Ashley Hay

Mm-hmm.

Thanks for having me.

No, not as much as I would like.

I've got a fantasy about a purely reading sabbatical.

But, you know, you always manage to squeeze bits and pieces in, I think, and you can justify any reading for the job as well, which is pretty great.

I recently have been reading a fantastic book called Earth Emotions by Glenn Albrecht, who is the man who coined among a number of phrases the word solastalgia for the sort of complicated space of nostalgia for lost landscapes that many of us find ourselves navigating at the moment.

That's been wonderful.

Yes.

And I think part of what's wonderful about the book is if you know Glenn Albrecht, you know him in association with that one word, and it's a powerful and useful word in a lot of contexts and spheres.

But what was wonderful about the book was understanding the process of naming or renaming that he's been going through for a lot of years and around a lot of different emotions and sort of things that we have to try to navigate and experience about how we see things and how we've

feel things.

So I found that really wonderful.

That was my sort of nonfiction recently.

I'm not a huge crime reader.

I have spent a chunk of this year reading nothing but crime.

Essays, memoir, fiction, poetry, reportage.

We had a great photo essay in there as well.

And that really immersed me in a landscape of crime and justice and punishment and retribution and all these sorts of things in a very different way.

I don't have a good reason for not being a huge crime reader.

I devoured Agatha Christie's when I was a kid.