My New Favourite Wellness Nonsense

Dear friends,

Thank you for being here and reading this as I work out how I want to exist on the internet. If you do ever want to talk to me, you can just reply to this email. Last week's most popular link was this story: "When Book Covers Outshine Their Pages", with the Scrambled Maps game a close second.

What I'm up to: I'm speaking at the Liverpool Literary Festival on Saturday 5th October at 1pm, tickets available here. There's also a new episode of Shedunnit just out, a Green Penguin Book Club discussion about The Poisoned Chocolates Case by Anthony Berkeley.

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

1. This deep dive into when, why and how food writing became all cutesy, using words like garlicky, buttery and jammy to describe recipes, is a good read. (Slight spoiler, it is mostly Alison Roman's fault.) Then follow it up by looking at this data visualisation showing when certain "-y" adjectives were most commonly used in the New York Times cooking section. 2019 was a big year for "runny"; "buttery" was huge in 2023.
2. On Taylor Swift's revisionist autobiographical project, including a close reading of the lyrics of "All Too Well (Ten Minute Version)": "There’s a conundrum posed by these album rereleases and how Swift is retroactively framing each of their 'era', because really, each album has two eras: the time during which it was written and recorded, and the promotional period shortly before and after it was released, when Swift based her entire aesthetic and media presence around its central thesis."
3. I identified quite closely with Megan Nolan's take on the "trauma" of publishing her novel. I, too, feel quite crazy as I grapple with the fact that I put A Body Made of Glass out into the world almost exactly six months ago. I was better prepared for the emotional rollercoaster this time, having already published one somewhat personal book, but knowing something is likely to be painful does not stop it from being painful. Saying no still takes time and mental effort, especially when the whole system seems to be built around endless yeses, no matter the private cost. I think I will write more about this in a future newsletter, maybe. As Nolan says:

"When you’re promoting a piece of creative work, no one tells you that you can object to anything, that you can and probably should say no to things. The implication you will have absorbed by this point is that you are operating inside of a scarcity economy where each crumb of publicity will go to one of the other dozen authors with debuts out that week if you turn it down. And who are you to decide what interviews are important or not? This is not your world."

4. Examining the sentimental feelings we have about online data storage, prompted by the news that an old university email account is scheduled for deletion.
5. The Brontë sisters finally got their umlauts (or diaereses, if you want to be pedantic) on their memorial in Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey!

6. I'm on a roll with discovering excellent time-wasting internet games. My latest is Alpha Guess, which merely asks you to guess that day's word. Each time you guess, it will tell you if the correct answer comes "before" or "after" your attempt in the alphabet. Infuriating yet fun!
7. I did not know that early circumnavigators thought that their ill health on these long sea voyages was because of "earthsickness" — a condition where their bodies degraded the longer they were away from familiar land. A poetic idea, but it was actually just scurvy.
8. My new favourite wellness nonsense to read about is extreme fruitarianism.
9. I'm always on the look-out for an interesting typeface. "Conveyer Belt Font" takes its inspiration from... well, conveyer belts:

10. I have recently become obsessed with the idea of "fastest known times", which are unofficial records for various trails and routes worldwide. The FKT for the Appalachian Trail has recently been broken by one Tara Dower, who completed the over 2,000-mile route in 40 days. This piece explains how she did it, including such time-saving highlights as getting up at 3am, taking 90-second naps lying on the muddy ground, and only taking three showers during her whole trip.
11. If you can make it through this lengthy essay on "how to do great work" you have arguably already done some. There's a lot more subtlety to it, but many of the barriers examined here are mental. Doing great work is difficult and you have to keep choosing that difficult thing, over and over again.

"The factors in doing great work are factors in the literal, mathematical sense, and they are: ability, interest, effort, and luck. Luck by definition you can't do anything about, so we can ignore that. And we can assume effort, if you do in fact want to do great work. So the problem boils down to ability and interest. Can you find a kind of work where your ability and interest will combine to yield an explosion of new ideas?"

12. We aren't just making it up: women really do get more autoimmune diseases (four in five diagnoses are in women). This research suggests it could be genetic.
13. I've been asking myself this a lot recently. What does success look like? And do I want it? "We’d be naive to believe that sales don’t matter to writers; we write to get paid – no man but a blockhead, Samuel Johnson famously said, ever wrote except for money."

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.

Until next time,

Caroline