Storing this info so I can find it again – how to create menu items out of categories was mostly intuitive, but reading this helped.
https://wordpress.com/forums/topic/multiple-post-pages-5/
As I create more posts, they will be categorised as travel, books, movies and TV, events, etc and those categories will each become a menu item.
Menu items for each category will speed navigation and let you, the reader, choose a category to explore.