A few weeks ago I shared a piece looking at what Gen Z are spending their "fun money" on. Now we can go younger still, thanks to these interviews in the Observer with tweens about what they "really want". Purchases here that I love the sound of and would enjoy today at my advanced age: a Crash Bandicoot Switch game, a top with cherries on it, a Sylvanian family figure and a Jacqueline Wilson book.
What comes after autofiction? This writer makes the case for "igno-fiction", which engages with ideas of spirituality, religion and mysticism. Is this why publishers are churning out the Greek myths retellings these days?
If you are at all interested in the topics of weight loss/body positivity/fat liberation, I recommend watching this video by comedian Sofie Hagen addressing their own weight loss. Content warning, obviously, for all that comes with this subject. It's a graceful and informative attempt to grapple with a difficult subject.
In Pride and Prejudice, Caroline Bingley waspishly states that to be considered accomplished, “a woman must have a thorough knowledge of music, singing, drawing, dancing, and the modern languages, to deserve the word; and besides all of this, she must possess a certain something in her air and manner of walking, the tone of her voice, her address and expressions.” Mr Darcy adds that she must also improve her mind via "extensive reading". This consideration of how that might translate to today speculates that being in a position to turn down romantic overtures from the wrong person is the twenty-first century version of a woman's accomplishments.
"After about two seconds (yes the password was that simple) I had the password! Embarrassingly, it was something we easily could have and should have guessed. But we didn’t, so my effort was for something at least."
I should be clear, this GQ profile of Travis Kelce is not good, in the sense that it is neither well-written nor revelatory nor particularly original. But I still read it compulsively, because it's just such perfect combination of all the most egregious things this style of journalism can be. They did a photoshoot in a swamp Zoolander would be proud of! The interviewer even allowed himself a small moment of horniness: "You don’t ever get to see them, hidden by game pants and socks, but his legs are tremendous, real Bernini shit. And to witness him perform a Nordic hamstring curl is something I will never, ever forget." Chef's kiss.
"When my first book was published, I thought I'd made it, that I was going to be a Successful Writer now. I was confused and dismayed to realize that wasn’t the case. I’d accomplished this major thing, this lifelong goal, and it didn’t really change anything. It didn’t make it easier to sell my next book or even pitch an article. My thinking before that first book was very black and white: I thought I was about to be a success, and then, when I didn't feel like I imagined being successful would feel, I figured that meant I was a failure."
A software developer takes on the problem of gaining access to a deceased grandparent's password-protected computer. I think about this probably more than I should — I don't know all my loved ones' passwords!
"After about two seconds (yes the password was that simple) I had the password! Embarrassingly, it was something we easily could have and should have guessed. But we didn’t, so my effort was for something at least."
In Pride and Prejudice, Caroline Bingley waspishly states that to be considered accomplished, “a woman must have a thorough knowledge of music, singing, drawing, dancing, and the modern languages, to deserve the word; and besides all of this, she must possess a certain something in her air and manner of walking, the tone of her voice, her address and expressions.” Mr Darcy adds that she must also improve her mind via "extensive reading". This consideration of how that might translate to today speculates that being in a position to turn down romantic overtures from the wrong person is the twenty-first century version of a woman's accomplishments.
Purchases here that I love the sound of and would enjoy today at my advanced age: a Crash Bandicoot Switch game, a top with cherries on it, a Sylvanian family figure and a Jacqueline Wilson book.
We should all be writing about our ancestors. This piece about the writer's grandmother Herta Schlerff is full of surprising twists: she was born in Bulgaria to a family of florists, educated in Egypt and Switzerland, worked at the newly created League of Nations, got married, emigrated to Argentina, got divorced, married someone half her age, and more.
Storyterra is an interactive global map showing where stories are set — it includes books, films, games and TV shows. So if you are travelling somewhere, you can scroll around and find some media set in the new place you are exploring.
NPR's Tiny Desk is always worth watching. As someone said in the comments of this one: "Clipse making us realise we’ve been listening to mediocre rap...".
Helsinki has just managed an entire year without a road traffic accident death. The most important thing, apparently, was reducing speed limits, but better public transport and well-designed areas for pedestrians and cyclists also helped.
I don't think I've ever seen such a cinematic video about woodworking. I'm in awe: imagine using a circular saw safely and also thinking about how to make that look interesting on camera at the same time!
The Wicked film promotional rollout was not a fluke, it was merely the mainstreaming of a growing trend: the TikTokification of the press junket. Movie stars are all chasing a single viral clip now, rather than deigning to talk about their work. "There are some of us, still, who want to hear about the actual films, rather than what a good boyfriend the actor would be for the internet. Regardless of the form, it’s a deliberate dumbing down."
Godchecker: a sort of Wikipedia, but just for deities of all origins and cultures.
Are we "scapegoating the algorithm"? An argument that the problems of political polarisation and disinformation already existed before social media. US-centric, but an interesting read nonetheless.
Account of a conservation programme in northern Mexico where ranchers (who previously hunted big cats to protect their herds) are paid per photo of a live jaguar from the motion capture cameras on their land. It seems to both saving animals and producing fun jaguar selfies!
A series of photographs that tell the story of the Lykov family. They belonged to an offshoot of the Russian Orthodox religion known as the "Old Believers" and in 1936 disappeared into the Siberian wilderness so they could follow their faith unmolested by successive Soviet regimes. They were rediscovered in 1978 when a team of geologists flew over their remote cabin, 160 miles from the nearest human settlement. The family did not know that WW2 had happened and declined to be relocated. One daughter of the original patriarch still lives out there.
Use the Tourist Map of Literature to see other readers' preferences mapped and find recommendations. Type in the name of your favourite author and see the strong and weak ties that surround them.
On fame and normality: "I'm sometimes more impressed by normality, especially successful people who've touched the sun and still choose normality in the end."
I am exactly the right age for this piece about rewatching The OC and finding the nostalgia genuinely painful rather than heartwarming (minus the observations about playing high school football, obviously I didn't do that).
"Instead of being bound by time and space, productivity is feelings oriented. It’s hard to define exactly what counts as productive, because the answer is that which feels productive. If your attention span is fried to cinders, watching a movie — a sustained engagement with one piece of media over a longer period of time — does feel productive. Because it is feelings oriented, productivity is itself hyper-individual. It feels different for everyone — although, when we’re all consuming the same online content centred on self-optimisation, it increasingly feels the same. When you want to ‘hit your step count’, going for a walk feels productive. When you want to ‘reduce inflammation’, a six step morning routine, complete with morning yoga and lymphatic drainage massage, feels productive. When you want to ‘heal your trauma’, journalling and going to online therapy feels productive."
"Designing these covers is a joy. My brief is generally: This is the new book by Zadie Smith. The cover needs to convey: ‘This is the new book by Zadie Smith.’"
It's not your fault that you can't work out what to do with your life: this has only been a question humans have faced since about 1850 and our brains have not yet evolved a way of dealing with it. Apparently.
A theory of a certain kind of new novel: one which is designed to be optioned for TV, because that's one of the only ways left a novelist can make a lot of money.
As promised last time, I'm still slowly catching up on the monthly reading updates I skipped earlier this year. In case you're new here or would like a refresher, when I made my reading goals for 2025 — Reading A Lot, But Differently — I decided to prioritise seeking greater variety and trying other formats (as well as avoiding buying new physical books and keeping up good habits). Because of my podcast, by default I read a lot of crime fiction from the first half of the twentieth century and sometimes I need an extra push to make sure I range beyond that. With that in mind, I managed a little genre exploration this month and completed two non crime fiction audiobooks.
This was the Shedunnit Book Club reading choice for May, chosen because members wanted to look at a golden age detective novel that was written during WW2 and covered the wartime experience. This one was published in 1945 and focuses on a seemingly impossible crime committed in London's Regent's Park during the blackout.
I had read this book once before several years ago, but reading it again with this focus on the wartime context gave me a much greater appreciation for it. The plot is decent although not one of Lorac's best, but her development of character and setting is excellent. The murder victim had been a lodger in a boarding house full of theatrical people and even the minor figures are memorable. There are some interesting details about the difficulty of investigating crimes in 1940s London, too, as records were lost to bomb damage and people killed or displaced from their homes. This time around I also gained a greater appreciation for the diligence of her recurring detective, Chief Inspector Macdonald, which ended up inspiring me to make this other podcast episode.
Another re-read. I got this cosy D&D-inspired fantasy novel from the library as an ebook last year after my production assistant Leandra recommended it in our newsletter and, despite knowing nothing about D&D, I really enjoyed it. Then at the start of this month I read an interview with Travis Baldree and learned that he is an audiobook narrator by profession. Since I needed a break from my re-listen of the Rivers of London series, I decided to give his reading of his own book a try. And it was excellent.
Long-time readers might remember me mentioning my frustrations with the general level of audiobook quality (when you have edited audio for a living as I have, your ear just zeros in on the issues automatically making it hard to follow a story) and it was great to find one that is so well narrated and produced. Baldree has a new book in this series coming out in November, Brigands & Breadknives, and I've already pre-ordered it in audio form.
This was an impulse borrow at the library, based entirely on the fact that I read Grossman's Magicians trilogy a few years ago and enjoyed it (I did not watch the show and thus have no opinions on its controversies). It's a retelling of the Arthurian legends from the point of view of a new young knight called Collum, who overcomes great hardship to get himself to Camelot only to learn that King Arthur has been killed in battle two weeks before. He joins up with the few remaining knights of the round table for a quest to salvage the moral ideal of Arthur's united kingdom before it is too late.
The publisher's website describes this book as "the first major Arthurian epic of the new millennium" and to begin with, this sensibility and ambition made me want to roll my eyes. I put the book down a few times in the first hundred pages. But once it had clicked that this wasn't really a novel but rather a very large collection of tales or romances in the tradition of Chaucer or Malory, it made a lot more sense to me. I think Grossman must have spent a lot of time immersing himself in the huge canon of Arthurian literature in order to be able to write something like this that both belongs to that tradition and does something fresh with it.
By the end, I felt like this was a really impressive work of literature that deserves to be read for decades to come. It has a lot to say about the waves of invasion and immigration in early Britain, and about gender and magic and family. It's also funny and silly and very moving.
Lift the Curtain by Dorothy Erskine Muir
This is an autobiography by a little-known crime writer about whom I made a podcast episode at the end of April. It covers her early life as one of the seventeen (!) children of John Sheepshanks, an Anglican vicar and later a bishop. It follows her through her time as an early woman student at Oxford University and then ends in 1917 when she receives the news that her beloved brother William has been killed while serving in WWI.
I can't link to this book because it seems to be vanishingly rare, even secondhand. I borrowed this copy from the London Library and other similar institutions may still have it. I requested it thinking I would just flick through it for any interesting facts about the author as research for the episode, but ended up reading it cover to cover and taking copious notes. I think I annoyed my husband quite a bit, reading out bits to him when he was trying to work, but I was so deeply into this book I couldn't help myself. If you are at all interested in late Victorian/early Edwardian childhood, I recommend trying to track this down.
If you've been here for a while, you'll know that I don't typically read many books that win major literary prizes. However, we received a copy of this, the 2024 Booker Prize winner, as a Christmas gift and, in the spirit of trying to read some things that are not classic crime this year, I gave it a go. It helped that Orbital is under 150 pages long.
I was underwhelmed. I liked the conceit of this book, which follows the inner lives of the astronauts in the International Space Station as it completes one full day of orbiting the Earth. It lacked tension or memorable emotional scope, though, and felt repetitive. The idea of literary-skewing science fiction is intriguing, but this wasn't a hit for me.
I am still working on reading all of Georgette Heyer's twelve detective novels this year (there are two coming up below) but I decided to take a little detour into the Regency historical fiction for which she is more famous. I've read and really liked another of these (Cotillion) and Frederica also seems to come highly rated by Heyer aficionados.
It did not disappoint. I do read quite a bit of contemporary Regency romance when I need a brain break so the tropes and settings are pretty familiar to me, but reading Heyer is a completely different experience. Her fiction has a bite to it that is totally lacking from something like the Bridgerton novels and this makes the inevitable happy ending hit so much better. In Frederica the dialogue is witty, the family dynamics are amusing, and the plot is well constructed. It also gets extra points from me for having a better hot air balloon scene than the one in Enduring Love.
This is my fifth Heyer detective novel this year. I'm feeling more and more confident in my opinion that while she was only average at concocting mystery plots, her gifts for creating conniving characters and writing catty dialogue were first-rate. This inheritance mystery in which any number of heirs could have murdered an unpleasant but rich old man with a cunning domestic poisoning trick is probably my favourite Heyer mystery so far.
The Pope died, the film was out, and listening to Roy McMillan (an approved narrator of mine) read this novel just made sense to me at the time. I went through the audiobook in only a couple of days and it reminded me how much I like a procedural thriller. The bits that gripped me most were the details of how the papal voting process works — so much breaking of sealing wax and slowly threading bits of paper onto string — and then seeing how Harris made these things instrumental in his plot. If anyone has recommendations for similar books where there's no murder and the suspense comes from the slow, attritional progress of a peculiar institution towards an unusual outcome, I'm all ears.
I'm halfway through my Heyer reading for the year! Once again, this is an inheritance mystery set among a rich family replete with unpleasant characters. The plot is not as well thought out as in Behold, Here's Poison and it's moderately obvious throughout who the murderer is. However, it has three redeeming features. One, Heyer's recurring detecting duo of Inspectors Hannasyde and Hemingway are beginning to develop some enjoyable rapport and personality. Two, the addition of a cinema-obsessed teen trying to play detective too livens things up considerably. And three, I always enjoy the pairing of an irascible old lady and her long-suffering companion-secretary. I know there are plenty of mystery fans who don't rate Heyer's work in this genre, but I'm yet to have a bad time reading one of her books.
That was, belatedly, my reading for April: nine books, bringing me up to 41 for the year so far. I'm still a smidge ahead of the pace needed to hit my target of 120 in 2025.
I did manage to stay on track with my intention to read more literary fiction and non-fiction this year, via The Bright Sword, Orbital and Lift the Curtain. I also got great pleasure from my two audiobooks, Legends & Lattes and Conclave. Both were highly satisfactory to me, a very picky audiobook consumer.
If you would like to follow along in real time, you can see what I'm reading at any given moment on the Storygraph. I just use that as a tracker, though, I don't publish any reviews there.
Links to Blackwell's are affiliate links, meaning that I receive a small commission when you purchase a book there (the price remains the same for you). Blackwell’s is a UK bookseller that (I believe) ships internationally at no extra charge.
