I have fallen in love.

With a book! This doesn't happen all that often these days.

When I was a child, I used to fall in love with books all the time. I'd start reading and lose myself in them completely. I knew - and liked - the characters more than I did my friends.

I still love reading, but in general I don't love the individual books in the same way. I enjoy them, I appreciate them, I am gripped and moved by them but I don't passionately inhabit them like I used to - not usually, anyhow.

Yesterday I started reading Elizabeth and Her German Garden by Elizabeth von Arnim. It wasn't even the book I wanted to read - I was leaving the house in a hurry to catch a train, and the book I had earmarked for my next read was nowhere to be seen, so I picked this one up off the nearest of the little piles of books that clutter up my house and put it in my bag.

Within the first few pages I was completely in love. Published at the turn of the 19th century, the book is the diary of a young English woman who is married to a German man, has three children, and likes to spend all of her time gardening. That doesn't sounds like the most riveting start, but it is just so beautifully written. The narrator is witty and honest, and a fantastically sharp observer of the society around her, which she spends most of her time trying to avoid. She loathes the expectations and constraints of her sex and her role, and is at her happiest alone, in the garden, reading books. It's a hymn to the joys of solitude and is particularly recommended reading to anyone who has a tendency towards self-pity or loneliness. And you don't need to know anything about gardening to enjoy it.