One Of My Most Toxic Traits

Dear friends,

Welcome to everyone who has signed up since I posted my emo little video on Instagram. In this format, you find me relaxed and happy to be in touch with you directly, with no algorithms or corporate overlords between us. If you do ever want to talk to me, you can just reply to this email — I had some excellent conversations about American attitudes to potatoes after sharing this map last time. Last week's most popular link was, inevitably, the one where you can test your perception of the colour blue.

What I've been up to: you can hear me talking about health anxiety and the Chalet School books on this new episode of the Tophole! podcast.

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

1. An oldie but a goodie. It's been fifteen years, but this piece of writing never fails to raise a smile for me at this time of year: It’s Decorative Gourd Season, Motherfuckers.
2. One of several life-altering revelations I came to during the process of writing A Body Made of Glass is that an awful lot of the daily mental grind of "feeling well" or otherwise is actually just to do with the state of our digestion. If I may quote myself for a preposterous second, I put this better in the book: "We are essentially tubes into which we put food to be processed every day; the limbs are just how we move the tubes around the world." Therefore, I was intrigued to learn of a new(ish) book, Rumbles: A Curious History of the Gut* by Elsa Richardson, that explores just this connection between the human stomach and the human condition. This interview with the author gives a good overview of what the book covers, from George Cheyne's "English malady" to modern wellness nonsense.
3. Billie Eilish can sing jazz? I wish she would do it more:

4. I love this project: mygranddadiskeepingbusy.com. The grandad of the title died in 1983, having kept a diary for the previous twenty years. His granddaughter has now transcribed and scheduled the posts, so that each day the site updates with his corresponding entry. They mostly tell of a life spent in contented yet active retirement, full of gardening, friends, chores, and the occasional mention of his rheumatoid arthritis. This entry, from 1st September 1963, is delightfully typical: "A bit cloudy at first but lovely later. Cleaned the weeds from round gooseberry trees. Ron, Dot and Jane came. Took Jane for a little walk. Mrs Starkey had a daughter Thursday."
5. This account of a reunion for the surviving members of the boys' choir that sang on a recording of Benjamin Britten's War Requiem in 1963 is very sweet. Bonus fact for choir nerds: one of the choristers was John Rutter!
6. Forget Wordle, this is the new daily game to play. Scrambled Maps presents you with a new map every day, broken into 18 tiles, and you must reassemble it using the clues from roads, rivers, railways and so on. Pleasantly addictive.

7. As someone who is exceptionally picky about how audiobooks sound, I was cheering at every line of this piece: Can We Please Put an End to Overperformed Audiobooks?
8. A glorious list of things that don't sound like they are named after people, but actually are. For example: Brown noise (named for a Robert Brown), shrapnel (Henry Shrapnel) and Max Factor (founded by Maksymilian Faktorowicz, who went by Max Factor in the US).
9. A beautiful poem about life and work, "Emergency Exit" by Kayla Czaga. Some favourite lines:

"I ordered too many cases of house wine.
I helped Rhea retire. I wore a headset backstage
and whispered to the Ukrainian dancing girls
that they were up next on the telethon.
For all these jobs, I made money. Enough to live on,
amounts that always felt like too much or too little
compensation for the tasks I’d performed."

10. One of my most toxic traits is that I always know which way north is and I find it inexplicable that everyone else doesn't too. What do you mean, you don't have an ever-present map in your head that is rotating and updating as you move through the world?? This report on navigational games and the notion of a "sense of a direction" was a good corrective for me.
11. A documentary, narrated by Brendan Gleeson, about the National History Museum in Dublin (or as it is better known "The Dead Zoo") and how the curators managed to get two 150-year-old whale skeletons down from the ceiling without breaking them:

12. I love the blog "McMansion Hell" and all of the architectural insanity that it documents. This might be its best post to date. It begins: "It is my pleasure to bring you the greatest house I have ever seen. The house of a true visionary. A real ad-hocist. A genuine pioneer of fenestration. This house is in Alabama. It was built in 1980 and costs around $5 million. It is worth every penny. Perhaps more."
13. A collection of books that are begging to be judged by their covers.

I intend to send out a few different types of post on this newsletter as it becomes more active: 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 don't publish these posts on my website; this is a newsletter-only publication, so you will need to be subscribed to receive it.

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 marked thus* are affiliate links for Blackwell's, 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 bookselling chain that ships internationally at no extra charge.