The Minutiae: My Reading is Changing
hello! a newsletter!
Hello, everyone! It’s been a while. I started this Substack properly in May and then had a much busier summer than I anticipated (lots of toddler time was obviously wonderful but not very conducive to high productivity levels). I blinked and it was September. Whilst it wasn’t the first few months I envisaged on here, I think it was actually good for me to figure out how I want to use this space. First of all, a big thank you to everyone for bearing with me, especially paid subscribers. Your support truly means the world.
From now on I’ll be releasing these weekly paid newsletters. They’ll be filled with musings, mostly on books, maybe sometimes on life. Some close reading, perhaps. Recommendations, poems. I figure we’ll work it out as we go. I have a bit of a tendency to want to research everything I think into oblivion, so I’m hoping a weekly deadline will help me get some thoughts out into the world before they disappear into the depths of my Notes app. Most of all though, I want them to be of value to you in some way, so I welcome any feedback on anything you’d like to see. I don’t want to needlessly take up more space in your already overflowing inbox. Alongside that, I’m hoping to launch at least one readalong (!!!), and a series about ‘reading like a lit student’ (the latter I plan to share with the Patreon book club if you are a member over there). More details on both to follow, hopefully launching at the beginning of next year at the latest. I hope to also properly continue my series looking at the novel form. That one I will have to research into oblivion, I fear.
For free subscribers, you will always have access to the monthly round-ups, and other projects I’ll be doing, too, including the new speculative fiction round-ups and indie press deep dives. These projects take a lot of time to put together so they were originally going to be paid but hey, I want lots of people to actually read them! Especially because more often than not I’ll be covering new books, and as everyone’s been saying recently, nobody wants to review new books anymore. And, despite all the frustration I’ve been expressing about contemporary fiction in recent years, there are good books being published, and I want you to be able to find them and read them. Thus, I offer myself as tribute.
I have other ideas, too, but the above will be my focus for the next few months. In the meantime, let me get into the inaugural newsletter. (Also my August reading wrap up is coming…!)
In my June wrap up I mentioned that I’ve been feeling a shift come over my reading recently. It has felt quite revolutionary, but every time I try to explain exactly what I mean, it moves a little out of my grasp.