01 Nov 2024 6 min read Permalink

Secrets, Spies, Styles: What I Read in October 2024

Dear friends,

October was a disrupted month of reading for me. I spent a good chunk of it dealing with a chest infection that not only made me cough a lot, but also stole my ability to concentrate on a book. Thus, I read less than I usually do, and I prioritised lighter, quicker things that my brain could cope with. I had all sorts of plans to read some seasonally appropriate, witchy literature, but it has not happened yet. Maybe next month. If you would like to look back on September's post, you can do that here.

Before we get into it, a plea for recommendations. If you are a picky audiobook consumer like me (ie, sound quality and narration matter greatly to you) please reply and tell me which ones you have enjoyed recently. Perhaps I'm just becoming more fussy, but I've started and then abandoned so many recently for one reason or another, and an audio diet of only podcasts is not doing my brain any good. I truly don't mind whether it's non-fiction or fiction, and it can be from any genre at all — I just want something I can bear to hear all the way through.

A reminder: 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" for this purpose. I'm presenting them in the order in which I read them through the month.

A Wound Deeper Than Pride by Ali Scott

It is one of my ongoing goals to read every single Pride and Prejudice continuation in existence. This one was new to me and I liked the sound of its premise: it is set not after the plot of Austen's novel, but diverges from it midway through. It imagines what might happen if both Elizabeth and Darcy left Kent after his disastrous first proposal and then met again shortly afterwards in London. This happens when she is nearly run over by a carriage outside his house, neatly setting up a "second chance" plot.

This isn't one of the best continuation contenders I've ever read — Longbourn by Jo Baker is much more creative, for instance — but it suited my bedridden brain very well during my chest infection. Obviously the outcome is a foregone conclusion, but I liked the enhanced role for Maria Lucas in this version and spent a pleasant hour looking up Regency-era maps of the streets around Grosvenor Square to understand how the carriage accident would have happened.

The Secret Place by Tana French

This is the book that the Shedunnit Book Club is reading in November, so I read it early to prepare the bonus podcast episode I was making about it. I thought I had podcasted about the book before in the SRSLY days, but I can't find any evidence of me done so — maybe I'm having a Sinbad moment. Anyway, I loved this Irish crime novel from 2015 about a group of teenage girls at an upscale Dublin boarding school and how they fare after a lad from the corresponding boys' school is found dead in their grounds.

The overlapping chronologies, the highly specific noughties fashion and slang, the hint of the unexplained, the clique-y friendships... It feels wrong to say that a book with some dark elements was a "joy" to read, but it was. To my mind, this is Miss Pym Disposes for the twenty-first century. Given that I have had Tana on Shedunnit to talk about how much she loves Josephine Tey, that comparison feels especially apt.

Slow Horses by Mick Herron

I have watched the Apple TV+ adaptation of this modern-day espionage book series, but unlike everyone else I know I thought it was just OK (and declining in quality season by season). Several people whose taste I trust insisted that the books were much better, though, so I gave this one a go. And they were right! I agree, Herron's spare, occasionally lyrical prose really does elevate the premise.

I appreciated the additional space for character back story and development in particular (this material is almost completely lost in the TV series). The section where a pair of young MI5 operatives talk about how the 7/7 bombings were the catalyst for them wanting to join the service is quite moving, as were some of the revelations about protagonist River's relationship with his mother and grandfather. And the Le Carré-esque psychodrama within the service was much tenser and more shadowy than on screen. I'll definitely be reading the next book in the series, once I get off the library waiting list.

Rivals by Jilly Cooper

For no good reason that I can name, I had always mentally pegged the work of Jilly Cooper as "not for me". Even though I read plenty of romance fiction both old and new, and I've heard her sharp prose and journalistic skills of observation praised for years. But the new TV adaptation of Rivals on Disney+ was perfect sickbed viewing. It's rare that I watch all the episodes of something based on a book and don't then read said book. So I did. And it was magnificently silly and fun.

If you had asked me prior to the single day in which I gulped it down if I wanted to read a novel primarily about commercial television franchise renewal in the 1980s, I would have said no. Now, I think this is the perfect backdrop for a set of awful people to be entertainingly awful to each other. Do I ship Taggie and Rupert? A bit, yes.

However, I'm still not sure that I'm a full Jilly Cooper stan yet. There was a chapter preview for another book included at the end of this ebook (from Tackle! I think) and I did not vibe with it all — a lot of shouting about horses and betting lingo that I did not understand. I am definitely not a horse girl. If anyone who knows her work well has a "you loved Rivals so you'll love X" type of recommendation for me, I'm all ears.

The Mysterious Affair at Styles by Agatha Christie

I reread this, Agatha Christie's first detective novel from 1920, for an upcoming episode of Shedunnit. My thoughts will shortly be available on the show in full, so I won't spoil them too heavily here. Suffice to say, I can't think of a better debut by an author who went on to great success.

Holy Disorders by Edmund Crispin

Another podcast-related read and one of many Crispins that I have read this year (with so many still to go). I'm trying to read all of his work before I make an episode about him. This one from 1945 concerns shenanigans in a small cathedral town and repeated murderous attacks on organists. Perhaps it is because I've overdosed on his style a little, but Crispin's comic flair was beginning to feel a bit brittle in this one and the meta, self-referential footnotes annoyed me on occasion. Still, a decent read from the tail-end of the golden age of detective fiction.

There we have it, my reading for October. For those who are interested in the data, that was six books, bringing me to a total of 92 for the year. 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.

Thanks for reading this far. If you would like to adjust what kinds of post you receive from me, you can do that in your account menu.

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.

Filed under: blog, newsletterarchive, monthlywhatIread

31 Oct 2024 4 min read Permalink

Difficult, Often Expensive, Sometimes Soul-Crushing

Thirteen things this Thursday that I have read, watched, listened to or otherwise found noteworthy.

Dear friends,

Welcome back to another one of these. If you do ever want to talk to me, you can just reply to this email. The most popular link last time was the auto-generated compliment, with this piece about the Criterion Collection coming second.

What I'm up to: I find asking people to support my work financially, especially when I'm not launching something new and shiny, extremely awkward and embarrassing! But I am currently in the season where I do that for my podcast Shedunnit, so if you are inclined to check that out I would appreciate it.

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

Although trying to emulate other writers' routines is a classic red herring in this business (using the same pen as Stephen King will not make you Stephen King, etc etc), I do really like this 2016 account of her day by Hilary Mantel. Her insistence on being left alone to wake up in her own time is truly inspiring.
Spin the wheel of 17th Century Death Roulette and find out what you would have died of in 1665 in this game built on real records. I was Scalded in a Brewers Mash, at St. Giles Cripplegate!
This is an interesting essay on a phenomenon I have felt myself, which in my head I call being a "pick me patient" — where as a frequent medical flyer you start to work hard at getting your doctor to like you the best of all their patients.
I applaud and am slightly afraid of Ben Grosser's transparency about his TikTok addiction. You can check whether he is scrolling at any time here, as well as seeing his stats. As he says: "Think of it as a last-ditch effort, a sort of public confessional as therapeutic tool aimed at defusing the intense compulsion I feel every day to endlessly scroll the world’s most popular video app."
Seasonally appropriate, part one: William Hope's amazing photographs of ghosts from the 1930s:

I am still working up the courage to knit my first pair of socks, so of course I am doing a lot of hyperfixation reading about the process. What could be better than a data-driven analysis about how hard it is to do?
"All nonfiction writers can end up writing incorrect or controversial things, but why does every Gladwell book push half-formed and inaccurate theories?" Reading reviews that debunk Malcolm Gladwell is a favourite hobby of mine, and this is a good one. Bonus companion podcast: If Books Could Kill on Outliers.
It was this post — On Being Butthurt — that finally caused me to "get" the work of Elif Batuman. This piece is meta, cyclical, defensive, self-aware, relentless: just like the phenomenon she is describing. And also somehow about the ever-present writerly advice to "keep a notebook"? Magnificent stuff.
The route to my school went past a boring motorway-adjacent road named "Simone Weil Avenue" and I often idly wondered who Simone was. Later, I learned that she was a French philosopher and activist who had died at the age of 34 in a sanatorium nearby. Now, she is one of my favourite people to research in an idle moment, so I was intrigued to learn recently that she is coming back into vogue as an enigmatic literary inspiration.

Seasonally appropriate, part two: this examination of why ghosts always appear wearing sheets or clothes. Why aren't ghosts naked? This would be more cohesive with the spiritualist idea of a ghost as an expression of a returning soul... And souls presumably don't choose an outfit prior to a visitation.
Alex Sujong Laughlin, a writer I have followed and admired for years, paid her own money to take a "TikTok class" taught by an influencer and it sparked some fascinating thoughts about ethics, algorithms and parasocial appeal. This sentence will be living rent-free in my head for a while: "I don’t have to tell you that posting on the internet is a weird thing to do."
Eighteen life lessons learned from eighteen years of blogging. These come across as both earnest and sincere, two things that I'm trying these days to receive without cynicism. Topics covered include: forgiveness, prestige, generosity and boredom.
A refreshingly hopeful take on the ridiculous finances of publishing even a well-received non-fiction book. "There is a big difference between becoming an author and becoming a celebrity author. For 99.9% of people who manage to do it, writing and publishing a book is more like going to grad school. It’s difficult, often expensive, sometimes soul-crushing, but potentially life-changing nonetheless."

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. Tomorrow, my reading round-up for the month of October will be going out, so if you want to read that make sure you have that setting enabled.

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

Filed under: Links, blog, newsletterarchive

24 Oct 2024 4 min read Permalink

Would You Like An Auto-Generated Compliment?

Thirteen things this Thursday that I have read, watched, listened to or otherwise found noteworthy.

Dear friends,

It's Thursday again. The clocks go back in the UK this Sunday. I've just finished a knitting project I've been working on, sporadically, for 18 months. All is well.

If you do ever want to talk to me, you can just reply to this email. The most popular link last time was Katie Stone's post "I Don't Drink", with this piece about the tradwives' terrible bread a distant second.

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

A fascinating behind-the-scenes look at the Criterion Collection, a film series that in the age of streaming fatigue has become a handy shortcut for finding good things to watch. But who decides what is "good"?
There I was, merrily listening to Spotify's "Spooky" playlist while I did some tedious data entry, when I was hit in the ears by the voice of Gia Ford, an artist I had never heard of before. She sounds a like a bluesy early Lana Del Rey. There's a dark, cinematic quality to her album Transparent Things that I am totally hooked on. If they ever make another Bond film, she should be in the running to do the title song. Try my favourite track, album closer "Our Mutual Friend".

I am always in the market for a new Pride and Prejudice take, and this one — Why Aishwarya Rai in Bride and Prejudice is the best Elizabeth Bennet — does not disappoint.
"I just quietly suffered, and quietly achieved. It was not the same as thriving, but when I look back to that period, it is proof of life." Katherine May is very moving on what it's like to grow up autistic and live to receive a diagnosis in adulthood.
Who Gets Shipped And Why? A fanfiction data analysis.
The BBC documentary series 40 Minutes, which ran on BBC Two between 1981 and 1994, is truly wonderful. Offbeat subjects, handled with minimal narration, unspooling over an amount of time that is the correct length for a meal. Plenty of episodes are still available to watch on iPlayer, and I would particularly recommend the one about Angel tube station, the one about the Great North Road, and "The Mighty Leek", which documents the attempts of some retired old men in the north east of England trying to grow the world's biggest leek.
Game of the week: Doubles. You have to double a number, then double it again, and again, and again, against the clock. Really tunes up those mental maths skills...
A poem by Margaret Atwood that I like a lot: "Now":

I love you now, right now
inside this one word now, the one you’re reading
now. And then of course this means
I love you now forever, just as
long as you can stay inside
this lemon egg of time

Street Nuns by Felipe Hernández — a photography project that is just... paparazzi shots of nuns out and about.
Cheating allegations rocked the men's world conker championships. The winner, an 82-year-old man fulfilling a role known as "King Conker" during the competition, was found to have a replica steel conker in his pocket. The outrage! He has since been cleared of suspicion: apparently he had the fake in his pocket to show to people as a joke.
On the dark, divided life of L.M. Montgomery. "Ultimately, Anne of Green Gables is a Rorschach test. Readers interpret the text through their own worldview. Is it a squeaky-clean, optimistic tale of overcoming adversity, espousing traditional values? Or is it a subversive, proto-feminist work reflecting the psychological struggles and frustrated Sapphic tendencies of the author? Two things can be true."
If you need a little positivity to add into your media diet, the humanprogress.org site might work. It is backed by the US libertarian think tank the Cato Institute, so bear that in mind, but it will alert you to cool breakthroughs such as the elimination of trachoma as a public health problem in India.
Would you like an auto-generated compliment read to you at the touch of a button? This website can help with that.

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

Filed under: Links, blog, newsletterarchive

17 Oct 2024 5 min read Permalink

A Pat Answer To The Inevitable Question

Thirteen things this Thursday that I have read, watched, listened to or otherwise found noteworthy.

Dear friends,

Welcome to all the new/old subscribers who have joined us after I did that post to the old No Complaints list — it was both delightful and moving to see so many names roll in that I recognised from my newslettering a decade ago.

Thank you for being here. I didn't get this out last week as planned because I was busy having the kind of cold that makes strangers on the street fearfully ask if you are planning on coughing up a lung. Now that it has simmered down to something more appropriate to your average Victorian street urchin, I am back at my screens.

If you do ever want to talk to me, you can just reply to this email. The most popular link last time was the Alpha Guess game, with Paul Graham's "How To Do Great Work" essay coming second.

What I'm up to: I was on the Cluster F Theory Podcast talking about hypochondria. A Body Made of Glass made this Publishers Weekly list of "20 Books Our Editors Don't Want You To Miss This Year", which was nice. And the annual Pledge Drive for my podcast Shedunnit began yesterday, so if you are inclined to check that out I would appreciate it.

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

While I was in my sickbed, I spent some time wearing my best headphones immersed in The Greatest Matter podcast. Self-described as a "Victorian Gothic Audio Drama", this is a serialised fiction show set in 19C Dublin about a criminologist visiting the city who ends up getting drawn into a murder investigation. Everything about the show is pitch-perfect, in my opinion — the writing is excellent, the sound quality is superb, and the mixing/mastering is exceptional. As someone who has edited many hundreds of hours of mediocre audio, let me tell you that there is not a footstep or a breath out of place in this one. It's by an erstwhile Shedunnit collaborator of mine, Conor Reid, of the wonderful Words To That Effect podcast, and I know that he has been working on bringing this project to our ears for many years. It was definitely worth the wait.
I love to read about a storm-in-a-teacup within a highly specific online community. This row over the classification of anime on the film reviewing platform Letterboxd is a great example. It's made more fun by the fact that a lot of film industry types, some of them very high profile eg Francis Ford Coppola, are users of the site.
I've so far steered clear of having epigraphs at the start of chapters in my books for two reasons. One, clearing copyright permissions for them is both time consuming and expensive. Two, I'm not sure they add much. Do people even read them? This examination suggests that they are divisive, but that they are ultimately there for readers, not writers: "The pleasure the epigraph is meant to fulfil is not the writer’s own."
This is the kind of surveillance culture I can get behind. The "Bop Spotter" is a solar-powered box on a pole in the Mission district of San Francisco, containing an Android phone running the Shazam app continually. The website lists all of the songs it picks up in the atmosphere, whether being played by passing cars, people with phones, shops, and so on. Inspired by the grim "shot spotters" that US law enforcement use to get early warning of gun violence, this device is meant to capture the shifting soundscape of what people in the area are really listening to, independent of algorithms or charts. I love the mission statement: "This is culture surveillance. No one notices, no one consents. But it's not about catching criminals. It's about catching vibes. A constant feed of what’s popping off in real-time."
The Story of Drawing in Six Images is well worth a look. This depiction of a cat and a mouse is from c.1295-1075 BCE. I think all of the universal New Yorker cartoon captions work here.

Photograph: Gavin Ashworth, Brooklyn Museum

I found this short story about an intense long-distance running camp in China to be compelling reading: My Five-Thousand-Meter Years.
It is rapidly becoming a newsletter tradition that I must find a new addicting, frustrating online game for each edition. This time, it is "What Came First?" from Google's Arts & Culture vertical. You are offered two cultural artefacts or moments and must pick which one came first. I was confident, but it's surprisingly hard. Do you know whether Dick Van Dyke, who was very old when I was a child, pre-dates Van Gogh's "Head of a Skeleton with a Burning Cigarette"? I didn't.
Long time readers will remember how much I love a medieval illumination. And I've got a new favourite: the "yellow silence" from a 12C copy of the Tractatus de Apocalipsin, an earlier commentary on the Book of Revelation. The artist chose to represent the moment when the final seal is broken and silence reigns in heaven for half an hour in the most perfect possible way:

I really enjoy the fact that most of the online tradwife influencers are making truly terrible bread.
I spent a long time with this series of short articles about "Digital Divinity", which looks at all the different ways internet technology are used by different faiths and religions. There's an AR app to help you always pray towards Mecca! Priests in the Phillippines are very serious about TikTok! In China, you can virtually sweep a tomb to pay your respects to the dead!
If I am in London and at a loose end before 16th February, I will definitely be going to this exhibition of replica Japanese food at Japan House. It does, indeed, look delicious.
A statistical analysis of the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon game. (Extra points if you, like me, prefer on a long car journey to play the John Nettles-adjacent version of this game popularised by the comedian Will Smith on his 2007 radio show Tao of Bergerac.)
I enjoyed this take on not drinking, from someone like me who avoids all alcohol for no more reason than it doesn't taste nice and causes near-instant queasiness. Nobody should ever have to explain why they don't want an alcoholic drink or be made to feel uncomfortable for not ordering one, but it can be handy to have a pat answer to the inevitable question.

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

Filed under: Links, blog, newsletterarchive

03 Oct 2024 4 min read Permalink

My New Favourite Wellness Nonsense

Thirteen things this Thursday that I have read, watched, listened to or otherwise found noteworthy.

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:

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.
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."
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."

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

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!
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.
My new favourite wellness nonsense to read about is extreme fruitarianism.
I'm always on the look-out for an interesting typeface. "Conveyer Belt Font" takes its inspiration from... well, conveyer belts:

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.
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?"

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.
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

Filed under: Links, blog, newsletterarchive

01 Oct 2024 10 min read Permalink

Crispin, Cazalet, California: What I Read in September 2024

Dear friends,

I've long enjoyed the end-of-month reading round-ups that bookish people of my acquaintance like Harriet Evans and Frances Ambler habitually post. I often find titles in their stacks that I want to read myself, or benefit from an alternative perspective on a book I have already tried. It's also a diary, of sorts. I read different sorts of things when I am different emotional states and it's interesting to notice those choices, I find. I have attempted periodically to cultivate a habit of doing this sort of monthly reading reflection, but it has never stuck — in part because of my on-and-off relationship with social media (more on this in a personal essay coming your way soon, don't forget you can adjust which types of post you receive from me here).

But! Now I am a newsletterer first and foremost, so I am going to aim for a monthly post like this recounting the books I have read and saying briefly what I thought of them. In general, my reading tastes range fairly widely: obviously I read a lot of crime fiction from the first half of the twentieth century, but I also enjoy romance novels (both modern and period), some fantasy, the occasional piece of science fiction, an assortment of non-fiction, and even sometimes, literary fiction.

If you would like to discuss any of the titles featured here or share your own, you have two options. You can reply to this email and send your thoughts straight to me, or you can visit the comments section of this post (scroll to the end) and post them there for other readers to see too.

These are books that I read in their entirety: for pleasure, for a book club, or as part of a longer-term project. I skim a lot of other books or read portions of them as I'm working on articles and podcast scripts, but I'm not counting those as fully "read" for this purpose. I'm presenting them in the order in which I read them through the month.

The Case of the Gilded Fly by Edmund Crispin

This was Crispin's first murder mystery, published in 1944 and supposedly written in just a few weeks while he was still an undergraduate at Oxford. It introduces many of the elements that would recur in his eight other detective novels: the eccentric academic-slash-sleuth Gervase Fen, classical music as a pivotal clue, the dense layering of literary allusion, theatre and theatrical people, and of course the geography and architecture of Oxford itself.

Because Crispin was a generation younger than the original "golden age" crime writers like Christie and Sayers, he comes at the whodunnit with a degree of self-awareness about the form that you don't find in books published pre-1939. In other words, his characters seem to know that they are in a detective novel and that certain things are therefore expected of them.

I've read some of Crispin's books before as I've come across them, but I'm now reading them in order because I want to eventually make a Shedunnit episode about his whole oeuvre (so you can expect him to crop up again over the next few months). I enjoyed this one more than some of his others. The "impossible" crime was not too elaborate or eccentric, the literary references served a purpose other than just showing off, and Fen displayed a level of moral decency I find appropriate in an amateur detective. If you haven't read Crispin before and want to try him, this would be a good starting point.

Diary of a Provincial Lady by E.M. Delafield

I re-read this book every autumn; it's a staple of the changing seasons for me. Perhaps it's because this diary began life as a column Delafield wrote for Time and Tide magazine and so is naturally episodic, but I find it such an easy text to pick up and put down whenever I need a little pick-me-up. The balance of humour and sincerity is perfect, I think. The Provincial Lady both laughs at the quotidian concerns of her small, privileged life in 1930 (lack of parlourmaids, bulbs won't grow) and takes matters domestic very seriously. The supporting characters never fail to delight me: Robert, the taciturn unhelpful husband; Lady B, the thoughtless, rich lady of the manor; and Our Vicar's Wife, who always says she can only stay for five minutes but is always there at least an hour. The illustrations in this Persephone edition only make them more real to me.

Fool Me Once by Ashley Winstead

This is a "second chance" romance set in the world of Texas politics. I picked up an earlier book by Ashley Winstead, The Boyfriend Candidate, at the library last year and enjoyed it, which is what brought me to this sort-of sequel. Fool Me Once follows Lee Stone, communications director at woman-founded electric car company that is decidedly not Tesla, and her attempt to get a bill through the Texas state legislature that would require all public vehicles (school buses, road maintenance trucks, etc) to become electric.

This lobbying brings her into contact with her ex-boyfriend Ben, now working as a policy advisor to the Texas governor. The pair broke up in graduate school after Lee cheated on Ben, mistakenly believing that he was already doing the same to her. She has unresolved trust issues dating back to her father's infidelity and the dissolution of her parents' marriage. She buries it all under a fun "party animal" personality, a prickly demeanour and a total refusal to enter into a committed relationship. But now Ben is back, and Lee's armour is slowly broken down by his sheer niceness. I like the less starry-eyed type of character you get in a second chance story — they tend to be older, more mature, and thus more interesting. A fun, occasionally moving, quick read.

Confusion by Elizabeth Jane Howard

I have been repeatedly told for years that I would love the five-novel Cazalet series, which follows a single upper middle class British family from 1937 to 1947. Because I am stubborn and contrary, I heard this recommendation and ignored it. Until this year, when I picked up the first novel, The Light Years, in a charity shop and devoured it. Turns out, other people do know me and what I might like! I'm actually having to ration out the other four books to prolong my enjoyment of the series, because if I didn't I would gobble it all down in the space of a week.

Thus, in September, I allowed myself to indulge in Confusion, the third book in the series, and the one that deals with the business end of the Second World War (1942-1945). The girls who were barely teenagers at the start of the series — Polly, Clary, Louise — are now old enough to move to London and exist independently. Meanwhile, their parents and grandparents continue to orbit the family home in Suffolk, Home Place, all living secret lives that they pretend don't exist for the sake of a false Edwardian domestic ideal.

Lurking hidden there are secret second families, affairs with American soldiers, inner struggles with sexuality, pacifism, religion – it's a lot. And all so beautifully written in restrained, economical prose. If I have a criticism, it is that the cast of characters whose point of view we see has grown so much that we don't spend as much time as I would like with any one person (I had a similar issue with the later A Song of Ice and Fire books). It's a problem of abundance; there are too many interesting minds I want to spend time inside.

I constantly feel like I'm going to cry while reading the Cazalet books partly because of the content, and partly because I know I will never have the chance to read them for the first time again. I know I will re-read them, and I know they will be important to me forever now, but I will never be new to them like this. Is that silly? Perhaps.

Trouble by Lex Croucher

A fairly forgettable reimagining of a Regency romance, in which a feisty, prickly young woman takes up a job as a governess in place of her angelic-but-ill sister. I'm not someone who requires that my historical romance have anything resembling accurate period detail — because what does that even mean for a genre that didn't exist during the time it depicts — but I do like a plot to consist of more than just a string of revelations about characters' true natures. I enjoyed the scene where a Navy ship is wrecked on the beach beneath the house, but that was about it.

The Appeal by Janice Hallett

When I say that I read this book in one go, I am not exaggerating. I still have the occasional totally sleepless night courtesy of my pandemic-era insomnia, and in an attempt not to spend eight hours scrolling on TikTok I usually dip into my library apps (Libby and Borrowbox) and see what I can download to while away the night. I knew of The Appeal because it has become a bestselling new crime novel of the 2020s surpassed only by Richard Osman's output, but because I spend most of my crime-time on books published between 1920 and 1940 I had never come close to picking it up before.

I sped through it in that one night. It's formatted as a collection of "documents in the case" with almost no connecting narrative between the Whatsapp messages, emails and interview transcripts that make up the bulk of the book. The dossier has been put together by a barrister for a pair of junior colleagues to assess, and since I too wanted to be a barrister when I was a teenager this format really scratched an investigative itch for me. I did guess the answer to the central mystery quite early on (because it happens to draw on something I've researched extensively in the past) but I still read voraciously through the rest of the book regardless. That's about the highest compliment I can pay a mystery novel — if I still want to read it after I know what's going to happen.

I do like the documentary/epistolary format, and I'm interested to try another Hallett to see if she pulls it off again with a different story. I'm glad to see a contemporary writer experimenting with it so successfully. Still, as much as I liked this book, it has not eclipsed The Documents in the Case by Dorothy L. Sayers and Robert Eustace from 1930 as the best example of this conceit for me. The Appeal is a good puzzle but it doesn't pack the same emotional punch.

A Radical Romance by Alison Light

It took me almost two years to finish this superb memoir about an unconventional marriage. Not because it was slog to read — quite the reverse. I found it so precisely emotionally devastating that I could only manage short sections at a time, days apart. I plan to write about it in greater depth in a future essay, so I won't say much more here, other than that I think you should get a copy and read it too. And then track down all of Alison Light's other books too, because she is a superb writer who deserves to be much better known.

Daydream by Hannah Grace

The Maple Hills romance series, of which this is the third book, serves a similar function in my life now as watching The O.C. did when I was 16. There is a cast of fairly interchangeable hot teenagers in California, doing hot teenager things, and I can just let their escapades wash over my tired brain in a soothing way. Sometimes, that's all you need.

Death in Fancy Dress by Anthony Gilbert

The Shedunnit Book Club is reading this 1933 detective story in October, so I re-read it this month in order to make the bonus podcast about it in good time. Club members will be able to hear my thoughts on it in a couple of weeks, but suffice to say: this is very far from being my favourite Gilbert novel of the ones I have read so far (I think that is The Vanishing Corpse from 1941). I miss the presence of her series detectives, sketchy solicitor Arthur Crook and know-it-all MP Scott Egerton, and I don't find any of the one-off characters here especially sympathetic. Still, the fancy dress party that gives the book its title is a good time, and I like the WWI hangover that is palpable throughout the plot.

There we have it, my reading for September. For those who are interested in the data, that was nine books, bringing me to a total of 86 for the year. 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.

Thanks for reading this far. If you would like to adjust what kinds of post you receive from me, you can do that in your account menu.

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.

Filed under: blog, newsletterarchive, monthlywhatIread

26 Sep 2024 4 min read Permalink

One Of My Most Toxic Traits

Thirteen things this Thursday that I have read, watched, listened to or otherwise found noteworthy.

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:

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.
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.
Billie Eilish can sing jazz? I wish she would do it more:

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."
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!
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.

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?
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).
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."

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.
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:

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."
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.

Filed under: Links, blog, newsletterarchive

19 Sep 2024 4 min read Permalink

The Months-Long Kafkaesque Ordeal

Thirteen things this Thursday that I have read, watched, listened to or otherwise found noteworthy.

Dear friends,

Thank you very much for the kind responses to last week's links newsletter. If you do ever want to talk to me, you can just reply to this email.

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

From this podcast, The Female Bob Dylan, I learned more about Connie Converse — a highly talented singer-songerwriter who began performing in the 1950s but then cut all ties and disappeared in August 1974 never to be seen again. Her family respected her wishes that they not look for her. "Let me go, let me be if I can, let me not be if I can't," she wrote in her farewell letters to loved ones. In 2009, an album of her home recordings, How Sad, How Lovely, was released. I love it: it reminds me of early 1970s music by Vashti Bunyan and Lal & Mike Waterson.
These portraits of people taken on a 400km walk around London are very arresting.
We recently started watching The Project, Peter Kosminsky's 2002 BBC drama that follows the fortunes of three young left-wing activists from Labour's 1992 election defeat through to Blair's re-election in 2001. So much to enjoy here, from the 1990s tech nostalgia (they do some dirty tricks journalism at conference involving pagers and fax machines!) to the appearance of not one but two actors who have played iconic roles in Pride & Prejudice adaptations (Crispin Bonham-Carter, Mr Bingley, 1995 and Matthew Macfadyen, Mr Darcy, 2005).
Is My Blue Your Blue? A tool for testing your perception of colour against everyone else's. Turns out, my blue is greener than 57 per cent of the sample population. Turquoise is blue, though, and that is a hill I am prepared to die on.
I was delighted to see Sam Leith write about the absolute horror show that is trying to clear copyright permissions to include quotations in a book. This is an under-discussed aspect of authorship, I believe. I don't think many readers know about the agony involved in including even six words of an in-copyright poem in a new book. Not only must you track down the rights holder in all relevant territories, but you, not the publisher, then have to pay whatever they demand (and if the estate is represented by a rapacious agency, it could be hundreds of pounds per word). The threshold for permission is not clear and the law is ill-defined. This has a chilling effect on publishers; they will always urge you to pay up for even the tiniest quotation to avoid litigation. I'm still recovering from the months-long Kafkaesque ordeal of trying to discover who I should pay for the Philippines audio rights to quote from Andrew Motion's biography of Philip Larkin. I hope anyone who has listened to A Body Made of Glass there appreciates the effort involved.
I love an obscure and highly specific book, and luckily archive.org is full of them. The Heraldry of Fish by Thomas Moule from 1842 scratches this itch perfectly. Sadly, it's not about fish with their own coats of arms, but rather the way the nobility incorporated fish into their symbology.
A perfect comic song about why we buy bath gift sets at Christmas for people we barely know.
Maps of where different crops grow in the US. My main takeaway: I'm shocked by how few places are doing potatoes compared to soybeans.
I found this essay by Thea Lim about self-worth, work and what the algorithms are doing to our ability to make anything free of the relentless capture of internet platforms mildly devastating. As an author/podcaster who is under pressure to beg people to read/listen to my stuff online all day, I feel very raw on this subject, but as Lim points out, even those who work in relatively "offline" fields or actively reject this stuff are still inside the matrix.

"And those ascetics who disavow all socials? They are still caught in the network. Acts of pure leisure—photographing a sidewalk cat with a camera app or watching a video on how to make a curry—are transmuted into data to grade how well the app or the creators’ deliverables are delivering. If we’re not being tallied, we affect the tally of others. We are all data workers.

Software engineer Teresa Ibarra did an interesting analysis of the ~80,000 text messages she exchanged with her then boyfriend in 2015/6. You can see the development of their pet names for each other, how much they mentioned the word "love", and what their major stressors were.
A pencil is an instrument of optimism because 95 per cent of it is designed for writing, and only five per cent for erasing.
Archery is a thriving pastime in the Indian state of Meghalaya because the Shillong Daily Teer lottery is the only form of legal gambling. Betters guess how many arrows will be shot in the daily competition, much like picking numbers for any other lottery.
A handy list of ambiguous words, ranked by how many meanings they have. "Break" tops the list, with 75 definitions.

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

Filed under: Links, blog, newsletterarchive

12 Sep 2024 5 min read Permalink

I Do Not Think It Very Nice

Thirteen things this Thursday that I have read, watched, listened to or otherwise found noteworthy.

Dear friends,

The urge to newsletter has hit me again. Perhaps it is the arrival of September, which always makes me itchy with the desire to start new projects, or maybe I am just inventing reasons not to be working on my new book proposal. Either way, here I am, in your inbox once more, with a baker's dozen of recommendations. I'm also doing my last (for now) in person book event for A Body Made of Glass at the Liverpool Literary Festival on Saturday 5th October — do come if you are able. Now, links:

Why, thirty years in, are we still holding that there is necessarily a qualitative difference between "writing" and "writing on the internet"? There is good and bad in both categories. This thoughtful essay should carry a dedication to everyone who has ever been told by a commissioning editor that their idea "sounds like more of a blog than an article..."
A Spark of Darkness, a two-part Hitchcock-inspired radio drama about a naval electrician turned detective investigating his apprentice's supposedly accidental death, is magnificently good. It is written by David K. Barnes and directed/sound designed by Andy Goddard, both of whom previously worked on the best fiction podcast to come out of the 2010s, Wooden Overcoats.
The Brazilian city of Linhares has recognised the legal rights of the waves at the mouth of the Doce River that enters the South Atlantic Ocean at the coast there. A bill stating that "waves have the right to continue breaking perfectly at the mouth of the Doce River" has been made into law — a response to a 2015 environmental disaster when a dam collapsed and ten million gallons of sludge from an iron mine entered the stream. The "legal personhood for natural phenomena" movement is gaining traction around the world and I find it philosophically fascinating. I'm looking forward to Robert Macfarlane's upcoming book, Is A River Alive?* for this reason.
When Virginia and Leonard Woolf's flat at 52 Tavistock Square, Bloomsbury was bombed in October 1940, they and their portable possessions had already moved out to another property. But the murals and decorative panels created by Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant were still on the walls, as you can see in these photographs.
Spell your name with aerial photographs of the Earth: this generator allows you to type in some letters and it will then search NASA's "Landsat" image database for features that match the shapes. On the website, you can then hover over each separate image and it will tell you what and where it is. Here's my first name, made up of images of Antarctica, Kentucky, Utah, Oregon, Indonesia, New York, Bolivia and Tibet:

The G.K. Chesterton poem "Ballade of Capital" from 1911:

I own the scheme is very neat,
I do not think it very nice
That we should own the blooming street
With all the people poor as mice.
I have old views: that loaded dice
Are “wrong”, and even Tit-for-tat
“Heathen”, that virtue is not vice —
And lots of little things like that.

I very much enjoyed Ed Pratt's series of daily short videos about travelling from the source of the Thames to the sea without leaving the river. Here's his first instalment, in which he wades along in the ankle deep marsh that passes for a stream near Kemble in the Cotswolds. Readers of my first book, The Way to the Sea, will remember that I did a bit of this wading myself at the start of the first chapter. Don't worry, though, he gets in a kayak once he reaches Cricklade.
This 2012 BBC documentary Sex and Sensibility: The Allure of Art Nouveau joined a lot of dots in my personal (sparse) knowledge of art history. I now know, for instance, what connects the work of Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh and Gustav Klimt. And there's also some lovely footage of Charles Rennie Mackintosh's Glasgow School of Art, which was largely destroyed by two fires in 2014 and 2018 and still remains a membrane-wrapped ruin stuck in insurance claim limbo.
- From that documentary, I learned of the existence of Klimt's Beethovenfries, a room-sized artwork from 1902. It was painted to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the composer's death. The work was apparently inspired by Wagner’s transcription of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony for piano and voice — the documentary presenter listens to this as he looks at it — and tells the story of "man’s quest for happiness". I can't wait to go to Vienna and see it for myself. Until then, I will thinking about this panel featuring a giant ape aka the god Typhoeus, one of the deadliest creatures in all of Greek mythology:

One for the people who, like me, have spent many patient hours explaining why bad web design choices are bad — shouldiuseacarousel.com. This part especially resonated: "Carousels are effective at being able to tell people in Marketing/Senior Management that their latest idea is on the Home Page."
The quest for ever-greater productivity is, by definition, never-ending. Only when we realise this can we escape the trap of the "productivity journey", as this writer discovers. "How many of these things we produce is not productivity. How you spend your life is."
Do you have a lot of time to fill with keyboard taps? If so, I recommend this browser-based Pacman game.
I do look at the Goodreads reviews of my books; maybe I shouldn't, but I do. They demand to be read. I find them absolutely mind-boggling and the entire platform inexplicable. I am not the only one.

This is the first of what might well become a series of link-sharing newsletters; I have been missing curating this kind of digital ephemera as I used to do when No Complaints first began back in 2014. Any (polite, kind) feedback or submissions for future inclusion are welcome via reply to this email.

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. And if you buy a book from a link to Blackwells in this newsletter (marked with a *) I will receive a small commission (the price stays the same for you). Thank you for reading.

Until next time,

Caroline

Filed under: newsletterarchive, Links, blog

12 Jun 2024 4 min read Permalink

The Post-Book Blues

Back at the bottom of the mountain again.

For a long time, I would always get sick on the first day of a holiday. Having remained functional through the final weeks of a long school term or period at work, it was only when my time was at last my own that my body would make its problems known. This effect was especially pronounced towards the end of senior school when every exam carried that "the results could affect the rest of your life" heft. The first few days of every break were spent in bed, clutching my stomach and/or mopping up snot. It was just the way I was made, I thought.

Funnily enough, this is actually how I came to be diagnosed with cancer when I was 17 (readers of A Body Made of Glass will know more about that), because I finished a very long and arduous school term, took to my bed with my customary malaise once the Christmas holidays began, and then didn't get better on my usual timetable. Three weeks later, I was still laid low, which is why my mother took me to a doctor who ultimately referred me to an X-ray clinic and then a haemato-oncologist, who then saw me through the next five years of treatment and recovery.

I don't experience this pattern of illness anymore. I am lucky that my life is no longer structured so rigidly into terms and holidays or periods of hellish office labour interspersed with much-needed moments of paid time off. It doesn't feel anymore like I am running on a treadmill that I cannot adjust until it stops at an appointed date far in the future when I will be able to safely collapse.

But I do still experience a sort of long-range time blindness when it comes to big life events. I become so focused on a highly anticipated moment in the future — the day of the house move, the start of a new job, the arrival of a guest — that I cannot visualise what might happen once that event has occurred. There is only a void, a cliff edge off which I will have fallen. Will I even still exist? Will anything? My brain cannot conceive of it.

This is how my mind approached the publication date of both my books: 6th June 2019 and then 11th April 2024. Years of work went into preparing for each of these days. Work on a book doesn't finish when you finish writing it. That's just when you switch into a different mode, preparing how to frame it for marketing and review. You toil for months on trying to generate as much interest as possible, all focused on that one day of release. And then, if you are part of the 90+ per cent of authors who do not make their full-time living from writing books, you are supposed to get up the next day and carry on with your life unchanged, almost as if all that effort and preparation had meant nothing.

Both times, this has given me something akin to emotional whiplash. It was less severe in 2019, I think, because the comedown from publication day was more gradual. I had lots of literary festival events booked for the summer that I travelled for, so there was more of a transition period from "book life" into real life. This time, it has happened more dramatically. I spent a few weeks doing nothing but book work, with sometimes five or six interviews and online events in a day. And then it dropped to none at all. I have a couple more in-person gigs in the calendar, one in July and one in August, but that's it. The contrast is jarring, to say the least.

The last few weeks have been blue. It's difficult for me to articulate why, when I have been so fortunate. In terms of real-world benchmarks, the book has surpassed all my expectations. It was serialised on BBC Radio 4 and reviewed in the New York Times! I can't name a single piece of publicity that I would have wished for but didn't get. That is not something I will likely ever be able to say again. I have been incredibly lucky. I feel guilty about feeling anything less than ecstatic.

Why do I feel so down? Why am I struggling to concentrate on anything and feel might cry every time I catch a glimpse of my book either online or in person? Why, having mostly avoided the comparison trap for months, am I now upset by literary festival listings and social media posts? I have been wrestling with this question and still don't know the answer.

A clue arrived, though, in this newsletter:

"Post-publication depression is a real thing. Writing a book requires a gut-gouging quantity of emotional vulnerability, isolation, and uncertainty. Most people are exhausted by the time they cross the finish line. Most people are not even positive when they can stop running."

It's not just me, then. It's the system. The writer, Anna Sproul-Latimer of the Neon Literary agency, goes on to describe the post-publication period as being characterised by "the dissolution of a survival fantasy". Authors get through the tough years of writing alone by thinking that all the exciting communal fun they will have once their book is on sale will make the misery worthwhile, only to get to that magical moment and find that it falls short.

Perhaps a beloved bookshop isn't stocking any copies, maybe the reviews aren't what you hoped, or there aren't as many readers or events or interviews as in your dreams. Then comes the disappointment, amplified by the fact that it represents the dashing of long-held hopes. There is no quick fix, either. The only way to "do better next time" is to climb the mountain from the bottom again and spend another several years writing alone.

For myself, I think a lot of this feeling comes from being unsure about what comes next. Should I even write another book, if I'm going to feel like this once it comes out? Part of my brain has been thinking about how I should be "working on my book" every day for the past eight years. I am curious to know what it would be like to be released from that mental load, but I also have ideas I would like to work on and ultimately share with others. Which is it to be?

When I find out, you'll be the first to know.

Thank you for reading. Any (kind) feedback or requests for future subjects are welcome via reply to this email.

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