What I am Reading Now…
Shola von Reinhold
April 2026

In all truth, my reading has ground to a halt.

This is due to two things over the past few years. The first: various so-called ‘silent’ migraine phenomena. Some are subtle and others just so familiar – never not known to me – that I presumed them to be universal, like Visual Snow Syndrome (not officially migraine phenomenon but mine gets more pronounced with them). I’m not sure if they’ve become more frequent or just more intense. Swirling auras and halos, static fractals through the brain and spine, rippling airs, pulsing visions and strange subaqueous pressures – at best they can almost be sensorially pleasurable, albeit making it hard to function, but sometimes they are intolerable, accompanied by nausea, or by all-through-the-body sensory discordance and the vision in one eye acquiring an internal unshifting cloud and weird pulling sensation. Hard to read, and write, and sometimes even speak – these migraines affect my language processing, swirling phrases about, drawing unhelpful words to the surface, lending a strange syntax to my speech which I’m not sure is now partly figured by trying to work around the linguistic depletion these migraines create. My reading thus, nowadays, often gets limited to research for books and other necessary things.

As a tonic to all this, I’ve taken to reading things in snatches, sometimes just a few pages or even a paragraph, and letting it swim or settle or otherwise find its place in the wool, mist and lightning spectacle of whatever migraine symptom is at play. This ‘practice’ has been bolstered by the second threat to my reading: domestic unfixity, bouncing around cities, peripatetically, sometimes precariously. It means I often leave books everywhere and have an ever-growing pile of unfinished or just started books that I had to stop thinking of as things to finish at all, but some cumulative mode of reading, just as valuable. And there is that great delight of throwing yourself at the mercy of someone else’s bookshelves for the period you are there. Of pulling things out at random, of letting go of the steering wheel of perusal and letting things come to you.

Here then are a few things I have read, or rather not read, that delight me and which I might finish one day. I give them in the context they came to me.

Clapton December 2025.

Catsitting in a ground floor flat with a garden bedroom. It snows a little this day. Here I read a small portion of a book that has been circling me for so many years. I’ve somehow just never come to sit down and actively read Toni Morrison. I suppose her appearance on lists to read, interview footage, photos of her dancing at Studio 54, her work as an editor, and the many anecdotes about her, made me feel I’d in some way already known her work in a way that meant I was always more likely to go and find lesser-known writers. But, of course, I didn’t know her work. I’m glad, therefore, I started Sula in this flat and finally got to glimpse her love for strangeness and curious beauty that I prize in authors.

Clapton January 2026

I spend the day cleaning the flat and, in a flurry, pack up my suitcase and bags and boxes of painting things. It’s after midnight when I make it to my next place. I have to stand outside the flat, belongings strewn around me, trying to figure out the lockkey for about an hour which becomes an ever more fraught task as it gets later, and I worry that neighbours will think I’m trying to break in. Not catsitting but the kindly offered use of a flat. I spend most of my time here researching the Black British Ballet company Les Ballet Nègres, founded by two queer Jamaican-born Ritchie Rilie and Berto Pasuka. The ballet debuted in 1946 and prematurely shuttered in 1952 after unsuccessful bids for Arts Council funding. They toured all over Europe to huge acclaim. It was not a lack of ticket sales but ultimately bureaucratic parochialism that led to the closure of Ballet Nègres. Pasuka’s prescience is striking: before the corps collapsed, he had been planning a large-scale ballet about the Haitian Revolution, centred on King Christophe of Haiti. This was over a decade before Aimé Césaire’s play, The Tragedy of King Christophe, and might have come about with even half of the support less visionary projects the Arts Council funded at the time. There is no programme or ballet libretto so I instead read the opening of Aimé Césaire’s play which is no less fascinating.

Another of Pasuka’s ballets centered on the real-life story of a prophet who tried to fly to heaven and was arrested. A strange echo of Toni Morrison’s flying insurance man. I end up reading various snippets about ‘flying Africans’, of escaped people evading enslavement, flying to paradise or to home.

February 2025

I’m now back in one of my favourite and semi-regular places to catsit. It is a friend’s house and has become source of comfort and fixity in the past year. It also has a good library. I find on the shelves Heretical Aesthetics, a collection of Pasolini’s writing on painting – serendipitous: I’ve been writing about relics, ruins and nostalgia and the opening which touches on Pasolini’s own (‘heretical’) Marxism in relation to his love of the past, of local history of ruins and relics, throws an exquisite dust in my eyes, Exquisite but dust all the same – it might derail everything. I might have to reconsider the entire book project. And I haven’t even read the book. I can’t even remember if I finished the introduction – I left it by accident in my next flatsitting place in Borough along with a book I’d actually brought with me from Scotland: Jessie Redmon Fauset’s The Chinaberry Tree, which I was also enjoying.

March 2026

I’m now back catsitting in the same house where I found the Pasolini book. It is late February and it is the first truly sunny day of the year. I’ve been moving between the guest room, the living room and the garden partly as my laptop I’m writing this on is downstairs charging, but my phone is broken and charging upstairs and keeps dying. I’ve just been in the garden. Reading: Just as I was wondering what to include for my next book, something, like an absurd deus ex-machina, came through the door. Rosa Johan-Uddoh‘s book Practice Makes Perfect. It’s been one of those books I’ve been meaning to read for a long time. I’ve just read a few snatches. It is the perfect format for my reading at the moment. It is also delightful and keen and sly and moves through Black history in Britain a way I find thrilling.