Welcome to the Thistle & Tome
Books have long been at the centre of my life. Not just as objects to be read and set aside, but as companions, as arguments, as windows into other times and ways of thinking. The kind of thing you find yourself turning over in your mind long after you have finished the last page, or that sends you down unexpected paths you never anticipated when you first opened the cover.
I live in Edinburgh, one of the great literary cities of the world, UNESCO's first City of Literature, home to one of the world's most celebrated book festivals and a remarkable concentration of bookshops, libraries, and literary history tucked into its closes and wynds. It is a good place to think about books. I hold multiple degrees in literature and am currently working on my MSc in Library and Information Studies at the University of Glasgow, which means that books and the places that house them are not just a passion but something close to a vocation.
Thistle & Tome is the place where all of that comes together. It is a space for thinking seriously about reading without taking itself too seriously. You will find five things here.
In Marginalia I will be doing what I most enjoy: literary analysis. Not the dry, jargon-heavy kind, but the kind that asks genuine questions of a text and tries to make a convincing case for the answers. The question, as a professor once told me, is never whether you are right or wrong. The question is whether you can convince someone that you might be right.
In Reviews you will find thoughts on books and other book related things I am reading, have read, or think deserve more attention. These will range widely across fiction and non-fiction, the contemporary and the classic, the literary and the popular.
In Lists you will find themed collections, groupings of books connected by subject, period, place, or some other thread that seemed worth pulling on.
In Musings you will find the looser, more personal material: reflections on the reading life, thoughts prompted by something I have encountered, videos I have made or found that felt worth sharing, and the kind of content that does not fit neatly anywhere else but feels worth including.
And in Places you will find writing about the physical spaces where books live. Bookshops, libraries, literary locations visited in Edinburgh and further afield. Because the literary world is something inhabited and physical, not just textual, and those spaces deserve their own attention.
If you love books, if you love thinking about them, talking about them, and seeking them out in all their forms, then Thistle & Tome is for you. Pull up a chair, make yourself a cup of something, and stay a while.
