Difficult, Often Expensive, Sometimes Soul-Crushing

Dear friends,

Welcome back to another one of these. If you do ever want to talk to me, you can just reply to this email. The most popular link last time was the auto-generated compliment, with this piece about the Criterion Collection coming second.

What I'm up to: I find asking people to support my work financially, especially when I'm not launching something new and shiny, extremely awkward and embarrassing! But I am currently in the season where I do that for my podcast Shedunnit, so if you are inclined to check that out I would appreciate it.

Here are thirteen more things this Thursday that I wanted to share with you:

1. Although trying to emulate other writers' routines is a classic red herring in this business (using the same pen as Stephen King will not make you Stephen King, etc etc), I do really like this 2016 account of her day by Hilary Mantel. Her insistence on being left alone to wake up in her own time is truly inspiring.
2. Spin the wheel of 17th Century Death Roulette and find out what you would have died of in 1665 in this game built on real records. I was Scalded in a Brewers Mash, at St. Giles Cripplegate!
3. This is an interesting essay on a phenomenon I have felt myself, which in my head I call being a "pick me patient" — where as a frequent medical flyer you start to work hard at getting your doctor to like you the best of all their patients.
4. I applaud and am slightly afraid of Ben Grosser's transparency about his TikTok addiction. You can check whether he is scrolling at any time here, as well as seeing his stats. As he says: "Think of it as a last-ditch effort, a sort of public confessional as therapeutic tool aimed at defusing the intense compulsion I feel every day to endlessly scroll the world’s most popular video app."
5. Seasonally appropriate, part one: William Hope's amazing photographs of ghosts from the 1930s:

6. I am still working up the courage to knit my first pair of socks, so of course I am doing a lot of hyperfixation reading about the process. What could be better than a data-driven analysis about how hard it is to do?
7. "All nonfiction writers can end up writing incorrect or controversial things, but why does every Gladwell book push half-formed and inaccurate theories?" Reading reviews that debunk Malcolm Gladwell is a favourite hobby of mine, and this is a good one. Bonus companion podcast: If Books Could Kill on Outliers.
8. It was this post — On Being Butthurt — that finally caused me to "get" the work of Elif Batuman. This piece is meta, cyclical, defensive, self-aware, relentless: just like the phenomenon she is describing. And also somehow about the ever-present writerly advice to "keep a notebook"? Magnificent stuff.
9. The route to my school went past a boring motorway-adjacent road named "Simone Weil Avenue" and I often idly wondered who Simone was. Later, I learned that she was a French philosopher and activist who had died at the age of 34 in a sanatorium nearby. Now, she is one of my favourite people to research in an idle moment, so I was intrigued to learn recently that she is coming back into vogue as an enigmatic literary inspiration.

10. Seasonally appropriate, part two: this examination of why ghosts always appear wearing sheets or clothes. Why aren't ghosts naked? This would be more cohesive with the spiritualist idea of a ghost as an expression of a returning soul... And souls presumably don't choose an outfit prior to a visitation.
11. Alex Sujong Laughlin, a writer I have followed and admired for years, paid her own money to take a "TikTok class" taught by an influencer and it sparked some fascinating thoughts about ethics, algorithms and parasocial appeal. This sentence will be living rent-free in my head for a while: "I don’t have to tell you that posting on the internet is a weird thing to do."
12. Eighteen life lessons learned from eighteen years of blogging. These come across as both earnest and sincere, two things that I'm trying these days to receive without cynicism. Topics covered include: forgiveness, prestige, generosity and boredom.
13. A refreshingly hopeful take on the ridiculous finances of publishing even a well-received non-fiction book. "There is a big difference between becoming an author and becoming a celebrity author. For 99.9% of people who manage to do it, writing and publishing a book is more like going to grad school. It’s difficult, often expensive, sometimes soul-crushing, but potentially life-changing nonetheless."

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. Tomorrow, my reading round-up for the month of October will be going out, so if you want to read that make sure you have that setting enabled.

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