It goes without saying that a book, therefore, is 'a thing of beauty' close to my heart

The tools that execute the commands issuing from my "creative" side are my somewhat bemused hands. They are most comfortable on a keyboard, so when I first urged them to pick up a lump of clay at my weekly ceramics class and to mould it into something resembling a pot, they were rather startled.

The item they finally produced was identifiable only to me.

My skills as a potter, however, are not the point. Rather it is that putting myself in a position where I've had to do something that goes against all my experiences, my routines, and my understanding of what I'm capable of has helped me to consider the things that I normally do differently - and this includes books and reading.

Take for instance, the new project set for our ceramics class by our teacher.

In the next two weeks, we are tasked to look around us with different eyes: to find four beautiful things and to photograph them.

These items include "a thing of natural beauty" - not man-made; something that was not a "purposefully beautified object" but whose beauty lay in its form, its function or its meaning to us; a third item of constructed beauty - an artwork, a building, clothes, food, a book; and, finally, "a thing of beauty close to your heart" - something or someone that has become so much a part of my surroundings that I've ceased to notice its intrinsic beauty.

Our teacher did not necessarily mean these instructions to be applied to books, but because that is what I do most often, her words were in my head when I next picked up a book, and they caused me to consider what, why, and how, I was reading.

For example, the form and function of a book is both a "purposefully beautified object" and "an item of constructed beauty".

No design (especially not an electronic version) has ever improved on the basic form of the book, or made it function more effectively than it has for hundreds of years. It goes without saying that a book, therefore, is "a thing of beauty" close to my heart.

But it is the functioning of the brain that I identified as "a thing of natural beauty". The two hemispheres, if allowed to work together in harmony, allow us to absorb and organise information and, if we let it, to release that now intrinsic knowledge in the form of creative expression.

Using both sides of our brains, we can find joy in our own endeavours, but also in those of others. Which brings me back to reading.

Think of approaching a book as one would look at a painting. Just as one can never look too often at a masterful artwork, and repeated viewings will reveal subtle beauties and add to our understanding of what makes the work a masterpiece, so, then, a first reading of a great book will reveal plot and character, but a second or third reading will allow us to stop and admire a description, to ponder the sub-text, to see the meanings between the lines as much as those within them.

And the more we read, the greater the context within which we will understand new books.

Hmm. With all this writing about books I am beginning to worry that I am developing a one-track mind. Time to go and smell some roses.