer days when the school holidays were about to begin and would seemingly last a life-time. The hazy afternoons lazing around on the grass in the park or by the local river, hoping the boy you fancied would magically appear and fall in love with you.  But the busier life became, with boys and exams, the books simply fell away. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, by Maya Angelou was the last book I read at high school, for my GCSE exams. I didn’t fully understand at the time, why I loved It so much. It now sits proudly on my bookshelf, alongside Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird and Kathryn Stockett’s The Help.

To try and hold on to my love for reading, I chose to study English Literature for A-Levels – I wish I’d read and understood the impact of the strange set texts beforehand… Dubliners by James Joyce and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead by Tom Stoppard. And there it was…. gone…

Reading Patricia Cornwell’s, Post Mortem hooked me in for a short while, I devoured anything to do with Kay Scarpetta’s character, probably because I’d had hopes and dreams of becoming a forensic pathologist. But those dreams were short lived. It was a very long time before I picked up another (non-study book). Many years in fact until Dan Brown burst onto the scene with The Da Vinci Code.

The years in-between were speckled with self-help books galore, The Celestine Prophecy, The Alchemist, How to Win Friends and Influence People, even The Bible. You can clearly see the path my reading tastes took during my twenties. The constant searching for something that my body and soul craved. This is when and why ‘Feast and Fiction’ was born in 2011.

Feast and Fiction was a group of work colleagues and girlfriends that loved reading and cake. What better combination can you ask for. Here, we would all nominate a book at the start of the year, and our choice would go into the cake tin waiting to be teased out, along with the chance of home baking our favourite cake (this quickly descended into favourite dessert) as would you believe, there are some people that don’t actually like cake. I know!!!

This particular book club ended for me in 2015, after I left my full-time job as a company accountant and retrained in Holistic and Complimentary Therapies – but perhaps the reading material that I was drawn towards was part of the reason my career path also changed.