What I'm up to: Making my umpteenth attempt at Couch to 5k. Feeling gleeful because I finally worked out how to read a graphic novel on my phone. Arguing with my choir director about how to rhyme "married" and "mermaid" in a folk song. Pulling out the mittens I'm knitting for the seventh time because I still can't do colourwork reliably. Normal end-of-February things.
I love Gina Trapani's visualisation "My Life in Weeks", which plots out her existence alongside major world events like the Clinton inauguration and the first broadcast of The X-Files. And it stretches into the future, with boxes yet to be filled. Thinking of a life in weeks rather than years or eras, in the same way that Oliver Burkeman's Four Thousand Weeksdoes, is so much more comprehensible to me.
I'm a big advocate of coming up with the name for a project first and then retrospectively working out what it should be. I don't know that that's what happened with the podcast It's Reigning Men, but I have my suspicions. It's delightful, though — I've always wanted to listen to half an hour of backstory for King Harald V of Norway.
I found this 2013 article by Christopher Fletcher, Keeper of Special Collections at the Bodleian Library, quite moving. Every time they acquire a manuscript that has pins in it — a centuries-old pre-word processing technique used by everyone including Jane Austen to attach edits and additions to a manuscript without having to rewrite it completely — they carefully remove the pins, date them and save them in a special box. Just in case anyone ever wants to do another PhD on "the use of pins in literature", I suppose.
Seb Emina's coinages for the new types of social media user are excellent (they're number three in this digest). I think I'm a Deskatarian who aspires to be a Gutenberg Girl. Which are you?
"In recent weeks, two of the people who I consider my formative editors in this stupid business have verbally shaken me by the shoulders and tried to wake me from this stubborn nostalgia. 'YOU NEED TO ACCEPT THAT 2014 WASN’T REAL,' each of them said to me."
As a savoury food goblin who would probably put salt on salt if that was physically possible, I excited to make Molly Goldberg's Pickle Soup.
This is a great primer on what the audiobook boom means for publishing at the moment. It also includes a suggestion to replace podcasts with non-fiction audiobooks, something I've been trying out for myself this month and really enjoying. Essay collections are where it's at, I think. More on this in my February reading update, coming your way on Monday.
I know very little about K-pop and am not in the market for a new music fixation at the moment. But I loved this live performance by Blackpink's Jisoo because the choreography is exactly the kind of thing I was trying to do to Britney songs when I was nine.
An interview with Nadia Odunayo, the woman behind my reading tracking platform of choice, the Storygraph. When asked if she would ever consider selling to Amazon (like Goodreads), she said: "That’s not something we’re interested in."
What if we took the pharmacological concept of a "minimum effective dose" and applied it to other areas of life? Reading for only eight minutes a day or regularly doing a bad drawing is still doing something.
These days, what with the decline influence of mainstream media and social media's increasing disinterest in sane, normal posts and links, it often feels like authors have to hand-sell each individual copy of their book. Why not do this on dating apps?
This Lonely Island medley is worth it for the cutaways to the audience alone, because then you can see which celebrities are vibing like mad and singing along, and which ones are thinking to themselves "why are Lady Gaga and Andy Samberg singing to me about incest, mustard and Captain Jack Sparrow?"
Finance is ruining popular art (again). "It’s democratic: Everyone’s brain gets melted. Critique dies. Numbed consumption wins. We pay good money for this."
In a historic churchyard in Manhattan, there is a grave of a woman who never existed — Charlotte Temple, the heroine of Charlotte, A Tale of Truth, a novel by Susanna Rowson first published in 1791. For a few decades in the nineteenth century, it was the most popular grave in the whole place for visitors, and was likely erected as a cash grab.
You can now buy Paper Apps™, or as they used to be known, "notebooks".
What I'm up to: I'm attempting calendar blocking this week properly for the first time. I certainly enjoyed the planning process, but I don't know that I love the feeling of being on a school timetable of my own creation. I would be interested to hear readers' thoughts about this technique.
A very serious guide, with flow charts, for working out whether the book you're reading is literary fiction or genre fiction. A handy rule of thumb: are the monsters hot, or do they have metaphorical resonance?
Last Saturday's Blind Date column was one of my favourites ever to appear because the two people discovered when they arrived at the restaurant that they had already dated eight years ago, and it had ended when one of them declined the option to go on a third date. Justin Myers' review is, as ever, essential companion reading.
A handy little tool that helps you maximise your time off work. You tell it what country you live in, whether you work on weekends, and how many days of leave you have to take. Then it spits out a calendar for the year that gives you the most consecutive non-work time.
An impeccable rant about the awfulness of February. "Something great happened here but it's over with, and that's the way February is."
I can't believe I've only just learned about Puzzmo, a well-designed page of thoughtful daily puzzles. Includes a crossword, several word puzzles, a poker problem, and more. My favourite is Really Bad Chess.
Combination obituary and explainer for the 2000s "horny profile", an icky by- product of the "fetid atmosphere" prevailing in the media at the time. This digest is full of can't-look-away details, including the fact that not one but two Esquire profiles of Penelope Cruz, published years apart, spent hundreds of words dwelling on how hot she looked while eating steak.
Somewhat related: an extract from Josphine Baker's memoirs, giving her first impressions of Paris and reflecting on the experience of doing her revue show there. "Buttocks exist. I don’t know why we dislike them. There are also buttocks that are terribly silly, of course, terribly pretentious, terribly mediocre. All they are good for is sitting on, if that."
The correct question to ask when you first see an Italian cityscape is "where did all the towers go?". As the above reconstruction of Bologna shows, the cities of northern Italy were once "implausible Medieval forest of towers, as dense as Manhattan skyscrapers". During the Guelph-Ghibelline wars of the 10th and 11th centuries, it was apparently a popular tactic to retreat into your fireproof stone tower with your family and valuables, while watching the homes and businesses of your enemies burn below. But as this exploration demonstrates, more of them have survived than we might have expected — they're just blended into the city now.
Feed your vertical scrolling addiction with WikiTok, a TikTok-esque tool that feeds you a different fact from Wikipedia upon every swipe.
"Now I’m at a point where the constant mining of myself for daily tidbits to offer has drained me dry. I have mined my last diamond for the mirror world. I am actually full of diamonds, but I’m reserving these for real life.
I set my reading intentions for the year a little late. It was only in the final week of January that I decided I wanted to try and read 120 books in 2025, with at least one a month each of non-fiction and literary fiction. Thus, I managed the former before the month was over, but not the latter — I'm working on that for February.
Otherwise, it was a good month of reading for me. I tried several new-to-me authors and had good experiences. Even the one book I didn't like wasn't so bad that I couldn't finish it. And I fulfilled my objective of reading mostly physical books that I already owned.
The books listed below are ones that I read in their entirety, either for pleasure, for a book club, or as part of a longer-term project. I skim a lot of others or read portions of them as I'm working on articles and podcast scripts, but I'm not counting those as fully "read". I'm presenting them in the order I read them throughout the month. If you'd like to see previous posts in this series, they're available here.
Continuing my audiobook habit of "Background Ben" instead of scary news podcasts, I listened to the third novel in the Rivers of London series. I've always been keen on London Underground history and trivia, so having a whole story built around that along with some Aaronovitch's magical elements that he's fleshing out very well by this point in the series was enjoyable. I continue to think that Kobna Holdbrook-Smith is one of the most talented readers I've ever heard — he does separate voices for each character while at the same time maintaining a clear sense of the first-person narrator's personality and impressions.
This was a recommendation from my podcast production assistant, Leandra, with whom I had been discussing my disappointing experience in December reading a fairy novel set in the Regency era. Soulless is Victorian in atmosphere, combining elements of fantasy in the form of a society that includes werewolves, vampires and people like the heroine who lack a full soul. A promising premise, given my burgeoning interest in historical fantasy, but one that didn't deliver for me. I found the central character — a parasol-wielding spinster — far too "sprightly" for my taste, and I simply didn't care enough about the various werewolf and vampire problems to follow them closely. By the last third of the novel, I was skimming to get it over with. I believe there are sequels to this and manga adaptations, but I won't be seeking them out.
This is the Shedunnit Book Club's book for February, which I read ahead so I could make the podcast episode about it. Rudolph Fisher was both a doctor and a writer in early 20th-century New York City, with his literary work bringing him in contact with the Harlem Renaissance. In 1932, he published this, his only crime novel, which is set in Harlem and vividly evokes the atmosphere of the neighbourhood. It features a cast of interesting and varied Black characters — as far as I know, the only mystery from the interwar crime fiction "golden age" to do so.
I found this to be a good read, balancing Fisher's obvious interest in the work of John Dickson Carr and Arthur Conan Doyle with his keen observational eye for the society in which he lived. He also brought in his medical expertise to good effect, including a doctor character as the police detective's sidekick and using some lab tests as plot points. According to the postscript in my edition, Fisher had planned out at least three more novels starring his Harlem detecting duo, but he sadly died in 1934 at the age of 37 without having the chance to write them.
I say this all the time on Shedunnit: one of the main pleasures of reading detective fiction from this period for me is the chance to learn about the social habits and conventions that seemed significant to a writer at the time, rather than those rated by a historian looking back with hindsight. This is an excellent novel for learning about how race, economic pressures and political reforms intersected in New York in the early 1930s, from the pen of a funny and erudite Black writer.
Continuing with the medical mysteries, I read this book for the Green Penguin Book Club strand on Shedunnit: the full discussion about it is available to listen to here. I went into this book with great trepidation because the presence of the word "moneylender" in the title combined with the 1931 publication date and the fact that this book has never been reprinted rang serious alarm bells for antisemitism.
I was surprised and relieved, then, to find that apart from a few lines of egregious description (sadly not uncommon in crime fiction in this era), my fears were not realised. This is a competent and well-structured early police procedural that shows the influence of Freeman Wills Crofts and has a medical thread running through it — the author was a doctor. Apart from in the odd secondhand Penguin edition, this book is very hard to track down, but if you do ever come across it in a charity shop or similar for a reasonable price, it would be worth buying.
Get used to this: I'm embarking on one of my "read all her detective fiction" projects with Georgette Heyer this year, so there will be at least one of her mysteries in each of these monthly updates. I began with this one from 1932, her first detective novel. She was already well under way with her historical fiction, although so far it had mostly been Georgian-era; the Regency stuff she's best known for today didn't come until 1935.
The tone of Footsteps in the Dark is light and amusing, centred around three siblings who have inherited a spooky old country house supposedly haunted by a ghostly monk. Along with a barrister brother-in-law and a clueless maiden aunt, they move in and proceed to be terrorised by ghosts, skeletons and local vacuum cleaner salesmen. I'd say this just about qualifies as a detective novel rather than a thriller because the characters do consciously decide to "investigate the case", but Heyer isn't especially interested in detailed plotting or fair play conventions. Instead, she writes sparkling dialogue and funny scenes, resulting in a quick and entertaining reading experience.
The fourth volume in the Cazalet Chronicles, which I have been spacing out since I first fell in love with the series last year. This one is firmly post WW2, and sees the "false Edwardian domestic ideal" (as I called it back in September when reviewing the third book) fully break down. The idyllic yet difficult days at Home Place have come to an end with the death of the patriarch — interestingly not dwelt on or even described by Howard — and the family has largely moved back to London to pick up some semblance of normal life.
Louise, in her unhappy marriage to a mother's boy/society portrait painter, continues to be the most heartbreaking character in my opinion, but honestly so many awful things have happened to the women in this series by now that even when there are nice developments I assume that it won't be long before Howard causes them to turn sour. I still love reading it, though, and will wait as long as I can before reading the fifth and final volume so as to eke out this experience of reading the full series for the first time. I will not be engaging with the literary cash-grab sequels recently announced by Howard's niece.
For all that I know quite a bit about British interwar crime fiction, I am fairly clueless about the American equivalent (cf. me only getting around to reading The Thin Man for the first time last year). Elizabeth Daly, a New York writer who published this first crime novel in 1940 when she was 60, was previously an unknown name to me. Her series detective, Henry Gamadge, appears occasionally on lists of "bibliophile" sleuths and being a fan of that subgenre, I decided to give him a try.
I found Unexpected Night to be delightful: it's a highly competent and promising debut novel. It concerns an inheritance plot surrounding a wealthy but very unwell young man, who will only have the power to make a will leaving the fortune as he desires if he makes it to his twenty-first birthday. His family are therefore trying to wrap him in cotton wool so he can last long enough to enrich them, whereas he would like to live life a little and indulge his interest in theatre. When he is found dead just a few hours into his birthday, suspicions are naturally aroused.
My one difficulty with this book was working out where it is set, as Daly doesn't make this explicit for a non-American reader coming to her story 85 years late, but I eventually pinned it down as a coastal Maine holiday resort popular with rich New Yorkers. I will certainly be looking out for more of Henry Gamadge's adventures.
A friend who is engaged in a serious decluttering and downsizing project periodically sends a list of books via email that he is getting rid of, asking if we would like them. We try not to take them all because of the aforementioned SABLE problem with physical books in this house, but I do enjoy the serendipity of getting to choose from someone else's carefully-curated collection. This book came in one of the batches we picked up last year, and I would never have known it existed otherwise.
It's the memoirs of a wealthy woman who lived in interesting times, as they say. She was born in 1803 in Wales and died in 1889 in Warwickshire, having outlived her husband and most of her siblings and children. She wasn't important to history or politics, but as one source puts it: "Her life could have been drawn from an Austen novel." At the age of 20 she was married off against her will to the heir to a crumbling Midlands estate. She participated in the London season, met various monarchs including Queen Victoria, oversaw the deaths and marriages of her children, travelled around Europe, and witnessed the waning fortunes of the English landed gentry.
Judging by the recollections she chose to set down, she wasn't a particularly deep or philosophical thinker, but the observations she did record about her life are interesting for their own sake. I devoured this book in a couple of days, completely hooked on the peculiar blend of privilege and hardship that made up the plight of a wealthy nineteenth-century woman. As an added point of interest, the memoirs were edited for publication by Alice Fairfax-Lucy, daughter of John Buchan, who married Mary Elizabeth's great-grandson and thus became in the 1930s the mistress of the titular country house, Charlecote. Except Charlecote was by then in serious decline, so Alice's afterword details the classic "death of the country house" narrative which nicely rounds off the story from the century before.
That was my reading for January: eight books, a decent beginning as I aim for 120 in 2025. 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.
Welcome to Thursday Thirteen, my weekly digest of links to things I have found interesting and which I think you might be intrigued by as well. Except today I'm sending this on Friday, because I was busy yesterday meeting a big deadline.
What I'm up to: I released an episode of Shedunnit this week about a mostly-forgotten 1931 murder mystery, The Missing Moneylender by W. Stanley Sykes, and I wrote 4,500 words of a project I'm not ready to tell people about yet.
This writer is engaged in a multi-year project where he visits every neighbourhood in New York City. This January, he finally went to his favourite one: Vinegar Hill in Brooklyn.
Have you been following the blurb discourse? As someone who is a) terrible at doing blurbs for other people's books in a timely fashion and b) hates asking them to do ones for mine but c) feels warm and fuzzy inside every time I get to see a name like "Lucy Worsley" or "John Green" on my book cover, I'm gripped. Rebecca Makkai in the NYT and this in the Economist are the best pro and con takes I've seen so far.
The newsletter I await most eagerly at the moment is by Karen Davis, who sends regular photographs from her walks in a country park near her home in Kansas City, Missouri. Her pictures are beautiful and seasonal, and a good pick-me-up now that I've reached the "it's always grey and I hate it" stage of winter.
An Atlas of Space, so you can know where you are in relation to all the other planets and astroids.
How did they make cars just fall apart like this in early films by the likes of Buster Keaton or Laurel and Hardy? This frame by frame analysis explains. Mostly, the bits of the car weren't joined together in the first place.
I haven't looked at XKCD for years. This one, "Features of Adulthood", reminded me why I used to like it.
What I'm up to: Since I last wrote to you I have been to see an exhibition of massive biblical tapestries, finished knitting my first sock, and talked at length to a teenage family member about why they are reading War and Peace in their spare time.
Some advice on how to productively disengage from the mad panic that passes for "news" these days:
"The first four years of Donald Trump was a continuous panic attack. I’m not going through that again. You don’t have to either. They’re on stage, but you don’t have to be their audience."
Have you ever had this thought: "If the letters of the alphabet were organised in neighbourhoods, what would they be called"? Well, now you know.
Nicole Zhu's short story "What I Eat in a Day" is full of clever thoughts about disordered eating, parasocial relationships, and yummy sandwiches:
"Susie accepts both the sample and the sandwich with the shock of someone being proposed to on a Jumbotron. She pops the cheese into her mouth. Even though the man is watching her for her reaction, the smile that stretches across her face is entirely unabashed. The flavor combination is what she’d hoped for. He grins in response, glad that his offering had the intended effect. Susie is pleased with herself, this moment of spontaneous eating that, for once, ignites excitement instead of dread."
This debut novelist read 50 other debut novels the year that her book came out (2024). Her report on all these books and reflections on what it means for a book to read or not read "like a debut" is very interesting.
"Neuschwanstein not only eschews the role of a castle as a 'fortress to be used in war' (an inherently stereotomic program) but was erected using contemporary materials and techniques that are simply not imbued with the same age or gravitas. Built via a typical brick construction but clad in more impressive sandstone, it’s all far too clean. Neuschwanstein’s proportions seem not only chaotic - towers and windows are strewn about seemingly on a whim - they are also totally irreconcilable with the castle’s alleged typology, in part because we know what a genuine medieval castle looks like."
I send a few different types of post as part of this newsletter: personal essays, reading updates and book reviews, reflections on my own writing, and links round-ups like this one. If you would like to receive some but not all of these, you can adjust those settings in your account menu.
I'm writing this in my free time, but if you would like to support my work, you have a few options. Forward this newsletter to a friend and encourage them to sign up. Subscribe to my podcast, Shedunnit, in your app of choice, or if you are already a listener, become a member of the Shedunnit Book Club. Buy my books — The Way to the Sea and A Body Made of Glass — or borrow them from your local library. Purchase a subscription for yourself or a friend to The Browser. Thank you for reading.
I stopped being able to finish books in 2020, about two weeks into the first Covid lockdown. The problem did not go away for years. I forced myself to read for work, but for pleasure skipped from volume to volume, sometimes only perusing a few pages before throwing another one on the reject pile. I wrote about this at the end of 2022, describing what it felt like to lose the ability to read at length, which until then had been for me "as unconscious as breathing".
This was my assessment as to why I could not get to the end of a narrative:
"I think what makes me put a book down and lose all desire to ever pick it up again is a feeling that I should be doing something more worthwhile with my time. Something that will make things better. I cannot articulate what that other activity is, nor have I, in six months of listlessly turning pages, chanced across it. I just know that reading that book, in that moment, is not it."
Last year, 2024, was the first time since then that I could finish books consistently again. A few factors contributed to that:
Therapy, via which I gained a better understanding of how long I had existed in fight-or-flight mode, tethered to my phone because I expected to receive an emergency call every moment.
Publishing my own book, marking the completion of a writing project that had preoccupied me since 2017.
Finally fully accepting the idea that all reading is reading, whether the book is in the form of an audiobook or is (or is not) from a particular genre.
Planning, tracking and reviewing my reading properly for the first time.
It's this last point that I'm focusing on today.
Read on for:
My stats for the year, with reflections and analysis.
Recommendations for the best books I read.
Thoughts about what I'm changing for 2025.
2024 in Review
I read 112 books in 2024. See them all here. My goal was 104, or two a week, so I exceeded that comfortably. I started writing monthly reading round-ups in September, so you can get more details of what I read in the last third of the year here.
106 were fiction and 6 were non-fiction.
My most-read genre was (unsurprisingly!) crime. The second was romance, followed in a distant third by fantasy.
My three most read authors were:
Edmund Crispin (9 books)
Christianna Brand (6 books)
Anthony Gilbert (6 books)
Approximately 65 per cent of my reading was done with physical books, 25 per cent via ebooks, and 10 per cent through audiobooks.
Analysis
I'm pleased but not especially surprised by how much I read last year. I made some gradual changes (explained here) to how much I was using my phone and I replaced a lot of my mindless scrolling with reading, both by carrying a physical book with me everywhere and by using reading apps on my phone. I don't have the data for this, but I think I picked up the pace through the year as my new habits began to stick and I stopped using Instagram. I remember starting to have the feeling around midsummer that I was excited to finish whatever I was doing so I could get back to reading, which was something I hadn't felt since 2020.
The fiction/non-fiction breakdown is a shock. I do look at a lot of non-fiction books for work, but I didn't realise I was reading so few of them cover to cover for pleasure. This feels especially galling given that I have written two non-fiction books myself, and would like to write more.
Given my overwhelming preference for fiction throughout this year, it makes sense that I was reading crime more than anything else. There's a reason why I have a podcast dedicated to this genre — I do really like it. And I've long had a romance-reading habit for when I want to relax completely. For fantasy to be registering so highly is slightly startling, but it was a very distant third.
My three top authors were all ones that I undertook to read as much of their work in full as possible so I could make a specific type of podcast episode about them. I wrote a little more about this in my November reading update. I'm pleased I did what I set out to do in this regard, but I'll be scaling it back in the future.
I have no particular thoughts about the different formats, although I suspect my audio percentage will be higher for 2025 because I've been replacing podcasts with audiobooks recently.
The Best Books I Read in 2024
My ten favourite titles break down like this:
nine fiction, one non-fiction
nine originally in English, one translated from Japanese
of the ten, there are
two genuine "golden age" detective novels (from the interwar period or very close to it)
two crime novels published in the 2020s, one historical and one contemporary
two YA novels (although that term didn't exist when Noel Streatfeild was writing, of course)
I read this while making the aforementioned podcast episode about Lucy Malleson aka Anthony Gilbert, and it ended up being one of my favourite golden age crime novels of the year. It even inspired another podcast episode, all about the trope it contains. First published in 1941, it follows the fortunes of an elderly spinster who rents a very isolated cottage, Lolly Willowes-style, thinking that she wants to end her days there. She arrives on a dark and snowy night to find that a dead body is already occupying the cottage, but when she brings the police back to inspect the corpse, it has vanished... I found it creepy and puzzling.
I read this historical novel thanks to a recommendation from my podcast production assistant Leandra. Set in 1784, it concerns the adventures of one Tiffany Woodall, half-sister of a librarian at an aristocratic country house. When said half-brother unexpectedly dies, she secretly buries him in the garden and dons a male disguise so she can go to his job in his place — initially for the money, but later because she becomes too intrigued by what is going on in the Big House to stop her subterfuge. I appreciated that the author had thoroughly researched her period and location, even including an appendix explaining the historical sources and secondary texts upon which she was drawing.
This is one of two books in my top ten that I read because they were selected by the Shedunnit Book Club, which to me is confirmation that book clubs are a force for good in the world. Although Allingham is best known for her long series of novels featuring sleuth Albert Campion, this is a standalone from 1940 about an upper-class family in London who have owned and operated a prestigious art gallery for generations. It's a murder mystery, but it also has a fake engagement subplot (a favourite from my romance reading) and some very astute observations about generational differences between the 19th and 20th centuries. And a detective from Orkney! Tailor-made for me.
A queer romance set in an alternate version of Edwardian England where magic is real. It felt to me like a close cousin of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, although — full disclosure — I never actually finished reading that book because I had to return it to the library before I was done. I am very picky about my magic systems and this one satisfied all of my requirements, as well as being a well-written and well-paced adventure story. This is the first of a trilogy and I did read the other two books as well, but neither lived up to the pleasure of the first.
This was the second book I read because of the Shedunnit Book Club and I liked it so much that I made a bonus episode where I interviewed the translator of the edition I read, Jesse Kirkwood. The novel was originally published in Japan in 1958 and I loved the social history it captures, from the professional etiquette of the police characters to the references to an earlier code of ethics. As the title indicates, the story is primarily about trains. The mystery definitely hails from the "humdrum" school of forensic alibi-breaking with much scrutiny of who was exactly where and when. Usually, I find this less appealing than the more psychology-driven kind of story, but I think this book and a few others have started to change my mind. I found the doggedness of the central detective oddly restful to read about.
I had Maureen as a guest on Shedunnit when she was still working on her Stevie Bell novels, which are contemporary-set YA mysteries with a strong hint of 1920s true crime to them (the first being Truly Devious). She kindly sent me a proof copy of this new standalone that involves a 2020s teenager going to live on a tiny island for the summer to be a tour guide for a historic house. They end up uncovering the solution both to a recent crime as well as one that occurred during the Prohibition era. Real page-turning stuff and so well crafted. I read it in two sittings.
I read three of the five volumes of Howard's Cazalet Chronicles in 2024 and this was by far my favourite. It covers the opening years of WW2, following the fortunes of the Cazalet daughters who were on the cusp of their independent lives when war hit — Louise, Polly, Clary, Nora — and what happens to them instead. Louise's sections are particularly heart-breaking, but the whole thing is so evocative and redolent with suppressed emotion that I still think about it regularly.
This novel is Streatfeild's thinly-veiled autobiography about her childhood in an Edwardian vicarage. As she explains in the foreword, Vicky, the middle daughter of three children, is her character. She is relentlessly and unfavourably compared by all the adults around her to her artistic invalid older sister and her beautiful, charismatic younger sister. I'd like to think that today some kind teacher or relative would notice that Vicky is starved of love and possibly neurodivergent, but of course there is no such help for her here. I cried when I finished this book, because Noel so clearly succeeded in creating the life she wanted because of all the talents her family refused to recognise in her, and yet because she published this in 1963 when she was 68, I don't think she ever quite got over the way she was treated. And nor should she.
The only non-fiction book to make my top ten and possibly the best and most touching memoir I've ever read. I was already a fan of Light's writing because of Common People and Forever Englandbut I'm now a lifelong devotee. A Radical Romance tells the story of her relationship with the historian Raphael Samuel, to whom she was married from 1987 until his death in 1996. He was 20 years older than she was and had lived a completely different kind of life to any that she had known to date, and yet they fit together. From her account, I think they were the living embodiment of what Peter Wimsey means in Gaudy Nightwhen he says: "Anybody can have the harmony, if they will leave us the counterpoint." I cried when I finished this one too. There are many excellent sentences in it I could quote, but I'll just give you this one:
"A person is a crowd as well as an individual and comes not only with a history but with a thickly wooded present and a future lit by hopes and desires."
I loved this mystery that is set in an amateur dramatic society and told through emails and messages when I first read it. I stayed up and finished it in a single night, and thought it was wonderful that a bestselling crime writer in the 2020s was reviving the "documents in the case" format that Dorothy L. Sayers had used in 1930. I still think this book is good, which is why I've put it on this list, but the shine has been somewhat taken off for me since by reading Hallett's subsequent books, which all employ the same format to much less success.
Changes for 2025
This is the first time I've been thorough about tracking my reading and reflecting on the results, and been very clear with myself when I'm reading for work and when I'm reading for leisure. I have some ideas based on what I've learned.
Keep Reading
Setting out to read 104 books worked well for me in 2024, so I'm going to stretch myself a little further and aim for 120 this year. Averaging ten books a month feels doable. I like the "pace" feature on the Storygraph which tells you how far ahead or behind your goal you are, so I'll be keeping that on for motivation again. If you would like to follow along in real time, you can see what I'm reading at any given moment on my profile there. Do send me a friend request if you track your reading there too.
Seek Greater Variety
If last year showed me anything, it is that my problem finishing books is now in the past. I completed two books a week without difficulty. But looking through the list of everything I read, it still looks defensive to me, as if I was worried that if I strayed beyond the genres and styles that I was certain to find easy and comforting, I would find myself back in 2020's headspace again. I think that's why I read so little non-fiction and almost no literary or experimental fiction. It was crime fiction, romance, fantasy and YA that helped me recover my ability to read at length again so that's where I stayed, even after it was entirely necessary.
I'm never going to be someone who reads classic and literary fiction all of the time. I like a balanced reading diet. But I used to be someone who read it some of the time, and I'd like to explore that option again. The same goes for non-fiction. Thus, my goal is to read one non-fiction book and one work of literary, classic or experimental fiction a month. I feel most excited about this one, as if I'm opening a door again that has been closed for years. Still reading a lot, but differently. That feels right as my theme for 2025.
Stop Buying New Physical Books
A member of the Shedunnit Book Club recently introduced me to an acronym that is popular in the fibre arts community: SABLE, which means "Stash Acquired Beyond Life Expectancy". This applies to me and physical books — there are probably more in my house right now than I could read with the years left to me even if I had nothing else to do with my time. I'm not going to put myself on a complete book-buying ban, but I'm going to try harder not to bring new physical books into the house. If I want to support a writer with a pre-order, I'll do that with the ebook or audiobook edition, or put the title on hold at the library. I'm a member of three libraries including the London Library, so I'm not short of options to acquire older books to read in a non-permanent way.
Explore Other Forms
I didn't read a single book of poetry, novella, short story collection or play in 2024. That isn't unusual, though, because I've never been much of a reader of these forms (unless you count Sherlock Holmes short stories, I suppose). I'd like to try them out, though, so in the spirit of expanding my literary horizons I'm aiming to read four books this year that are in a form other than the novel.
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 ships internationally at no extra charge.
What I'm up to: Doing my best not to let January 2025 get me down. I made big batches of Priya Krishna's Everyday Dal and Coconut Saag to be my lunches this week and that's been very cheering. The saag is excellent with tofu.
Here are thirteen more things this Thursday that I wanted to share with you:
Did I sign up for the link-sharing site are.na purely because Tavi Gevinson said she liked it in a recent interview? Yes. Do I understand anything about how it works? No. But I am enjoying clicking my way around and this recent editorial about how different the world would be if we all behaved like moss (?) was interesting.
Timely serialised fiction from 1901. The Inheritors was written by Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Ford and satirises the colonial and aristocratic corruption they observed in the world. It follows a class of "cold materialists" who want to annexe and exploit Greenland.
"My cat was called simply Mii. We sometimes nicknamed her Mii-tan, but her formal name was Mii Inaba. I simply couldn’t manage to come up with a better name for her, however hard I tried. Her mew-mii, mew-mii way of crying that I’d first heard when she was hanging there in the dark had somehow stuck in my heart and wouldn’t go away. And thereafter, whenever I called her name, she would naturally answer me, mii. Mii had decided on her own name with the sound of her cries."
Try not to cry while reading this letter Marie Curie wrote to her dead husband Pierre in her "mourning journal".
It cheers me so much that the band OK Go is still making absurdly over-complicated music videos. This latest one is made up of 64 different takes, screened simultaneously on 64 phones. I will always enjoy the work of people who are willing to do the most.
This generator will provide, on each click, a different euphemistic and professionally palatable way to say "hell no". My favourites so far: "That's an interesting perspective for our long-term roadmap" and "We should let this marinate a bit longer".
I'd completely forgotten about the game Battleships, but this online version is the perfect thing to play while on hold to the plumbing company that still hasn't fixed your leaking kitchen tap (just for example).
There are so many gems in this Trojan horse of a Vanity Fair cover story about Harry and Megan's big relaunch. It seems to be just another celebrity puff piece, but by quoting so many "insiders" verbatim without much comment from the writer, it gradually builds a picture of how unhinged your world becomes when everyone you talk to is your employee (or profiting from you in some other way) and therefore won't tell you "no, that's a stupid idea". For instance, during their ill-fated Spotify deal, "Harry wanted to host a series where he interviewed powerful men with complicated stories, like Mark Zuckerberg, Vladimir Putin, and Donald Trump". This was known internally as "the sociopath podcast" and was predicated on the fact that Harry's mother was "essentially murdered" yet he hadn't turned into a mad strongman. I had to pause reading at this point and stare into space for five minutes while I thought about the ego contortions required to consider that a good or even vaguely executable concept. And that's just the contents of one paragraph.
What I'm up to: Staying warm, not allowing my dog to murder me by pulling me over on the icy pavements, and thinking about what I want to do with this newsletter in 2025. If you have thoughts on this last one, now is the time to tell me about them.
Here are thirteen more things this Thursday that I wanted to share with you:
Finally, I think I have found (via web curios) an AI/LLM thing that might be useful to me! En allows you to use natural language queries to find books to read. You type in something like "political thriller set in Georgian England" or "epic family saga involving bird watching", and it pulls title suggestions for you. From my experiments so far, it seems to produce moderately rational results (unlike every other AI thingy I've ever tried). For the former prompt, it recommended The Devil in the Marshalsea by Antonia Hodgson and for the latter The Signature of All Things by Elizabeth Gilbert. I haven't read either, but based on some quick searches, both seem to be well-reviewed novels that meet the above criteria. The search engine links to Goodreads, so I suspect it is at least in part using information from reviews there to source titles.
This game, Hexcodle, is so hard yet I am completely addicted to trying to best it. It does require some familiarity with the hex code system for denoting colours. Essentially, it shows you a colour swatch and you have to guess the correct code for it.
The continued resonance of this line — "We are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours" — from Jimmy Carter's 1977 letter for the Voyager space is beautifully unpacked here:
"The act of writing is ever thus: a reach beyond the limits of one’s own spacetime, searching for a stranger’s hand in the dark. What a vulnerable, cuckoo, romantic thing to do."
I'm a fan of inventor Simone Giertz and found this tour of her house very inspiring, both because of all the interesting custom pieces she has made for it and because of the extremely normal level of clean/tidy she maintains.
I'm doing a lot of thinking about what I can or should be doing with my life and abilities at the moment. This piece about having a "life project" was very useful to me:
"I have noticed that my favourite creative people — whether it’s Rebecca Solnit or Ada Limón, Ta-Nehisi Coates or Miranda July, Mimi Tempestt or Richard Powers, Jenny Odell or Valerie June, Ross Gay or George Saunders — are engaged in a life project, each work a piece of some whole. Their books or poems or Instagram posts gather force from this larger system of thought, action, and intensity. And in any case: doesn’t it seem useful to search out the guidewires and mycorrhizal networks underlying your creative life?"
Some good tips for learning Japanese (or any language) beyond Duolingo. You should read the full piece, but it can be boiled down to "get some books, one of which should explain grammar to you in a way you can understand".
I'm writing this in my free time, but if you would like to support my work, you have a few options. Forward this newsletter to a friend and encourage them to sign up. Subscribe to my podcast, Shedunnit, in your app of choice, or if you are already a listener, become a member of the Shedunnit Book Club. Buy my books — The Way to the Sea and A Body Made of Glass — or borrow them from your local library. Purchase a subscription for yourself or a friend to The Browser. Thank you for reading.
Until next time,
Caroline
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 ships internationally at no extra charge.
Welcome to the first proper "Thursday Thirteen" of the year. This is a weekly digest of links to things I have found interesting and which I think you might be intrigued by as well.
Last week's list was slightly different — thirteen small life changes rather than links — but it is still worth noting that the most popular thing for people to click on was my date stamp, with the silly chair coming second.
What I'm up to: Getting back into a routine after being away, doing two loads of laundry a day, and knitting my first-ever pair of socks (the Elizabeth Carter stockings by Kate Davies, for the knitters among you). The first Shedunnit episode of the year went out yesterday, too — it's a "reading through the decades" one spanning 1925-2015, so do dip into that if you need some inspiration for new crime fiction to try. Also, I am thrilled to share that A Body Made of Glass was picked by critic Sarah Ditum for a "favourite books of the year" list in the Sunday Times. This cheered me right up at the end of 2024 as I was reflecting on the publishing process.
Here are thirteen more things this Thursday that I wanted to share with you:
A very funny account of what it's like to be the person who does voiceovers for adverts.
The Anti Tag Cloud tool represents a literary text by showing the most common English words that don't appear in that book. Pride and Prejudice, for instance, doesn't feature much mention of "blood", "faith" or "government".
Jen A. Miller's annual freelancing wrap-ups should be required reading for anyone who wants to earn their living by exchanging words for money. The latest edition highlights just how difficult it is to make what most people think is "writing" — that is, contributing articles to publications they have heard of like the New York Times — your full-time job as a freelancer. Jen is a very successful and experienced writer who has been doing this for two decades, and last year only two per cent of her income came from consumer publications. That's partly a reflection of the state of journalism and partly owing to her (very smart!) decision to become "extremely choosy in deciding when I’m going to put myself through the wringer of a consumer publication process".
Four minutes of musical intensity, courtesy of Shoshana Bean and Cynthia Erivo (and Taylor Swift). I like to imagine this is the only take they did of this.
I need to hear this all the time, but especially at this time of year when I am inclined to get rid of everything I own: A Capsule Wardrobe Won’t Save You.
I am old enough to remember when DJ Earworm was Spotify Wrapped. Enjoying this year's offering, I was inclined to think that was a better time, too. His mashups of the most popular songs from each year are a genuine creative output all of their own, and I can still hum the melody from the 2009 one.
Originally written about films, but applicable to every discipline, I look at "Against Lists" by Elena Gorfinkel when I need to be reminded that there is more to culture, criticism, even life, than... what I'm doing here:
"Lists pretend to make a claim about the present and the past, but are anti-historical, obsessed with their own moment, with the narrow horizon and tyranny of contemporaneity. They consolidate and reaffirm the hidebound tastes of the already heard."
