Practice
What is it like to go through one’s day without analyzing every facet of one’s most basic routine? Darned if I know… (🫥)
Practice, the debut novel by Rosalind Brown: A campus novel where the campus in question (Oxford) is a mere blip. This one’s a tight reflection on constraint/restraint — with regard to academics, exercise, eating, relationships — and that fuzzy line between positive productivity and worrying rigidity. My piano teacher used to drum it into our heads that “Practice makes permanent [ie not perfect].” In life, whether or not that “permanent” is a good or bad thing depends on what you’re practicing, I suppose.
It’s a novel taking place over the course of just one day, à la Ulysses or Mrs. Dalloway (our protagonist Annabel does, in fact, take a shine to Virginia Woolf) that illustrates how perfectly the banal and the frantic/obsessive moments of our days weave together while — usually — a normal countenance belies it all.
{PS: I spy a Paper Skyscraper bookmark peeking out of my book. Practice was a library read, but here’s a plug for Paper Skyscraper + its well-curated selection of books for sale despite not being a bookstore…)
originally published on instagram