What do you think of when you think of an indulgent read? Is it romance? Fantasy? A cozy mystery? Me, I like a good nothing novel. If Goodreads users are complaining that “nothing happened,” or, better yet, that they were bored, my interest is immediately piqued. I don’t need things to happen! Enough with the happenings, already. Give me a book about a person sitting in a room. Maybe standing, or stretching, occasionally. Thinking. Give me “Practice,” British author Rosalind Brown’s exquisite first offering to the world of nothing novels.
The protagonist and subject of “Practice” is Annabel, and I mean subject in a true scientific sense. Annabel is her own meticulous observer, the architect of her 
enclosure, always thinking about how to optimize, how to adjust her conditions. And for what? What is the subject’s task? Today, it is to write an essay about Shakespeare’s sonnets. And we need only concern ourselves with today. (We will find that for a subject as sensitive as Annabel, this task is enough for a whole day, enough for a whole book.)
Some facts: Annabel is an undergraduate student at Oxford University. It is January. It is Sunday. Shakespeare wrote a lot of sonnets. Shakespeare is dead. (Just one of many thoughts Annabel will have today. This one she processes quickly.) Annabel has a mom, a friend named Bridget, a boyfriend named Rich. They are important, but today they are mostly notifications on her phone, texts to respond to, when everything is done. Today, Annabel has an essay to write. Focus!
In truth, it’s not the texts that are distracting. It’s the thoughts. Annabel has a lot of them, about everything. Many of these thoughts are well-worn; paths she treads regularly, probing a little further each time, such that her inner world is quite labyrinthine, quite logical, a lush maze, softly lit. Annabel spends so much time in the chambers of her mind, there are two characters that live in there with her: the scholar and the seducer.
The scholar and the seducer are men. They are not real. They are kind of like alter egos, or characters in a book that Annabel is working on, except she’s not writing a book, just fantasizing, in a literary kind of way. They are in love, but she can never quite imagine the consummation, because in a way, both men are Annabel herself. (There are successful episodes of imagined intercourse, of course, just between herself and other people. Sometimes her boyfriend.) No, the scholar and the seducer are not real, but most of this book takes place within the enchanting prism of Annabel’s consciousness, anyways, so they are real, more real than any of the living, breathing humans Annabel passes on the street.
Wait, why is she on the street?? Isn’t she working on an essay? Well, yes. But the fog, you know. The fog looked so lovely from her window. She had to walk through it. (It’s what the scholar would do.)
I’m not sure I’ve convinced you. What is the emotional payoff? What makes “Practice” worth the read, other than the romantic dreary cozy winter academia vibes?? If there is a single answer to this question, it is that this book makes you want to read. It made me want to set an alarm for 6 a.m., to worship my mornings, to protect my quietude, to tighten and weave the threads of my concentration, to memorize a poem just to recite it to myself later, to trust the slow practice of scholarship. It is a piece of literature about loving literature, about literature as a lens for living. About devotion.
She sits down, opens the laptop, creates a blank document, finds the centre of the page. Takes up her book and starts to page through. Selects, on a whim, six of the love triangle sonnets—three to the Young Man, three to the Dark Lady—and types them out. Six narrow rooms out of the great big labyrinth. That thou hast her it is not all my griefe. So now I have confest that he is thine. Even just typing them she is stirred, like grass.
Tags: atmospheric, blank space, dorm life, erudite, intimate, introvert, new fiction, no chapters, yearning, yoga
-Karena
