Plans, Thoughts, Changes for The Unseen Review in 2026

a small update

This cabinet was supposed to hold towels and now it holds books . . . no surprises there.

I’ve been on Substack with The Unseen Review (previously end matters) for almost two years now, and I’m still learning how best to work this platform and decide exactly what I want to use it for—not always the same thing. In that time, I’ve made 253 posts. Out of those, 182 have been podcast episodes for the slow reads that I’ve run, equating to over 43 hours of listening time. (By the time we actually hit the two-year mark, it’ll likely be much more.) And I’ve written at least 192,000 words according to my Scrivener project, though the total is probably far higher considering I don’t use it to draft everything.

It stands to reason that over the course of all this, I have learnt a few things! Today I wanted to share a few changes and plans for the rest of the year.

Last year was my big year of experimentation. I produced some work I was really proud of, which we’ll get to in a moment. But it’s also the case that I probably overdid it a little. Like many of us here, Substack is not my only gig but I very much planned my year as if it was. The experience was invaluable to me in many ways, though, and I feel much more confident this year in what to offer and the value of what I’m producing here.

I realise it is now March that I’m sharing this—just ignore that fact if you can. I did draft this post weeks ago but in the never-ending sea of admin that is my life, it hasn’t made it to your screens until now.

The plans

As usual, I’ll be producing monthly(ish) reading round-ups, and more ad hoc ‘features’ all about books throughout the year.

Slow reads

One thing I think works great on here is the slow reads. Substack is (or was . . .) a newsletter platform, and it has that podcasting functionality built in. Everybody approaches slow reads differently, but I’ve found the most effective way, for me, is to arrive into your inboxes (or your personalised RSS feed!) with a podcast episode every single day. You read a section every day and listen along.

Substack is a very smooth platform to use for exactly this. As you may know, I run a book club on Patreon, as well, but I find the text post formatting horrible over there and I don’t think it’s as smooth overall as a ‘newsletter’. Plus, Substack has great discoverability—and I want more people to join us! So the slow reads will be staying.

I’m going to do two new ones this year. The first will be Paradise by Toni Morrison in September, and the second will be Independent People by Halldór Laxness in November and December. (The Gormenghast slow read will continue up until early May!) I consider Paradise to be one of Morrison’s best works (possibly, for me, her best), but it can be difficult to follow. I think it will really benefit from the slow read treatment so we can untangle everything she’s doing here. And Independent People is a novel on a grand scale that will also reward that daily close attention; there are so many elements to it which would be easy to miss by yourself.

I consider my slow read candidates so carefully—I’m looking for layered novels with real complexity and depth; ones that will work over a longer period of time (and that don’t need to be read more quickly to catch their rhythm); and books that I can see myself living with intensely for weeks on end. I’ve been so lucky that the first two choices I made were ideal books for this format—John Crowley’s Little, Big and Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast Trilogy. If they weren’t special to me before, these books have now become part of the fabric of my being. Although they are different in many ways, they do share something in their fantasy lineage, and it has been such an honour to introduce them to new readers over the past year.

I am thinking of running the Little, Big slow read again this year live to your inboxes through the second half of June, July, and into August. If you are interested in this because you missed it the first time, please let me know below.

I would likely tool this up a little as I revisit each post, so it will be at least slightly different from last year’s version.

Also, those that did it with me last year and don’t want to mess around with your settings, do not fear; I will be setting up a new section so that the posts won’t come to your inbox unless you want them there (true of all my slow reads). And secondly, if you would like to take last year’s slow read in your own time—i.e. you’d like to make a start today—I recently put together a directory so you can find your way around the posts (there are also more navigation links in the posts themselves).

Courses

I also wrote and ran the How to Read and Analyse a Novel course last year. Not my most catchy title but it did the job. I loved running this so much; we looked at the big picture stuff—why it’s worth learning to analyse novels, how do they work, what are their key components—and then we did some hands-on learning by digging into some great contemporary novels together. I got to reread and share some of my all-time favourite books and write (copious) amounts of words about them. If nothing else, the reading list alone is a really great introduction to some fantastic contemporary fiction.

I did originally plan to do an Introduction to Speculative Fiction course last year, but I ended up delaying it as it was too much to juggle along with everything else. That was probably a good thing, because I’m still toying with something like this but I feel like the topic has bloomed in my mind into multiple courses at least. I think what I really wanted to do with this course was to guide more readers into the speculative genres that I love. Perhaps you’re a literary reader who is intrigued but everything you’ve tried so far has been subpar; perhaps you just don’t know where to start and feel overwhelmed. That’s what I think I’d be aiming for in my first version of this course, so it’s more likely to be Speculative Fiction for the Literary Reader.

I’ve also carefully considered the amount of work that goes into a project like this, and I’m not sure how to approach it moving forward, because I’m not certain it works here on Substack. Firstly, in terms of pricing, but on the admin side of things, too, I don’t think a newsletter format is the best approach. I’ve thought about running future courses on a different platform again like Teachable, but I’m naturally pretty reluctant to do this and add another thing into the mix. Still, I think it would suit a course much better (obviously), and would probably enable me to create a more flexible approach, plus bring people along with me week to week a bit better. Basically, I’d love to hear your thoughts on this. Are you interested in seeing this course!? And if so—is it okay that it might appear elsewhere? Or did you like the Substack format if you joined in last year? Have you run a course somewhere and liked the set-up?

Your subscription

To reflect all this, there will be a few changes in how the free and paid offerings are organised moving forward! First of all, I plan to make any of my writing that isn’t to do with the slow reads free.¹ I hope this means I can be genuinely helpful to readers of The Unseen Review, and it also takes the pressure off a bit as I find it difficult to guarantee a certain regular amount of writing. Instead, I can read and research in my own time. Older posts may be paywalled after a month or two as the archive reflects a huge amount of work, but if you subscribe for free today you should receive everything to your inbox and have access to it that way.

That means that paid subscriptions will be mostly to do with the slow reads, accessing the full archive, or signalling support for my work. And may I just say, I am eternally grateful to anyone who has a paid subscription. Support through subscriptions means I can keep reading and keep sharing great literature with you, and I am so grateful.

And if you aren’t able to become a paid subscriber today, I would so appreciate it if you could share my posts and tell your book-loving people about my work. I am deeply algorithmically-challenged (and completely unable to keep promoting my own work psychologically—even this is against my very nature) and I know I get by a lot of the time on your very generous word-of-mouth recommendations. So if you enjoy my reviews or find yourself reading what I recommend, please do tell the world in whatever ways—big or small—works for you. It makes a big, big difference.

The price of a monthly subscription will be going up a little to £5 to better reflect the work that goes into the slow reads for those that do upgrade during those months for them, but I’ll be keeping the annual price at £39.99 so that if you just want access to everything all year round you can opt for that. I’ll be changing this in a week’s time, so you can still lock in the current price (£3.99) now, and you’ll stay on that price forever.

Other news

Reading retreat

Finally, some other news that I’ve been meaning to get to you!

First of all, I’m running a reading retreat this year with Aweventurer in May. I’ve wanted to do something like this for ages—mostly because I just love meeting you and chatting books with you—but haven’t quite had the bandwidth to organise it. When Aweventurer reached out, it seemed like a great fit. We’ll be heading to Umbria, Italy on the 1^st–5^th May and I can’t wait. You can see the full itinerary on this page! Now I need to pick the books we’ll be reading.

Editing

In just a few weeks I will have completed my Editing certificate with The University of Chicago (one of the reasons I have not done as much writing as I might have liked over the last ten months or so!). Alongside all the above, learning a whole new career last year was intense, but I’m realising more and more my abilities and value as an editor. I have a new website with full details of my editorial services, which you can check out here.

With that, I will leave you! Until next time.

1. The only exception I can think of is if it is a sensitive or vulnerable topic!