An update for a favourite podcast episode of mine: "Secret Mall Apartment" by 99% Invisible.
Advice from a beauty expert for someone who doesn't wear makeup and is feeling pressured to put it on for her wedding:
"I agree with you: it is radical to get married without makeup in 2025. It’s radical to choose embodied freedom – your ability to 'cry, laugh and hug' without regard for running mascara – over performance as a bride. It might be hard for your community to understand, but 200 years ago, so was marrying for love! People did it anyway."
Speaking of weddings, this is a great anecdote from someone who, with their then-partner, accidentally went to a wedding a year late. They ended up attending the nuptials of two total strangers who happened to be getting married in the same venue. Said couple thought it was hilarious, and invited the crashers to stay for the whole event and be in all the pictures. They still invite them to their anniversary celebrations, and even though the attendees aren't partners any more, they still go to enjoy the reunion of a strange yet fun day.
I'm going to be both serious and angry for a second, because since I last wrote to you I found out that my work is among the many, many thousands of books in the illegally pirated LibGen database that Meta has used to train its AI model. There is more detail and context about this in the original reporting here. Even some advance copies of books that haven't been published yet were included. That this is, at the very least, a copyright infringement is absolutely clear to me. I trust the various professional bodies I belong to and will be closely monitoring their attempts at litigation. But there is also an emotional and cultural component to this for me. Over the past nine months or so, I have increasingly come to feel that the platforms operated by companies like Meta are essentially extractive; that they take ideas — photos, text, content — from users, for free, make a profit off it and offer nothing of value in exchange. The world as mediated through a social network built for this purpose is a sterile and sometimes scary place. Daisy Buchanan described the feeling of having her four very personal novels harvested in this scrape as like a "brain pick" in the worst possible way. I agree, but that's also how the products of Meta and other such companies make me feel now more generally, beyond this specific incident. And I want to opt out, as far as I'm able. I'm still working out exactly what this will look like for me, someone who has work to flog online, but I do know I won't be going back to posting any of my personal images or thoughts on Instagram or Facebook. I will find a new home for the dog photos, I promise.
Man that is born of woman (saith the prayer book) hath but a short time to live, especially in British detective dramas since it is foreordained that some poor sod will be shot, strangled, drowned, or brained with a shovel before the opening credits and theme music.
I'm obsessed with the fish doorbell. This feels like such a Dutch solution to a problem to me? Take your turn watching to see if the fish need to be let through here.
At the same time as "serious" or "difficult" literature is becoming more popular (probably because of the advent of AI slop), the publishing industry has to face up to the biases involved in how these qualities are signalled with marketing.
Caitlin Dewey on choosing not to be pregnant on the internet. "My first child is now arriving in a matter of days, and most of my social and professional networks have no earthly idea. Apart from a single vague post to an alt Instagram account, I’ve largely hidden this pregnancy from social media." I hope we are moving towards a place where the people doing the performative online announcements about life events are the outliers, not the other way around.
Bells On Sundayis a podcast that feels like it is made for me and about five other people who also think The Nine Tailorswas Dorothy L. Sayers' best novel. It is simply a recording of some bells, from a church, minster or cathedral somewhere. I like these, from Saint Milburga in Stoke St Milborough, Shropshire, but they're all good.
“You can make your own plans, the day will make itself” (2024) by Katherine Duclos
Why is everything so mid? Because, as a society, we simultaneously replaced human gatekeepers with automated platforms and incentivised people to homogenise their taste.
I have been winding wool for a new knitting project recently, which is probably why encountering Frederick Leighton's 1878 painting "Winding the Skein" tickled me so much. It does not look like this when I'm doing it.
Useful step-by-step guide on how to help someone who has fallen out of their wheelchair. This is the key point: "Do what they ask, NOT what you think would be helpful."
What I'm up to: The paperback of my latest book, A Body Made of Glass, has been published this week in both the UK and the US! (There will also be an Australia/New Zealand edition, but it's not out until July.) Paperbacks very rarely get reviewed these days, so I was both surprised and happy to see this excellent review-essay in the Los Angeles Review of Books: We Are Never Well, nor Can Be So.
Neither the covers nor the text of the book's two editions have changed, other than to add some lovely quotes from people like John Green ("I loved it") and Lucy Worsley ("essential reading"). To celebrate publication, there is a giveaway where you can win a signed and personalised copy of either paperback edition: this is the form and it's open for entries until 20th March. And if you'd like to purchase a copy, all the links to do that are collected here.
Morris the dog was VERY keen on the UK paperback.
I hope the children who wrote to Alfred Hitchcock to correct his grammar on a billboard for The Birds — he put "The Birds is coming", they said it should be "The Birds are coming" — never grew out of their pedantry.
I don't normally read many thousands of words about the (parlous) state of contemporary art, but this piece is so well-written and argued that I was at the end before I'd even registered what I was doing.
"If you are not familiar with their joys, highrise trousers are fantastically comfortable and keep your lower back warm. My children still squirm with embarrassment every time they see me in them (which is most days) but that is probably some kind of seal of approval. If you are uncertain about the required cut, check out photographs of agricultural labourers in summer (ie jacketless) circa 1880-1914."
During the "Winter Stupid". Photo: Eric Wagner
I enjoyed Eric Wagner's account of his tradition with a friend that they call "Winter Stupid". This is just them going and trying to camp for a weekend, in winter, in the Washington/Oregon backcountry. The tent fell on them this time, but at least they didn't inhale any white gas fumes like on a previous occasion!
I did not and will not watch a single second Meghan's Netflix show, but I did read many takes about it, and this was my favourite.
A niche fascination of mine is the early generation of people who managed to make a career out of being internet "content creators" and, if they stuck with it, what they think about this now. This woman vlogged her life consistently between the ages of 20 and 30. She now has some reflections on that decade lived out on the screen.
Justin Myers nails what I found so uncomfortable about that saccharine "coffee with your younger self" trend that has been going around social media.
Cozy Dumpster Fire: like the Netflix cosy fireplace, but more appropriate to the times.
An interview with one of the founders of Letterloop, a social media alternative that provides "private group newsletters for friends, families & teams". She seems smart and savvy and the product is interesting, but I can't switch off the voice in my head that goes it's a blog just call it a blog this is just livejournal!.
I have never set foot on the Isle of Wight, but I have sailed around it, and perhaps this is partly why I am oddly fixated on it. This essay on how this small island in the English Channel has been the setting for generations of utopian dreams really justifies all the time I have spent daydreaming about it.
A wonderful tour of London as it has been reproduced in scenery form on studio soundstages for filming purposes. Even the title of this piece — "the imagined city of the backlots" — is evocative.
A new vibe just dropped, and I already hate it: boom boom.
I cut a long section about the trend for obsessive personal health and fitness tracking and quantification out of A Body Made of Glass because, although interesting, it didn't illuminate my central subject of hypochondria that much. I might repurpose that into an essay at some point, because I do think it's a pattern of behaviour we ought to scrutinise more than we do. This is a good overview of how useless most of the consumer tracking stuff is:
"If you look at my Oura smart ring app on the night of the 12 January, you will see my heart rate spike dramatically at 11pm, then flatline completely. You would have to assume that I’d had a heart attack and died. In fact, I was running a fever and, frustrated by the weight of the ring on my finger, tore it off and threw it across the room."
This is written as "advice for a friend who wants to start a blog", but I think it would be instructive to anyone embarking on a public creative project who needs some encouragement to be authentic and weird in their own personal way:
"What if you want to write 5000 words about the history of French grammar but fear people will get bored by that? What should you do? You should write 5000 words about the history of French grammar. It will filter your readers so you attract those who like the grooves of your mind."
Tips for good mathematical handwriting. As someone with some quite peculiar features in my writing (self-consciously adopted when I was about 13 because I wanted to seem eccentric and now unavoidable habits), I appreciated the post-hoc justification for looping the letter l, crossing z and putting a slash through 7. Otherwise somebody might not be able to read my equations!
This was the month where I realised what I need to both enjoy reading books and feel like I'm doing it purposefully: structure and planning. To that end, I spent some time finally creating a centralised list of books I want to read on my Storygraph. Then I cross-checked my various library subscriptions to see what was available in their ebook catalogues and added tags. Now if I get restless, I can quickly borrow something I already know I want to read and be immersed in a matter of seconds, without having to make any extra decisions. Decision fatigue and paralysis, I'm learning, is a big component of why I sometimes get stuck with my reading.
Overwhelm is another part of it, so taking the time to look at the podcast episodes I plan to make this year (yes, I do schedule them a year at a time!) and scoping out what needs to be read and by when was very calming. An episode I have planned for November, for instance, requires me to re-read eight Agatha Christie books, so I've spaced those out over the intervening months. Do try and guess what subject I'm covering if you like, I would enjoy that. Anyway, I never again want to be in the situation I had in autumn 2024, when I was chain-listening Edmund Crispin audiobooks on 2.5 speed just to get through them in time. Not fun!
This is a loose structure, though, with plenty of room for spontaneity and mood-reading. I did a fair bit of that this month, actually, which resulted in what was, for me, a very satisfying blend of genres and styles for the 28 days of February.
I'm going to whisk through the by-now customary Ben Aaronovitch section; for those who are new to these monthly reading round-ups, I've cut out most of the anxiety-inducing politics podcasts I used to listen to and instead, I'm making my way through the Rivers of London series on audiobook. I managed two in February, which tells you just how much time I was devoting to podcasts before. Foxglove Summer I think is my favourite of the series so far: I enjoyed the tension that came from born-and-bred Londoner Peter Grant having to spend time in the countryside.
Body Work was more of a departure for me, being the first in the series of comics/graphic novels that runs alongside the novels. I haven't tried to read a graphic novel of any kind in years, and I was disconcerted to find that the app I used to use, ComiXology, has since been folded into Amazon. Still, I must admit that ComiXology's "guided view" technology makes reading a work like this in the Kindle app an absolute dream. I did most of it on my phone while travelling and was impressed by how seamlessly I could swipe from panel to panel even on such a small screen while not losing the sense of the artist's original page layout. Obviously, it's a different kind of story that works for this more visual format, but I enjoyed it very much.
I read this 1961 crime novel for a recent Shedunnit episode where I investigated Agatha Christie's taste in crime fiction. She gave this book first prize in a "Don's Detective Novel" competition, and I could see why. Although some of its subject matter is much more of the 1960s than the interwar era when she became famous for her mysteries — blackmail, extortion and pornography all feature — the plot is well worked out and has a good reveal at the end. I would recommend this if you are in the market for a quick, satisfying read that straddles the divide between the golden age whodunnit and the later twentieth-century thriller.
I love that Ali Hazelwood writes the same book over and over again in different settings and millions of people buy them every time. I mean that sincerely. I need things I can rely on these days. All of her stories are about a burgeoning relationship between a physically large, often Scandinavian, man and a petite, athletic, brainy woman with insecurities. Because I know exactly what I'm going to get, I find her stuff very comforting to read, even if it is at this point veering towards the predictable and forgettable. In this new novel, her usual character types are transplanted to the world of high-level American collegiate watersports, with a large swimmer and a small diver navigating their kinks and feelings. Now that I'm writing this a couple of weeks later, I'm not sure I can recall the details of the plot, but I enjoyed a nice brain break while I was reading it, and I appreciated all the little Easter egg references to her other books that were sprinkled throughout.
Despite my intention to try and read more non-fiction this year, I found that I couldn't settle to any one book of that type this month. I've got a few on the go and I hope to finish one next month. I did fly through this quite short guide to modern creativity, though, and found in it some thought-provoking ideas as I continue to refine my relationship with social media and this newsletter.
I already counted myself in Agatha Christie's debt, but now I can add something else to the slate: I owe her for making me read Elizabeth Bowen for the first time. Bowen was one of Christie's favourite authors, so I picked up 1949's The Head of the Day for that aforementioned podcast episode. I was completely enraptured by it. It's a tense, claustrophobic tale set in London towards the end of WW2, focusing on a quartet of characters with complicated inner lives. Two are potentially engaged in espionage and counter-espionage, while romantic and family relationships interfere. There's also a hint of Bowen's Anglo-Irish background, with a younger English character unexpectedly inheriting a rural Irish "Big House", which his mother travels over to inspect as he is still doing military service.
As discussed at the start of the year, I'm pretty out of practice in reading literary fiction like this, so for the first fifty pages or so the intense interiority of the style and slow-paced plot was quite hard going for me, but by the end I was gripped like it was a thriller. I thought it had similarities both to Edith Wharton's 1912 novel The Reef and Patrick Marber's 1997 play Closer. I loved it and have already borrowed two more Bowen novels from the London Library.
Vasti's Regency romances are of the type that show absolutely no resemblance to history at all, but I have enjoyed them in the past in the same brain-switching-off way that I enjoy Ali Hazelwood. However, this one was a disappointment because of the peculiar pacing. I'm not sure a book of this type is ever going to work if the most exciting set piece (a near-fatal runaway carriage incident) happens in the first couple of chapters and then the hero and heroine fall requitedly in love before the halfway point. What is left to happen? Not much, it would seem.
My reading of this 2022 thriller is entirely owing to getting better organised. I saw someone — I think the author Sarah Perry, but can't be sure — recommend it ages ago on Instagram. I scribbled down the title and immediately forgot about it. Then I rediscovered my note when I was compiling my TBR on the Storygraph, saw that my library had this available for ebook borrowing, and dived right in.
It's in some ways quite a conventional domestic noir thriller, set in northern England with the mother of a teenage son as the protagonist. Right at the beginning, events come to a head when her son stabs a man one night outside their house — an act that is completely at odds with her previous knowledge of her child. After an exhausting night at the police station, she wakes up the next morning and finds that it is... the day before the crime. And this keeps happening, with her skipping backwards through time. She decides that this is happening so that she can solve her son's crime before he commits it, and it turns into quite an interesting reflection on cause and effect.
This is the Shedunnit Book Club book for March, which I read a little ahead so I could record a podcast episode about it. It's the first Inspector Morse novel, from 1975. This was also my first time reading a Morse book despite loving the television series for decades.
It isn't often that I read a book that inspired a major screen adaptation and think "I like the TV version better", but that was the case here. Last Bus to Woodstock is very of 1975 in many ways, chiefly its attitude to women and sexual assault, and that's not a milieu I tend to seek out in my crime fiction. The character of Morse is consistently well-drawn and I admired Dexter's plotting, but I don't think I'll be stocking up on more of this series in book form any time soon. I will be watching random episodes while I eat my dinner, though.
Oh, I wanted to like this novel so much. I formed a very positive impression of Mary Robinette Kowal when she appeared on my friend Helen's podcast last year and the premise of this book — Jane Austen but with magic — felt tailor-made for me. Unfortunately, said magic is almost entirely redundant in this world since its only use is for people to make pretty illusions for drawing room entertainment, and the surrounding comedy of manners and courtship is of pretty low quality. I was also irritated by the wholesale borrowing of entire characters from Austen's novels: there is a Mr and Mrs Bennet, a Frank Churchill, a Georgiana Darcy, a sort of Lady Catherine de Burgh, and so on. Perhaps this was meant as homage, but the copy and paste was too entire for my tastes. Not for me, unfortunately.
I completed the month with a Heyer, since I'm reading all of her crime fiction in order this year for an eventual podcast episode. First published in 1933, as with the one I read last month, Why Shoot a Butler? is a light-hearted detective story set among wealthy English people, with more of a focus on character and atmosphere than plot. I enjoyed it as a good example of its type, rather than because I had grand expectations of an excellent puzzle. The one stand-out feature for me was the protagonist Frank Amberley, who is both the book's amateur sleuth and its romantic hero, yet remains incredibly grumpy throughout. Since he is a barrister by profession, the same as Heyer's husband, I did wonder if this was a private domestic joke.
That was my reading for February: twelve books, right on track to hit 120 in 2025. I also managed to meet my objective of reading one work of literary or experimental fiction (in this instance, The Heat of the Day) and one non-fiction book (Show Your Work!) per month, plus I managed to fit in a graphic novel as well. All very satisfactory, although I do think I could still stretch myself more when it comes to non-fiction. I'll work on that for March.
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.
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 (I believe) ships internationally at no extra charge.
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.
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