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 essay about "what the book section likes", with Simone Giertz's house tour a close second.

What I'm up to: Doing my best not to let January 2025 get me down. I made big batches of Priya Krishna's Everyday Dal and Coconut Saag to be my lunches this week and that's been very cheering. The saag is excellent with tofu.

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

1. Did I sign up for the link-sharing site are.na purely because Tavi Gevinson said she liked it in a recent interview? Yes. Do I understand anything about how it works? No. But I am enjoying clicking my way around and this recent editorial about how different the world would be if we all behaved like moss (?) was interesting.
2. Timely serialised fiction from 1901. The Inheritors was written by Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Ford and satirises the colonial and aristocratic corruption they observed in the world. It follows a class of "cold materialists" who want to annexe and exploit Greenland.
3. Lovely writing about a poet's chance rescue of an abandoned kitten in Japan in 1977:

"My cat was called simply Mii. We sometimes nicknamed her Mii-tan, but her formal name was Mii Inaba. I simply couldn’t manage to come up with a better name for her, however hard I tried. Her mew-mii, mew-mii way of crying that I’d first heard when she was hanging there in the dark had somehow stuck in my heart and wouldn’t go away. And thereafter, whenever I called her name, she would naturally answer me, mii. Mii had decided on her own name with the sound of her cries."

4. Try not to cry while reading this letter Marie Curie wrote to her dead husband Pierre in her "mourning journal".
5. It cheers me so much that the band OK Go is still making absurdly over-complicated music videos. This latest one is made up of 64 different takes, screened simultaneously on 64 phones. I will always enjoy the work of people who are willing to do the most.

6. A poem by a gardener about the contradictions in a formal landscape.
7. This generator will provide, on each click, a different euphemistic and professionally palatable way to say "hell no". My favourites so far: "That's an interesting perspective for our long-term roadmap" and "We should let this marinate a bit longer".
8. A behind-the-scenes look at how a longform investigation into a stalker of Asian-American professors made it into print. Working this way is a vanishing luxury most writers today will never get to experience but it's still fascinating to read about.
9. I'd completely forgotten about the game Battleships, but this online version is the perfect thing to play while on hold to the plumbing company that still hasn't fixed your leaking kitchen tap (just for example).
10. Browse the peppermills of Jens Quistgaard:

11. Why is Everyone Suddenly Reading Middlemarch? As a mental defence against the oncoming tide of AI slop, basically.
12. Mark Zuckerberg will never understand why we don't love him. The gold chain is very funny to me.
13. There are so many gems in this Trojan horse of a Vanity Fair cover story about Harry and Megan's big relaunch. It seems to be just another celebrity puff piece, but by quoting so many "insiders" verbatim without much comment from the writer, it gradually builds a picture of how unhinged your world becomes when everyone you talk to is your employee (or profiting from you in some other way) and therefore won't tell you "no, that's a stupid idea". For instance, during their ill-fated Spotify deal, "Harry wanted to host a series where he interviewed powerful men with complicated stories, like Mark Zuckerberg, Vladimir Putin, and Donald Trump". This was known internally as "the sociopath podcast" and was predicated on the fact that Harry's mother was "essentially murdered" yet he hadn't turned into a mad strongman. I had to pause reading at this point and stare into space for five minutes while I thought about the ego contortions required to consider that a good or even vaguely executable concept. And that's just the contents of one paragraph.

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

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 ships internationally at no extra charge.

Welcome to the first proper "Thursday Thirteen" of the year. This is a weekly digest of links to things I have found interesting and which I think you might be intrigued by as well.

Last week's list was slightly different — thirteen small life changes rather than links — but it is still worth noting that the most popular thing for people to click on was my date stamp, with the silly chair coming second.

What I'm up to: Getting back into a routine after being away, doing two loads of laundry a day, and knitting my first-ever pair of socks (the Elizabeth Carter stockings by Kate Davies, for the knitters among you). The first Shedunnit episode of the year went out yesterday, too — it's a "reading through the decades" one spanning 1925-2015, so do dip into that if you need some inspiration for new crime fiction to try. Also, I am thrilled to share that A Body Made of Glass was picked by critic Sarah Ditum for a "favourite books of the year" list in the Sunday Times. This cheered me right up at the end of 2024 as I was reflecting on the publishing process.

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

1. A very funny account of what it's like to be the person who does voiceovers for adverts.
2. The Anti Tag Cloud tool represents a literary text by showing the most common English words that don't appear in that book. Pride and Prejudice, for instance, doesn't feature much mention of "blood", "faith" or "government".
3. Katherine Rundell's series of The Essay about magic in children's fiction was a dose of pure delight delivered in five fifteen-minute episodes.
4. Jen A. Miller's annual freelancing wrap-ups should be required reading for anyone who wants to earn their living by exchanging words for money. The latest edition highlights just how difficult it is to make what most people think is "writing" — that is, contributing articles to publications they have heard of like the New York Times — your full-time job as a freelancer. Jen is a very successful and experienced writer who has been doing this for two decades, and last year only two per cent of her income came from consumer publications. That's partly a reflection of the state of journalism and partly owing to her (very smart!) decision to become "extremely choosy in deciding when I’m going to put myself through the wringer of a consumer publication process".
5. Four minutes of musical intensity, courtesy of Shoshana Bean and Cynthia Erivo (and Taylor Swift). I like to imagine this is the only take they did of this.

6. I'm warning you now, I was crying by the time I finished reading this piece about the trial of Dominique Pelicot. It is extremely good and very upsetting.
7. The best British podcast ever to exist, Answer Me This, is coming back!!! If you, like me, got through most of the 2010s by listening to Helen and Olly, you must join their new Patreon.
8. I need to hear this all the time, but especially at this time of year when I am inclined to get rid of everything I own: A Capsule Wardrobe Won’t Save You.
9. I've never related to a video on the internet harder.
10. Writing advice: sometimes it is good to tell rather than show, or "turn off the TV in your mind". You don't necessarily need to describe what every character is wearing!
11. I am old enough to remember when DJ Earworm was Spotify Wrapped. Enjoying this year's offering, I was inclined to think that was a better time, too. His mashups of the most popular songs from each year are a genuine creative output all of their own, and I can still hum the melody from the 2009 one.

12. My sort of place: Italian village forbids residents from becoming ill.
13. Originally written about films, but applicable to every discipline, I look at "Against Lists" by Elena Gorfinkel when I need to be reminded that there is more to culture, criticism, even life, than... what I'm doing here:

"Lists pretend to make a claim about the present and the past, but are anti-historical, obsessed with their own moment, with the narrow horizon and tyranny of contemporaneity. They consolidate and reaffirm the hidebound tastes of the already heard."

I'm writing this in my free time, but if you would like to support my work, you have a few options. Share this to a friend. 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.

I've been mostly offline for the last 10 days, so I have not yet accumulated enough good links to share with you as I usually try to do on Thursdays. However, since this is the time of year when we think a bit more than usual about self-improvement and resolutions, I thought I might share a list of thirteen very small things I've been doing over the past 12 months and intend to continue doing. These are activities or habits that have brought me joy, given me a release from stress or expectation, or simply kept me entertained. They are, of course, specific to me, but perhaps you will find a spark of inspiration below for your own version.

1. Cut open your skincare tubes. If your cream or serum comes in toothpaste tube-style packaging, it is not finished when you think it is finished. Cut or tear off the end that isn't the cap and you will be horrified at how much product you were about to throw away. I sometimes get another week's worth of applications out of my moisturiser, for instance, by progressively cutting my way down the tube as I empty it.
2. Really commit to a task system. Whether you write your to-do lists on bits of paper, in a journal, on your phone, in an app — it doesn't matter. Pick one system and stick with it so that it can help you. After years of wanting to be someone who used paper lists but was always losing them, I finally moved everything into the Todoist app and made my peace with its digital-ness. More than twelve months later, I'm reaping the rewards of tasks I set to repeat "every year": I'm buying birthday presents in good time and remembering to get seasonal clothes out of storage.
3. The jar of cleaning tasks. I have struggled with cleaning my whole adult life: I need a clean space to feel mentally calm, but I have found it impossible to develop a consistent routine that keeps spaces clean. After learning more about neurodivergence and where I fit into those spectrums (thanks, therapy), I realised that I need novelty and urgency to do things like this. I experimented with a jar containing a dozen slips of paper, each with a different cleaning task written on it. Every day, I would pull out a slip and do that task immediately. Not knowing what I was going to do beforehand somehow made it exciting, and I did more cleaning during this period than in the entire month beforehand. Now I have created a digital "jar" of cleaning tasks in an app that pulls a random one for me every day and I weirdly look forward to learning whether I will be cleaning windows or hoovering or whatever else.
4. Having two phones. This one is quite specific to my job. In 2024 I increasingly found social media to be a corrosive force in my life, but I felt unable to quit it completely because I needed a way to tell people about my books, podcasts, articles etc. I was stuck in an endless-feeling cycle of installing the Instagram app, scrolling guiltily, and then deleting the app again. Then I listened to this podcast episode from Emma Chamberlain in which she describes balancing her needs as someone who works online with her desire to end her internet addiction by having two phones. She describes how the "good phone" contains all the normal things she needs and wants for her day-to-day life like maps, music, podcasts, texts, and so on, while the "bad" phone has all the necessary but addictive stuff on it like social media. The latter stays in a drawer switched off until she needs to post something for work, and it goes back there once she is finished. I dug out an old phone, paid a few quid to get the cracked screen mended, and set up a similar system for myself. I use the Freedom app to stop myself from installing the bad stuff on the good phone and now spend almost no time at all having thoughts that automatically take the form of tweets or Instagram captions, which was a disturbing habit I had picked up. It's alarming how quickly the basic friction of having to walk to a drawer and turn another device on releases you from the impulse to "just have a quick scroll".
5. Mentally divesting from social media. This was helped greatly by having two phones, see above, but even before I did that I had begun trying to separate my mind from the algorithmic hivemind. I work by myself in silence most of the day and I had begun to notice that when my husband came home from work my conversation with him was about 90 per cent "I saw a TikTok today that said..." and "have you watched this funny video of a dog". Now, some of that is fine, but it probably shouldn't be all I have in my head. I'm trying to feed myself a diet of audiobooks rather than podcasts, longform videos or television episodes instead of "shorts", and books instead of articles — the improvement was noticeable straight away.
6. Searching for apps on your phone instead of scrolling menus. I'm sure you have sensed a theme here: I've been working on my relationship with my devices quite a bit. I can't speak to all phone makes and models, but on my Google Pixel I have turned off every possible automatic recommendation option for apps and websites, and set the browser homepage to a blank screen. Now when I want to do something on my phone, I pick it up and start typing the name of the app I want, and it filters the menu until I'm only seeing "Whatsapp" or whatever it is I want. This stops me scrolling past the tempting icons of distracting apps and keeps me on track with the task I originally wanted to complete. If you find yourself picking up your phone a lot and then putting it down 15 minutes later with no memory of what you wanted it for in the first place, I recommend trying this. It feels clunky for the first few days but the new habit forms quickly.
7. Getting a silly chair. My back hurts a lot and I have terrible posture from working slumped over all the time, but I don't have space in my house to get one of those fancy up-down standing desks. So I got a backless kneeling chair off Facebook Marketplace (like this one, but a fraction of the price!) instead. It has helped.
8. Never going anywhere without a book. I mean, literally anywhere. If I'm not going to look at my phone unless I have something I need to do on it, I require other ways to keep myself amused. Cultivating a collection of small books that fit in any coat pocket or handbag means you never have to be bored while queuing or waiting.
9. Having a really big e-reader. I know some people use a Kindle or similar for the above purpose — a portable reading-only device that they can whip out for entertainment during any in-between moments. I, however, find the small screens on most of these frustrating. I like to see a whole page at a time, like in a physical book or journal. Two years ago now I invested in a BOOX Note Air2 Plus e-ink tablet and I still use it every day. It's slightly smaller than A4, satisfying my size requirements, and it has the advantage of being a black-and-white Android tablet so you can install all the library and reading apps (including Kindle) rather than being locked into one company's ecosystem.
10. Reading email newsletters via RSS. I refuse to get the Substack app but was finding that I was missing newsletters in the sinkhole that is my inbox. I use Feedly as my feed reader when I'm working on The Browser and have now switched my newsletters into a folder there too. For most, you can just paste in the publication's url and it will automatically find the feed, and for those that require an email subscription (eg those you pay for) it can generate an address to use so they show up in the reader too.
11. Be who you are, aesthetically. My tiny cupboard-office is papered with a 1920s wallpaper featuring pigeons and my laptop is covered in stickers of my dog's face. Neither is especially chic or "Instagrammable", but they make me happy every time I see them. Find whatever your version of this and pursue it, regardless of fashion or expectation.
12. Stop checking the news every five minutes. For me, this is a hangover of my time as a journalist in a newsroom, but I've encountered it in non-media types too, and it took me a long time to unlearn this. Unless you work in breaking news or similar field, you don't need to look at the BBC News homepage (or your equivalent) every five minutes. It's fine to find out about world events a few hours after they happen, via a radio or TV bulletin or a longer written report. In fact, you'll probably get better quality information this way because enough time will have elapsed for it to have been gathered.
13. Get the thing you need to do the thing. However inconsequential or silly it feels. And as long as it is affordable, of course. I'll give you an example: I wanted to write in a notebook every day, but I didn't like the thin paper or tight lines of the one I had designated for the purpose. I also found the area at the top of each page for the date annoying because it was too small for my beloved date stamp. I persisted for months, hating the experience of doing this thing I wanted to do, before I eventually snapped and spent about £15 on exactly the notebook I had wanted all along. Now I write in it every day and positively grin when I get to stamp the date at the start of every session. I think the lesson here might be that sometimes you don't have to tough it out just for the sake of doing so — if some friction can be easily and cheaply smoothed over without expending extra willpower, you can just do that. It isn't cheating.

Dear friends,

Thank you very much for all the kind responses to my appearance on Fresh Air last week. It meant a lot, sincerely, to have so many strangers tell me they were proud of me.

If you do ever want to talk to me, you can just reply to this email. The most popular link last time was "Wordle and I Are Breaking Up", with "Help, I'm The Loneliest Person In The World!" coming a close second.

What I'm up to: I released my fifth Christmas-themed episode of Shedunnit this week. I am as surprised as you are that I still have things to say about festive murder mysteries. And for the small number of people who like my monthly reading updates, I promise the long-overdue November one will be with you in the next day or so. If you don't currently get those in your inbox and you would like to, toggle on "Reading Updates" in your account menu.

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

1. It feels like List Season has started early this year. I blame Spotify Wrapped, which was at best underwhelming and at worst terrifying for the glimpse behind the AI-generated curtain that it offered. However, I did like this list of "The New Rules Of Media" from the anti-algorithmic publication One Thing. It opens with this, which as a person who tries/is trying to share work with people on the internet felt a little too real:

Everything is a personality cult, and maybe just a cult. You have to cultivate your own, no matter how small. To do so you must always be relatable, but also ideally aspirational. Just don’t get too out of the reach of your cultists.

2. It turns out, some people (Margaret Thatcher?) are just genetically wired to need less sleep than me, a person who feels exhausted if she doesn't get 8.5 hours a night. Join me in finding them both despicable and fascinating.
3. Maybe you need to hear this: You don’t actually have to stay on Twitter.
4. One of the greatest things the internet has ever done is rehabilitate the reputation of Baroness Schraeder from The Sound of Music, mostly via that incredible McSweeney's piece from 2011. Now, comedian and songwriter Riki Lindhome has taken the lore one step further by rewriting "So Long, Farewell" to be from the Baroness's perspective. Her performance video is pitch-perfect, right down to the smallest details of the costume and the background nun playing the violin:

5. This was interesting: Anne Helen Petersen's "Brief Theory of the Modern Gift Guide" holds that we have all retreated so far into our personality-based niches that mainstream recommendation sites like Wirecutter can no longer adequately serve us.

6. Sandy Duthie, pictured above, thinks he landed his new job as a solo lighthouse keeper on a remote Australian island because of his enormous beard. I agree with him.
7. Why have I only just learned of the BBC Micro Games Archive? I spent a very happy hour the other day playing "Roman Adventure", a text-based game I last saw on a terminal in my primary school in 1994.
8. Speaking of games, I'm intrigued by "Short Trip", a recently-released illustrated game with a most charming summary — "The cats living along the mountain railway have places to be. You, the sole cat operating the tram, have the delightful duty of transporting them." Here's the trailer:

9. The train nerd in me enjoyed perusing this performance report that highlights Europe's best and worst train operators on several different factors. To nobody's surprise, the three most costly operators (Avanti, Eurostar and GWR) are in the UK.
10. Back in September, I finished reading A Radical Romance by Alison Light, a memoir about her marriage to the historian Raphael Samuel. Delving more into Samuel's work after I finished led me to the History Workshop movement. Their website has one of the most interesting "books to read" lists I've seen yet this year, themed as it is around "radical" approaches to memoir, science, craft and more. I added The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine by Rozsika Parker to my to-be-read list so fast after perusing this list.
11. A victim explains a new type of scam he experienced: a "spamalanche", where the scammer signed him up for hundreds of email mailing lists hoping to conceal the notifications of unauthorised purchases made with his stolen credit card number.
12. I nodded vigorously through Celine Nguyen's first-year review of her newsletter, personal canon. Even as I've just been gently easing myself back into newslettering the past couple of months I've had several readers ask me for tips on how to do this, and I think in future I will just direct everyone to this post. It's far more comprehensive and helpful than I could ever be. To whit:

"My high-level advice — which supersedes everything below — is that you should decide what you want from your writing, and then completely ignore any advice which detracts from this goal."

13. Self-explanatory: pics of people taking pics.

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

Dear friends,

You find me fully in the grip of what I call The December Delusion, in which I believe I can definitely get a lot of work done ahead so I can take time off over Christmas while also going to social events, doing a choir performance most nights, getting all the gifts bought, and sending Christmas cards. My best wishes to all those who also celebrate this annual event.

If you ever want to talk to me, you can just reply to this email. The most popular link last time was whichcountrytomoveto.com, with the well-dressed font man coming second.

What I'm up to: I'm the guest on NPR's Fresh Air today, in conversation about hypochondria with Terry Gross herself! It airs live across the US throughout the afternoon, depending on where you are based, and then will be available to listen back after broadcast here and here too.

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

1. A superb video explaining how to use data visualisation techniques to master the timings of any complicated roast meal.
2. In the past few weeks, I have been looking critically at my media diet. I am keener than ever to understand politics and policy without having to imbibe a constant flow of psychodrama to get it. I get most of my news from radio and podcasts, so these are the switches I'm making.

• Music rather than talk radio as my everyday background. For me, that means BBC Radio 3, ClassicFM and BBC Radio 6 Music, depending on the time of day. The brief hourly news bulletins let me know which stories are truly cutting through to the wider population and which are not (and can therefore be safely ignored as Westminster/Washington bubble stuff).
• Podcasts that broaden my horizons rather than narrow them. For ongoing monitoring and consumption, I like:
  • Monocle's daily show The Globalist, which is made from London but covers all countries equally — ie an election in Iceland or a major new law in Australia gets as much airtime as the latest UK government announcement.
  • Podlitical from BBC Sounds, which comes from the BBC Scotland newsroom in Glasgow and covers UK politics with a Holyrood/Cardiff/Stormont bias.
  • Three feeds from BBC Local Radio/Regions that are infrequently updated but always worth the time when they are: Multi Story, In Detail and In Court. All three aggregate often very good local reporting on big stories that rarely gets much air time on bigger channels. Multi Story sadly hasn't been updated since 2021, but I live in hope.
• Lastly, I like to drop in temporarily on shows made by outlets based in a place I'm currently interested in. At the time of writing, for instance, the Irish general election has almost finished counting, and I'm listening to Election Daily from the Irish Times to get my information about it.

3. Are your local community spaces online (Facebook groups) totally flooded with Boaver stuff too? This longread about how big data changed the US dairy industry felt timely.
4. Fancy architecture, but for dogs:

5. On breaking up with Wordle.
6. I remember so vividly that morning after an awful night before, when I had taken a big romantic swing and it had not worked out the way I had hoped. A colleague, immediately understanding the nature of my distress and knowing that we could not discuss it properly while at the office, emailed me an extremely appropriate edition of the "Ask Polly" column (then published at The Awl, RIP) on the hour, every hour, until we could leave and go to the pub for a weepy debrief. Heather Havrilesky, the writer of that column, now publishes it independently and occasionally sends out a classic from the archive. This is how I came to read 'Help, I'm The Loneliest Person In The World!' for the first time in a decade and find myself sobbing at my computer screen. I am so different now, and yet I still need the same advice. Maybe you do too.
7. Sometimes it's good to stick your face into some very mass culture. This is a playlist of the 100 most streamed songs on Spotify, ever.
8. The modern equivalent of those chalk figures carved into hills? People are making interesting designs with solar farms.
9. Paul Graham on how the age of AI is going to divide us into the "writes and the write-nots", because there will be no reason for people who don't enjoy writing or aren't good at it to ever do it. This is bad, by the way.
10. A well-reported piece about coming to terms with the fact that you might not ever "recover" from burnout.

"Burnout asks me whether I really need to claw at the whole world with both hands. And it suggests that what I’m holding is already more than enough. There is a wealth all around. I need only to dwell within it, and witness it, rather than rushing on to the next thing. And I need people, of course, to care for and receive care from, so that I can continue to remain here as long as my body lets me."

11. WhenPhoto, a game where you are shown a series of photographs and must guess the year in which each was taken.
12. I am a sucker for a vlogger who documents an interesting-to-me life. This one is an oboe student at Juilliard. As an unsuccessful teenage oboist, I am hooked.
13. Buying a TV in 2024 is surprisingly hard, if you want it to a) look good b) work with all your other stuff and c) not spy on you too much.

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

Dear friends,

Welcome back to my would-be-weekly newsletter, which just took a month's break while I was busy pre-recording all the podcast episodes that will go out while I'm having a break over Christmas.

If you ever want to talk to me, reply to this email. The most popular link last time was the game of Death Roulette, with Hilary Mantel's writing day second.

What I'm up to: White-knuckling it through "Books of the Year" season, honestly. I know these lists are arbitrary, subjective and unimportant in the grand scheme of things, yet it still wounds me a bit every time I see that A Body Made of Glass isn't on one. I'm probably not supposed to admit to that kind of ego-fragility in public, but there we are. It's a very personal book; it often feels like it is me that is under review, not just something I wrote.

The book is out in paperback in both the UK and the US in March, so if you've been holding off until you could have it in a slightly smaller, cheaper package, now's your chance to pre-order. It is otherwise exactly the same book. You can, of course, have the audiobook – read by me — right now.

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

1. L.M. Montgomery's 150th birthday is this Saturday, so there has been some good anniversary-pegged content about her recently. I liked this podcast episode that includes an interview with her granddaughter and a discussion of why Emily of New Moon resonates so much with neurodivergent people today.
2. Readers of my first book will know that the Isle of Sheppey is the closest thing I have to a point of origin in the UK. Of course, I was delighted to see it make the news for a fun rather than a grim reason: a new “chief scorpion wrangler” is sought to take care of the 200-year-old colony of arachnids that live in the walls of Sheerness Dockyard.
3. Notes App Epiphanies: I loved this. My favourite screengrabs (everything I write is true):

4. My favourite post-election take, which is mostly about a recently widowed man losing and then finding a beloved wedding ring.
5. Some people scroll Instagram reels from sun-drenched islands to find their next holiday destination. I like to get lost in this map that shows everywhere in Europe I could take a night train to. The far north of Sweden? Don't mind if I do.
6. I recently chanced across the Ephemeral New York blog and have been keeping up with it assiduously since. It has a great combination of current photography of NYC institutions with history. This recent post marking the 200th anniversary of the opening of Fifth Avenue was especially good.
7. A very stylish man dresses as various fonts.
8. Thomas Jones in the LRB did a good job of articulating my own views on the Richard Osman crime oeuvre. I love it when critics do that:

"Given what it sets out to do, it’s hard to fault The Thursday Murder Club. It may be the literary equivalent of the ultra-processed snack foods that Chris can’t help gorging himself on, full of ‘empty calories’, but, on their own terms, it’s hard to fault a packet of cheese and onion crisps or a Wispa bar, either."

I also appreciated the mention here of all the guilt expressed in those books around food. Quite jarring to be regularly told about someone's biscuit-based shame when trying to enjoy an uncomplicated mystery.

9. Fascinating piece of writing about genre snobbery. When is a book allowed to "transcend commercial fiction"? What tricks do authors use to signal that what they are writing is literary fiction rather than "just" science fiction or a spy novel?
10. The Mushroom Colour Atlas is simply gorgeous and must be perused at length.

11. I have been reading ferociously this month (as subscribers to my reading updates will shortly find out) and I found some of the tips here on how to maximise your reading time helpful. I have yet to keep a book of poetry by my toilet, but never say never.
12. Considering texts of condolence as their own form of writing, or perhaps of prophecy. "A friend’s brother dies and on the day of his funeral I text, 'I hope it goes as best as can be today, I am thinning of you.' A few weeks after my first chemo, my hair begins to shed."
13. Where should you emigrate to? Use this handy quiz to find a country that matches your economic, social and cultural preferences.

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