Caroline is Writing

a blog by a writer attempting to live the literary good life on the internet
2 min read Permalink

People Don't Even Know About The Private Jet Incident

Thirteen things this Thursday that I have read, watched, listened to or otherwise found noteworthy.

The most popular link last time was this essay about LinkedIn, with these interviews with people who take online privacy very seriously a close second.


  1. The illusion of consent on the internet. No, I did not "agree" to your cookies.
  2. The snack of the summer = putting delicious savoury stuff between two sheets of nori. I cannot endorse the use of an American “cheese product” as advocated here, but I've enjoyed versions with plant-based cheese or seasoned yoghurt.
  3. I really liked this observation from a first person piece about being ghosted at the age of 54:
"While I was not prepared for these precocious, worldly students , I loved teaching short stories, because it’s how we live our lives: one story stacked on another, then another, some running in parallel. Everything all at once. In some stories, you might be the protagonist – in others, just a supporting role. But in all of them, we intertwine with people living in stories of their own."
  1. A good read on why Brad Pitt's personal life doesn't seem to have caught up with his cultural reputation (yet?). "It's like most people don't even know about the private jet incident that required the FBI's involvement."
  1. New dodie video!
  2. Sometimes connections occur in one's content consumption that feel spookily serendipitous. We just watched this Rolex-sponsored documentary from 2011 about 125 years of Wimbledon. The following day, I was catching up on one of my favourite Taylor Swift adjacent podcasts, On the Bleachers, and heard the hosts discussing the relationship that Rolex has to tennis. Their chat was prompted by this very interesting article: "How Rolex Paved the Way for Luxury’s Love Affair With Tennis."
  3. An interesting list of Pride and Prejudice adjacent books — continuations, reimaginings, etc. I am pretty obsessed with trying to read every single Austen follow-on that exists, and I found two here that I had never heard of before.
  4. Screenshots from a conversation with ChatGPT that will make you want to throw every device you own out of the window.
  5. On the difference between being "useful" at work and being "valued":
"I had become the go-to person for making things run smoothly, for fixing urgent problems, for delivering. But every time I pushed toward more strategic and ambitious directions, there was a lot of can-kicking and “let’s think about it” that went nowhere. I was incredibly useful to the organization, but not necessarily valued."
  1. The romance and meaning of compass directions.
  2. Sometimes, you just need to take pictures of the horizon to feel OK.
  3. Via Reo Eveleth's excellent monthly roundup, I came across this lecture about Edmonia Lewis, a 19c American sculptor of Black and Native American origin who lived a fascinating life and created some wonderful work.
  1. Music theory + data analysis = this piece on chord progressions.

Filed under: Links, Blog
2 min read Permalink

The Soundtrack To All Of My Emotional Solo Bus Journeys

Thirteen things this Thursday that I have read, watched, listened to or otherwise found noteworthy.

The most popular link last week was Will Storr's take on the "Substack Style", with oneminutepark.tv coming second.


  1. Interviews with people who take their online privacy extremely seriously. I've always known in theory that we trade convenience for privacy, but reading about people who care enough to seek out the inconvenient route really got me to grasp it on a practical level.
  2. Not unrelated: a compendium of the many, many articles that have been written over the past few years about how the internet "used to be fun".
  3. It's my blog/newsletter and I'll conduct a one-side argument with a Guardian architecture writer if I want to. No, this is not the most beautiful sewage treatment plant. This is. (Astute readers of The Way to the Sea will already know the correct answer without clicking.)
Illustration by Anna Li for The Pudding
  1. The Pudding really is doing some of the most interesting data journalism and visualisation at the moment. This piece feels like a combination of a graphic novel and a phD thesis about how often Asian actors are inaccurately cast in American media (Chinese people playing Korean characters, and so forth).
  2. The band Arcade Fire provided the soundtrack to all of my emotional solo bus journeys between 2005 and 2011. But, like the writer of this well-observed piece about cancellation and music fandom, I had found that the quality of their records had fallen so far that by the time sexual misconduct allegations about Win Butler surfaced in 2022, I barely noticed. It's not very comfortable to think about, but the scale of the backlash against an artist can have something to do with how good their work is currently considered to be.
  3. Short fiction: "How to live well on a $100,000 advance" by Naomi Kanakia.
The Merlin fragment in its box. Image: Cambridge University Library
  1. Cambridge have found lost bit of the Arthur-Merlin story.
  2. I really enjoy getting glimpses of other publishing industries beyond the Anglophone world that I inhabit. This round-up of interesting new books being published in China scratched that itch.
  1. Just a man about town, in his wearable fire escape.
  2. A self-described "failed" comedian ponders why his comedy career didn't work out and concludes that it was because he didn't put in the time and energy to become friends with other comedians.
  3. LinkedIn Is So Embarrassing.
  1. An absorbing 90-minute documentary about Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, the writer and psychiatrist who developed the "five stages of grief" model.
  2. The birth stories of seventeenth century women.

Filed under: Blog, Links
2 min read Permalink

Trying To Achieve Peak Cultural Saturation

Thirteen things this Thursday that I have read, watched, listened to or otherwise found noteworthy.

The most popular link last week was the Useless Web, with Mary H.K. Choi on quitting therapy second.


  1. Two doctors discuss the big "secret" that those in their field keep from their patients: medicine is a lot more uncertain than our cultural norms would have us believe. I wrote about the conflicting ideas and feelings this prompts in A Body Made of Glass and I'm still thinking about it. It's much harder to get your head round the idea that your doctor is using the best science so far rather than the best science ever, full stop.
  2. My old Hot Pod colleague Nick Quah has an intriguing piece out about the "New Media Circuit". If you're a celebrity with a film to promote, it's no longer enough to be interviewed by Terry Gross or the New York Times. You have to do Hot Ones, be charming while holding puppies, wear a neck chain on Theo Von — or whatever will be the zeitgeisty thing at the point when you are trying to achieve peak cultural saturation.
  3. Would you like to watch a minute of footage from a random park somewhere in the world? Of course you would.
  1. Why Is Everybody Knitting Chickens? Because they're great, of course!
  2. My mother worked in adult further education when I was growing up and it makes me furious every time I think about how that system has been needlessly hollowed out in the UK over the past two decades. However, people and communities find a way: this is a lovely two part piece on running evening classes with your friends — not for profit or some other tangible end goal, but just because you like to learn stuff together.
  3. Yes, I am still listening to the Phantom Thread soundtrack very often and thus this piece about Paris Fashion Week in 1947 was very appealing to me.
  4. This week in ancient continental dynasties: the Hohenzollerns have finally agreed to hand over all the priceless stuff they own to the German state. Very soon ordinary folk will be able to gaze upon artefacts including "Lucas Cranach the Elder’s portrait of Elector Joachim I of Brandenburg, Baroque ivory furniture created for Elector Frederick William and a dinner service that belonged to Frederick the Great". The descendants of the erstwhile Kings of Prussia "retain ownership of seven tobacco boxes and a number of other items on a so-called 'C-List'", though, so everybody wins.
  1. This is the best lofi stream on the internet — librarians scanning microfiche + beats.
  2. The Secret Diary of a Video Game Horse.
  3. Will Storr has nailed why so much "popular" writing on Substack a) follows the same format b) makes me feel queasy. It's AI!
  1. Beautiful perfume bottle blueprints.
  2. Facebook's main legacy is... "a long list of indelible birthdays".
  3. This is a funny-sad bit of memoir about how to "make a living" as a writer. The author does a daily "horse news" newsletter at 6am every day an American race track conglomerate and one summer wrote 70,000 words of "choose your own adventure" erotica for an app. This makes my brief turn reviewing burlesque acts for a communist newspaper seem tame.

Filed under: Blog, Links
2 min read Permalink

I Can't Escape The Feeling That We're All Just Working For Free

Thirteen things this Thursday that I have read, watched, listened to or otherwise found noteworthy.

The most popular link last week was this Tokyo hotel, with Cal Newport's thoughts on internet joy second.


  1. Extremely spectacular and incredibly sylvan: essentially a five-star review of Switzerland.
  2. "I feel neither younger nor older than 94, but 94 now feels younger than I’d expected." An interview with 94-year-old author Judith Viorst.
  3. I loved the new Lorde single and am eagerly anticipating the album. But I'm also so interested in how she is belatedly embracing "the new pop star marketing machine". This is an astute analysis, but I think the writer is a little harsh on Lorde for simply wanting to try hard to have her work appreciated.
  1. Via Web Curios, I enjoyed this song "idk i just work here" and its video — a sad-but-funny satire of every terrible minimum wage job you ever had.
  2. Did you know that cabbage was only introduced to Japan in the 18C? Learn this, alongside many other similar facts, in this brief history of cabbage.
  3. If you were also a "there's someone under the bed" child, I hope you find this vindicating as well as incredibly terrifying and creepy. You're not silly for checking!!
  1. 13 Animals made from 13 circles by Dori the Giant.
  2. This is a fantastic but sobering read from Carla Lalli Music on what it takes — financially and emotionally — to maintain a successful presence on YouTube. You might remember Carla from the pre-2020 Bon Appetit channel, and after that all fell apart she struck out own her own. Over three years of producing weekly videos on the platform, she spent $14,000 a month on production costs, not including her own time. And even though she racked up 18 million views and over 230,000 subscribers, the ad money YouTube paid her never came close to covering her costs. She sometimes fell short in a month by as much as $10,000. Which meant a choice between taking whatever sponsors she could to try and break even, or reducing her production costs. Make it an ad or make it worse, or both. I would like to write more about this mad dichotomy at a future point, but for now I'll just say that I can't escape the feeling that we're all just working for free for these corporations, even when it looks from the outside like we're individually successful. Plenty of people would love to have the numbers Carla pulled in and yet... she couldn't afford to keep doing it.
  3. Mary H.K. Choi on quitting therapy.
  1. An incredible online gallery of artists' calling cards.
  2. Something new to feel depressed and furious about: what's happening to the deep ocean.
  3. Shall we conjugate some nouns?
"I tear the hair; I tore the whore; I have torn the horn.
I see the sea; I saw the saw; I have seen the scene.
I draw the law; I drew the loo; I have drawn the lawn.
I throw the bow; I threw the boo; I have thrown the bone."
  1. The Useless Web is never not a good click.
Filed under: Blog, Links
3 min read Permalink

This Is For The Hardcore Procrastinators Only

Thirteen things this Thursday that I have read, watched, listened to or otherwise found noteworthy enough to share with you.

  1. There were a lot of The Great Gatsby takes around for the centenary of its original publication, but none of them caught my interest as much as this one by Wesley Lowery. It posits the theory that the character of Jay Gatsby is subtly written as a Black or mixed race man working hard on "passing" as white so as to "outmanoeuvre the racial order of the era". I'm by no means an expert on Fitzgerald, but I found this analysis both interesting and persuasive.
  2. Cal Newport on rediscovering joy on the internet by frequenting nice websites dedicated to things you are interested in rather than attempting to make sense of vast social media networks.
  1. This twentieth anniversary performance of "Hips Don't Lie" by Shakira and Wyclef Jean was both baffling and life affirming. It prompted so many questions for me. Does Shakira keep laughing because she can't believe this is her most culturally lasting song (in the English-speaking world)? Why is Wyclef wearing a utility vest and an upside down flower as a hat like a Cicely Mary Barker flower fairy? And why is she dancing in a sandpit that has been constructed on a television soundstage?
  2. Ed Simon makes a good case for why we should do close readings of bad poetry.
  3. I love reading about the DIY projects of people with practical skills and the will to use them. This one by Andrew Childs is a great entry in this genre. Andrew's son has type 1 diabetes and having a smartwatch that displayed his CGM data would greatly simplify the task of managing his levels while at school. But giving a nine-year-old an Apple Watch seemed like a bad idea (and the Apple Watch is apparently not that good as a diabetes tool anyway). So Andrew designed and built a custom kid-with-diabetes smartwatch instead.
  4. Would you like to play solitaire (or minesweeper or sudoku or 2048) at work inside a spreadsheet so it looks at a casual glance like you are diligently doing data entry? Well, now you can.
A close up of Dorothy L. Sayer's handwriting.
Photo: Alan Jacobs at blog.ayjay.org
  1. Reflections on the handwriting of various famous writers, including C.S. Lewis and Dorothy L. Sayers (see above), and what it could reveal about their moods. "One thing seems quite clear to me: the loose, flowing hand is associated not just with hurry but also with happiness."
  2. This looks like an intriguing zine that combines a puzzle element with a commentary on art in the age of AI.
  3. One of my (many!) unfulfilled project ideas is a hyperlocal newsletter just serving the few streets around my house. I will never actually do this but it's fun to think about the "fox spotting" column it would contain. I did really enjoy reading this profile of 88-year-old Lucy Lippard, though, who has been running a news-sheet for her village of 250 people in New Mexico since the 1990s.
  1. Sometimes it's nice just to look at some pictures of owls in towels.
  2. This is for the hardcore procrastinators only: the Dangerous writing app. If you stop typing for more than ten seconds (or the interval of your choice) it irrevocably deletes everything you have written. It's probably a good way to train yourself not to check your email or look at the news at the end of every sentence!
  3. Is Anna Wintour anything like the Miranda Priestley character in The Devil Wears Prada? In some ways, yes, in others no, this former Vogue editor says. For one thing, she doesn't wear Prada:
You’d think somebody with Anna’s personality would have been attracted to the severe monochromatic blacks and navy favored by Miuccia Prada in the early 2000’s but, in fact, she preferred soft pastels and busy patterns of pink and pistachio. The first time I attended a party in her house, I was shocked by the cheerful yellow walls and drapes bursting with cabbage rose blooms. It all seemed so utterly un-Anna but, then again, as I learned from her, that’s what fashion is, a readily accessible tool that allows you to remake the actual self into a preferred version.
  1. If I ever get to Tokyo (unlikely, for both financial and environmental reasons) I think I might like to stay in this hotel.

Filed under: Blog, Links
3 min read Permalink

From The Point Of View Of A Typeface

Thirteen things this Friday that I have read, watched, listened to or otherwise found noteworthy.

The most popular link last week was this piece about personal style malaise, with this one about the death of cultural gatekeepers coming second.


  1. When Kylie Minogue Was a Font. This is about the 1997 techno-pop track "GBI (German Bold Italic)", in which Minogue sings from the point of view of a typeface. I'd never heard it before and I love it.
  2. An update for a favourite podcast episode of mine: "Secret Mall Apartment" by 99% Invisible.
  3. Advice from a beauty expert for someone who doesn't wear makeup and is feeling pressured to put it on for her wedding:
"I agree with you: it is radical to get married without makeup in 2025. It’s radical to choose embodied freedom – your ability to 'cry, laugh and hug' without regard for running mascara – over performance as a bride. It might be hard for your community to understand, but 200 years ago, so was marrying for love! People did it anyway."
  1. Speaking of weddings, this is a great anecdote from someone who, with their then-partner, accidentally went to a wedding a year late. They ended up attending the nuptials of two total strangers who happened to be getting married in the same venue. Said couple thought it was hilarious, and invited the crashers to stay for the whole event and be in all the pictures. They still invite them to their anniversary celebrations, and even though the attendees aren't partners any more, they still go to enjoy the reunion of a strange yet fun day.
  2. What did the Hubble telescope see on your birthday? This is what I got. Sparkly!
  1. I'm going to be both serious and angry for a second, because since I last wrote to you I found out that my work is among the many, many thousands of books in the illegally pirated LibGen database that Meta has used to train its AI model. There is more detail and context about this in the original reporting here. Even some advance copies of books that haven't been published yet were included. That this is, at the very least, a copyright infringement is absolutely clear to me. I trust the various professional bodies I belong to and will be closely monitoring their attempts at litigation. But there is also an emotional and cultural component to this for me. Over the past nine months or so, I have increasingly come to feel that the platforms operated by companies like Meta are essentially extractive; that they take ideas — photos, text, content — from users, for free, make a profit off it and offer nothing of value in exchange. The world as mediated through a social network built for this purpose is a sterile and sometimes scary place. Daisy Buchanan described the feeling of having her four very personal novels harvested in this scrape as like a "brain pick" in the worst possible way. I agree, but that's also how the products of Meta and other such companies make me feel now more generally, beyond this specific incident. And I want to opt out, as far as I'm able. I'm still working out exactly what this will look like for me, someone who has work to flog online, but I do know I won't be going back to posting any of my personal images or thoughts on Instagram or Facebook. I will find a new home for the dog photos, I promise.
  2. Mara Wilson's tribute to Michelle Trachtenberg is so moving and revealing of what it was like to be a child star in the 1990s.
  3. A poem I liked: "Observations Concerning the Role of the Anglican Funeral Service in the Murder Mystery" by Maryann Corbett.
Man that is born of woman (saith the prayer book)
hath but a short time to live, especially
in British detective dramas
since it is foreordained that some poor sod
will be shot, strangled, drowned, or brained with a shovel
before the opening credits and theme music.
  1. I'm obsessed with the fish doorbell. This feels like such a Dutch solution to a problem to me? Take your turn watching to see if the fish need to be let through here.
Spring by Michalina Janoszanka
  1. Michalina Janoszanka did extraordinary things with reverse painting, building up layers of pigment on the reverse of a piece of glass to create a kaleidoscopic image.
  2. I want someone to make this bag for me.
  1. At the same time as "serious" or "difficult" literature is becoming more popular (probably because of the advent of AI slop), the publishing industry has to face up to the biases involved in how these qualities are signalled with marketing.
  2. Colorfle: like Wordle, but for mixing colours.

Filed under: Links, Blog
2 min read Permalink

All Hail Zeus, I Suppose

Thirteen things this Thursday that I have read, watched, listened to or otherwise found noteworthy.

The most popular link last week by far was this take on Meghan's Netflix series, with this piece by Sage Sohier about her best photograph second.


  1. Caitlin Dewey on choosing not to be pregnant on the internet. "My first child is now arriving in a matter of days, and most of my social and professional networks have no earthly idea. Apart from a single vague post to an alt Instagram account, I’ve largely hidden this pregnancy from social media." I hope we are moving towards a place where the people doing the performative online announcements about life events are the outliers, not the other way around.
  2. Bells On Sunday is a podcast that feels like it is made for me and about five other people who also think The Nine Tailors was Dorothy L. Sayers' best novel. It is simply a recording of some bells, from a church, minster or cathedral somewhere. I like these, from Saint Milburga in Stoke St Milborough, Shropshire, but they're all good.
“You can make your own plans, the day will make itself” (2024) by Katherine Duclos
  1. Katherine Duclos makes beautiful art with Lego. If I'm ever in a city where she has an exhibition, you won't be able to drag me away.
  2. Why is everything so mid? Because, as a society, we simultaneously replaced human gatekeepers with automated platforms and incentivised people to homogenise their taste.
  3. I tried to find my personal style and all I got was this existential crisis.
  4. Beware custard powder — it might explode.
  1. I have been winding wool for a new knitting project recently, which is probably why encountering Frederick Leighton's 1878 painting "Winding the Skein" tickled me so much. It does not look like this when I'm doing it.
  2. Useful step-by-step guide on how to help someone who has fallen out of their wheelchair. This is the key point: "Do what they ask, NOT what you think would be helpful."
  3. Reflections on the "Day in the Life" format of social media video, now that the AI slop version of it has appeared.
  4. Hellenic Polytheism is... back? All hail Zeus, I suppose.
  1. This is one for the 2016-era subscribers to my newsletter: 20 Essential Tools of a Medieval Scribe.
  2. Why do they play up-tempo pop music in the supermarket? Because it supposedly makes us buy more things at a faster rate.
  3. I'm nine months late to this Emily Gould piece about monster romance books, but it's still well worth reading, especially if you think you don't want to read books about horny-yet-loyal blue aliens.

Filed under: Links, Blog
3 min read Permalink

I Hope They Never Grew Out Of Their Pedantry

Thirteen things this Thursday that I have read, watched, listened to or otherwise found noteworthy.

The most popular link last week was this analysis of the new "boom boom" aesthetic, with this piece about the cloistered nuns of Tyburn second.

What I'm up to: The paperback of my latest book, A Body Made of Glass, has been published this week in both the UK and the US! (There will also be an Australia/New Zealand edition, but it's not out until July.) Paperbacks very rarely get reviewed these days, so I was both surprised and happy to see this excellent review-essay in the Los Angeles Review of Books: We Are Never Well, nor Can Be So.

Neither the covers nor the text of the book's two editions have changed, other than to add some lovely quotes from people like John Green ("I loved it") and Lucy Worsley ("essential reading"). To celebrate publication, there is a giveaway where you can win a signed and personalised copy of either paperback edition: this is the form and it's open for entries until 20th March. And if you'd like to purchase a copy, all the links to do that are collected here.

Morris the dog was VERY keen on the UK paperback.

  1. I hope the children who wrote to Alfred Hitchcock to correct his grammar on a billboard for The Birds — he put "The Birds is coming", they said it should be "The Birds are coming" — never grew out of their pedantry.
  2. Olivia Laing on how to eat while writing a book, for maximum nutrition and minimal time/effort. "Sandwiches from the garage, at least on a metaphorical level, are exactly what’s needed."
  3. Photographer Sage Sohier gives the backstory to what she considers her best photograph: "Gordon and Jim after coming out to Gordon’s mum."
  1. Rick Astley singing Chappell Roan's "Pink Pony Club". I promise this isn't a rickroll. I am now rooting for them to do a duet.
  2. I don't normally read many thousands of words about the (parlous) state of contemporary art, but this piece is so well-written and argued that I was at the end before I'd even registered what I was doing.
  3. Kate Wagner, the visionary behind the blog McMansion Hell, has had a tough few months recovering from a fall and a concussion. Her essay about having to cease all work and writing in order to recover is very good.
  4. Monty Don, writing in 2005, tells us how to dress for gardening:
"If you are not familiar with their joys, highrise trousers are fantastically comfortable and keep your lower back warm. My children still squirm with embarrassment every time they see me in them (which is most days) but that is probably some kind of seal of approval. If you are uncertain about the required cut, check out photographs of agricultural labourers in summer (ie jacketless) circa 1880-1914."
During the "Winter Stupid". Photo: Eric Wagner
  1. I enjoyed Eric Wagner's account of his tradition with a friend that they call "Winter Stupid". This is just them going and trying to camp for a weekend, in winter, in the Washington/Oregon backcountry. The tent fell on them this time, but at least they didn't inhale any white gas fumes like on a previous occasion!
  2. I did not and will not watch a single second Meghan's Netflix show, but I did read many takes about it, and this was my favourite.
  1. A niche fascination of mine is the early generation of people who managed to make a career out of being internet "content creators" and, if they stuck with it, what they think about this now. This woman vlogged her life consistently between the ages of 20 and 30. She now has some reflections on that decade lived out on the screen.
  2. Justin Myers nails what I found so uncomfortable about that saccharine "coffee with your younger self" trend that has been going around social media.
  3. Cozy Dumpster Fire: like the Netflix cosy fireplace, but more appropriate to the times.
  4. An interview with one of the founders of Letterloop, a social media alternative that provides "private group newsletters for friends, families & teams". She seems smart and savvy and the product is interesting, but I can't switch off the voice in my head that goes it's a blog just call it a blog this is just livejournal!.

Filed under: Links, Blog
3 min read Permalink

Those Who Like The Grooves Of Your Mind

Thirteen things this Thursday that I have read, watched, listened to or otherwise found noteworthy.

The most popular link last week was Seb Emina's new terms for social media user typologies (number three on this digest), with this photo essay about the British Museum second.


  1. Put the world's forests on shuffle and enjoy a random tree-based soundscape.
  2. I have never set foot on the Isle of Wight, but I have sailed around it, and perhaps this is partly why I am oddly fixated on it. This essay on how this small island in the English Channel has been the setting for generations of utopian dreams really justifies all the time I have spent daydreaming about it.
  3. A love letter to the personal website.
Source: Library of Congress.
  1. A wonderful tour of London as it has been reproduced in scenery form on studio soundstages for filming purposes. Even the title of this piece — "the imagined city of the backlots" — is evocative.
  2. A new vibe just dropped, and I already hate it: boom boom.
  3. I cut a long section about the trend for obsessive personal health and fitness tracking and quantification out of A Body Made of Glass because, although interesting, it didn't illuminate my central subject of hypochondria that much. I might repurpose that into an essay at some point, because I do think it's a pattern of behaviour we ought to scrutinise more than we do. This is a good overview of how useless most of the consumer tracking stuff is:
"If you look at my Oura smart ring app on the night of the 12 January, you will see my heart rate spike dramatically at 11pm, then flatline completely. You would have to assume that I’d had a heart attack and died. In fact, I was running a fever and, frustrated by the weight of the ring on my finger, tore it off and threw it across the room."
  1. Why do certain poems go viral? An investigative close reading.
  1. A visualisation that lets you rotate the pool, move the sphere around, splash the water... It's very calming to fiddle with.
  2. Meet the cloistered nuns of Tyburn.
  3. This is written as "advice for a friend who wants to start a blog", but I think it would be instructive to anyone embarking on a public creative project who needs some encouragement to be authentic and weird in their own personal way:
"What if you want to write 5000 words about the history of French grammar but fear people will get bored by that? What should you do? You should write 5000 words about the history of French grammar. It will filter your readers so you attract those who like the grooves of your mind."
  1. A poem I enjoyed: "Walking with the Weather" by Medbh McGuckian.
Untitled [Fig. 32] MOCA, Bangkok, 2023. Source: Assaf Hinden
  1. Interviews with gallery attendants about what it's like to look at people who are looking at art.
  2. Tips for good mathematical handwriting. As someone with some quite peculiar features in my writing (self-consciously adopted when I was about 13 because I wanted to seem eccentric and now unavoidable habits), I appreciated the post-hoc justification for looping the letter l, crossing z and putting a slash through 7. Otherwise somebody might not be able to read my equations!

Filed under: Blog, Links
9 min read Permalink

Bowen, Bennet, Butler: What I Read in February 2025

This was the month where I realised what I need to both enjoy reading books and feel like I'm doing it purposefully: structure and planning. To that end, I spent some time finally creating a centralised list of books I want to read on my Storygraph. Then I cross-checked my various library subscriptions to see what was available in their ebook catalogues and added tags. Now if I get restless, I can quickly borrow something I already know I want to read and be immersed in a matter of seconds, without having to make any extra decisions. Decision fatigue and paralysis, I'm learning, is a big component of why I sometimes get stuck with my reading.

Overwhelm is another part of it, so taking the time to look at the podcast episodes I plan to make this year (yes, I do schedule them a year at a time!) and scoping out what needs to be read and by when was very calming. An episode I have planned for November, for instance, requires me to re-read eight Agatha Christie books, so I've spaced those out over the intervening months. Do try and guess what subject I'm covering if you like, I would enjoy that. Anyway, I never again want to be in the situation I had in autumn 2024, when I was chain-listening Edmund Crispin audiobooks on 2.5 speed just to get through them in time. Not fun!

This is a loose structure, though, with plenty of room for spontaneity and mood-reading. I did a fair bit of that this month, actually, which resulted in what was, for me, a very satisfying blend of genres and styles for the 28 days of February.


Broken Homes and Foxglove Summer by Ben Aaronovitch; Body Work by Ben Aaronovitch, Andrew Cartmel and Lee Sullivan

I'm going to whisk through the by-now customary Ben Aaronovitch section; for those who are new to these monthly reading round-ups, I've cut out most of the anxiety-inducing politics podcasts I used to listen to and instead, I'm making my way through the Rivers of London series on audiobook. I managed two in February, which tells you just how much time I was devoting to podcasts before. Foxglove Summer I think is my favourite of the series so far: I enjoyed the tension that came from born-and-bred Londoner Peter Grant having to spend time in the countryside.

Body Work was more of a departure for me, being the first in the series of comics/graphic novels that runs alongside the novels. I haven't tried to read a graphic novel of any kind in years, and I was disconcerted to find that the app I used to use, ComiXology, has since been folded into Amazon. Still, I must admit that ComiXology's "guided view" technology makes reading a work like this in the Kindle app an absolute dream. I did most of it on my phone while travelling and was impressed by how seamlessly I could swipe from panel to panel even on such a small screen while not losing the sense of the artist's original page layout. Obviously, it's a different kind of story that works for this more visual format, but I enjoyed it very much.


My Brother's Killer by D.M. Devine

I read this 1961 crime novel for a recent Shedunnit episode where I investigated Agatha Christie's taste in crime fiction. She gave this book first prize in a "Don's Detective Novel" competition, and I could see why. Although some of its subject matter is much more of the 1960s than the interwar era when she became famous for her mysteries — blackmail, extortion and pornography all feature — the plot is well worked out and has a good reveal at the end. I would recommend this if you are in the market for a quick, satisfying read that straddles the divide between the golden age whodunnit and the later twentieth-century thriller.


Deep End by Ali Hazelwood

I love that Ali Hazelwood writes the same book over and over again in different settings and millions of people buy them every time. I mean that sincerely. I need things I can rely on these days. All of her stories are about a burgeoning relationship between a physically large, often Scandinavian, man and a petite, athletic, brainy woman with insecurities. Because I know exactly what I'm going to get, I find her stuff very comforting to read, even if it is at this point veering towards the predictable and forgettable. In this new novel, her usual character types are transplanted to the world of high-level American collegiate watersports, with a large swimmer and a small diver navigating their kinks and feelings. Now that I'm writing this a couple of weeks later, I'm not sure I can recall the details of the plot, but I enjoyed a nice brain break while I was reading it, and I appreciated all the little Easter egg references to her other books that were sprinkled throughout.


Show Your Work! by Austin Kleon

Despite my intention to try and read more non-fiction this year, I found that I couldn't settle to any one book of that type this month. I've got a few on the go and I hope to finish one next month. I did fly through this quite short guide to modern creativity, though, and found in it some thought-provoking ideas as I continue to refine my relationship with social media and this newsletter.


The Heat of the Day by Elizabeth Bowen

I already counted myself in Agatha Christie's debt, but now I can add something else to the slate: I owe her for making me read Elizabeth Bowen for the first time. Bowen was one of Christie's favourite authors, so I picked up 1949's The Head of the Day for that aforementioned podcast episode. I was completely enraptured by it. It's a tense, claustrophobic tale set in London towards the end of WW2, focusing on a quartet of characters with complicated inner lives. Two are potentially engaged in espionage and counter-espionage, while romantic and family relationships interfere. There's also a hint of Bowen's Anglo-Irish background, with a younger English character unexpectedly inheriting a rural Irish "Big House", which his mother travels over to inspect as he is still doing military service.

As discussed at the start of the year, I'm pretty out of practice in reading literary fiction like this, so for the first fifty pages or so the intense interiority of the style and slow-paced plot was quite hard going for me, but by the end I was gripped like it was a thriller. I thought it had similarities both to Edith Wharton's 1912 novel The Reef and Patrick Marber's 1997 play Closer. I loved it and have already borrowed two more Bowen novels from the London Library.


Earl Crush by Alexandra Vasti

Vasti's Regency romances are of the type that show absolutely no resemblance to history at all, but I have enjoyed them in the past in the same brain-switching-off way that I enjoy Ali Hazelwood. However, this one was a disappointment because of the peculiar pacing. I'm not sure a book of this type is ever going to work if the most exciting set piece (a near-fatal runaway carriage incident) happens in the first couple of chapters and then the hero and heroine fall requitedly in love before the halfway point. What is left to happen? Not much, it would seem.


Wrong Place, Wrong Time by Gillian McAllister

My reading of this 2022 thriller is entirely owing to getting better organised. I saw someone — I think the author Sarah Perry, but can't be sure — recommend it ages ago on Instagram. I scribbled down the title and immediately forgot about it. Then I rediscovered my note when I was compiling my TBR on the Storygraph, saw that my library had this available for ebook borrowing, and dived right in.

It's in some ways quite a conventional domestic noir thriller, set in northern England with the mother of a teenage son as the protagonist. Right at the beginning, events come to a head when her son stabs a man one night outside their house — an act that is completely at odds with her previous knowledge of her child. After an exhausting night at the police station, she wakes up the next morning and finds that it is... the day before the crime. And this keeps happening, with her skipping backwards through time. She decides that this is happening so that she can solve her son's crime before he commits it, and it turns into quite an interesting reflection on cause and effect.

I like how many authors these days seem to be asking the question "but what if I added time travel?" and then running with the answer. The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Turton is one such, as is One Last Stop by Casey McQuiston. Genre is a construct anyway, so let's have more of this sort of thing, please.


Last Bus to Woodstock by Colin Dexter

This is the Shedunnit Book Club book for March, which I read a little ahead so I could record a podcast episode about it. It's the first Inspector Morse novel, from 1975. This was also my first time reading a Morse book despite loving the television series for decades.

It isn't often that I read a book that inspired a major screen adaptation and think "I like the TV version better", but that was the case here. Last Bus to Woodstock is very of 1975 in many ways, chiefly its attitude to women and sexual assault, and that's not a milieu I tend to seek out in my crime fiction. The character of Morse is consistently well-drawn and I admired Dexter's plotting, but I don't think I'll be stocking up on more of this series in book form any time soon. I will be watching random episodes while I eat my dinner, though.


Shades of Milk and Honey by Mary Robinette Kowal

Oh, I wanted to like this novel so much. I formed a very positive impression of Mary Robinette Kowal when she appeared on my friend Helen's podcast last year and the premise of this book — Jane Austen but with magic — felt tailor-made for me. Unfortunately, said magic is almost entirely redundant in this world since its only use is for people to make pretty illusions for drawing room entertainment, and the surrounding comedy of manners and courtship is of pretty low quality. I was also irritated by the wholesale borrowing of entire characters from Austen's novels: there is a Mr and Mrs Bennet, a Frank Churchill, a Georgiana Darcy, a sort of Lady Catherine de Burgh, and so on. Perhaps this was meant as homage, but the copy and paste was too entire for my tastes. Not for me, unfortunately.


Why Shoot a Butler? by Georgette Heyer

I completed the month with a Heyer, since I'm reading all of her crime fiction in order this year for an eventual podcast episode. First published in 1933, as with the one I read last month, Why Shoot a Butler? is a light-hearted detective story set among wealthy English people, with more of a focus on character and atmosphere than plot. I enjoyed it as a good example of its type, rather than because I had grand expectations of an excellent puzzle. The one stand-out feature for me was the protagonist Frank Amberley, who is both the book's amateur sleuth and its romantic hero, yet remains incredibly grumpy throughout. Since he is a barrister by profession, the same as Heyer's husband, I did wonder if this was a private domestic joke.


That was my reading for February: twelve books, right on track to hit 120 in 2025. I also managed to meet my objective of reading one work of literary or experimental fiction (in this instance, The Heat of the Day) and one non-fiction book (Show Your Work!) per month, plus I managed to fit in a graphic novel as well. All very satisfactory, although I do think I could still stretch myself more when it comes to non-fiction. I'll work on that for March.

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.

Filed under: Reading, Blog, Monthly Reading Review