It Seems To Produce Moderately Rational Results

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.

The most popular link last week was this video about the impossibility of time, with this essay about the lie of capsule wardrobes a close second.

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:

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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."

4. The illustrated envelopes of Edward Gorey are gorgeous and I dearly hope someone buys me the whole book as a gift this year.

5. 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.
6. This is equal parts revealing and alarming, as a writer. A rundown of the literary archetypes that book editors and reviewers like and the ones they don't, and what that's doing to our taste in reading material.
7. Imagine putting your spade in the soil on an ordinary workday and discovering an enormous intact mosaic from the late third century.
8. A delightful radio programme: Ian Sansom documents his training process to compete at the 2024 World Paper and Comb Championships.
9. On the art of Mary Potter and the relief of turning 60. Here is Mary's The Rising Moon from 1942:

10. There is no such thing as "timeless style".
11. I don't know if I agree with this or want to do it necessarily, but I am intrigued: the hundred pages a day strategy for maintaining a regular reading habit.
12. 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?"

13. 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

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