Sometimes I resist the assembly-line approach to writing or reading — the sense of marching through a list. Our intellectual lives aren’t meant to run on conveyor belts. In a small act of rebellion, I lean into gardening metaphors instead: tossing half-formed ideas onto a compost heap, trusting they’ll break down into a rich mulch of thought.
At other times I slip into what some call ‘monk mode.’ I become the stern parent — You won’t finish everything, so why start so much? — or the gym instructor, urging myself to push harder. Then again, I like to imagine my writing desk as if I were on Bake Off or Sewing Bee: workspace clear, tools ready, discipline in place.
So where’s the happy medium? I’ve learned to treat my creative practice as an experiment. Letting papers pile across my flat never helped me think, but nor does chasing productivity for its own sake. But what’s the point of finishing a book a week, or forcing out a blog post every Friday, if it only makes me miserable?
Sketching teaches me that form often emerges from play (as in the hand studies below). My writing process works the same way, shifting between structure and improvisation. The best structures don’t confine; they channel — less a wall than a viaduct. And what works one season may falter the next. A creative life is, as Hemingway wrote of Paris, a moveable feast.
How orderly is your own process? Do you stick with one book until the last page, or one piece until the final draft? Or do you wander between projects, trusting something fruitful will emerge?
In this edition we’ll have:
📚 What I’ve Been Reading
📅 This Week in Thought
🎞️ Seen & Heard
🧠 Thought Prompt
📚 What I’ve Been Reading
The following are not all from August, or even July - I am a reader who savours, underlines, and writes in the margins rather than breezes through chapters. You will find:
Fiction
Nonfiction
Other Substacks
Fiction
Françoise Sagan, Bonjour Tristesse
Bonjour Tristesse (“Hello Sadness”) (1954) by François Sagan (1935-2004) is a book that I discovered on a whim: I’d been planning on visiting France on holiday and reading something French while I was there. And voila! This gem with a holidaying, sunbathing youth on the cover appears. Life offers us occasional serendipities that should not be resisted.
It is a story about a duplicitous, sun-lounging, seventeen-year-old, French young woman and her serial-romancing father. Life is simple, until her father agrees to marry, with disastrous consequences. The novella (100 pages) is funny, acutely psychologically perceptive, especially written so young (Sagan was 18), and surprising.
What redeems it from the risk of teenage solipsism – from the brutal amorality of youth – is the doubt of the protagonist. Sagan does justice to human complexity, where reason dances, tussles with desire, spite and all manner of emotions. What could be seen on the face of it as a study on laziness, young and old love and cruelty becomes a philosophical meditation on all three. Recommended.
Ursula Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness

The initial fantasy-style setting of castles and a kingdom made me unsure at first, as that’s not really my bag, but it turned out to be incredibly interesting. Famously a feminist sci-fi, or perhaps more accurately, a gender-bending sci-fi, it’s set on a planet where humans are genderless most of the time but are hormonal for a few days a month and become one gender or other.
It’s set on an icy planet, and has a fair amount of Hemingway-esque toughing-it-out on the ice. So much has been written about this that I’m not sure what I can add - only that I’m darned glad I read it.
H.E. Bates, The Triple Echo
A trip to WWII for my next fiction read of the summer. A welcome change of pace after reading about outer space with Ursula Le Guin. I was attracted to the illustrations and the light novella length. Bates is famous for his evocation of the English countryside, for example, in his best known work "The Darling Buds of May" which became a popular TV series.
The countryside features in this work, but actually the weather is more prominent as a dramatic device and a creator of atmospheres. Bates’ writing is economical and dramatic in the right places. The illustrations by Ron Clarke are delicate and set off the action delightfully:
“For a long time she sat with her face buried in her hands, drinking from a cup of darkness inside them.”
Nonfiction:
Umberto Eco’s essays
Strictly speaking, my essay writers’ club The New Essayists read the title essay of this, plus a much less whimsical essay on fascism1 and one bizarre think-piece about the impossibility of drawing a map on a scale of 1:1. To balance things out, I threw in optional readings about jeans and pop music from the collection I already owned, Tales in Hyperreality.
I’m not sure what I think about Eco as an essayist - he is a contradictory figure. He writes David Sedaris-like comic memoir (the salmon story), deeply analytical political writing worthy of Noam Chomsky, and writes seriously about silly things. I’m still not tempted to read The Name of the Rose at this point, though being a medievalist does sound like a cool thing to be, as multi-hyphen careers go.
Hegel for Beginners
Back at the end of June I took a day off and because I am an incredible nerd, I went to the British Library, where I’d reserved this book on Hegel. (I had looked in a few bookshops who stocked the Introducing series, which this evolved into, and was never lucky.)
Why Hegel? My interest was piqued by Susan Sontag mentioning him (see my recent essay Alone in Berlin) and, he’s a big hitter in philosophy terms. Doing my philosophy bachelor’s degree back in 2005-8, I didn’t sign up to this course, and everyone on it seemed to groan under some invisible weight all semester.
But when you can learn from comic books, everything is easier! I managed the first half and scrawled a full A4 page of narrow-lined notes by hand.
Byung-Chul Han, The Scent of Time (2024)
The “wunderkind of German philosophy” (wait, stay with me) is actually surprisingly readable, which is refreshing. Han’s thinking dovetails really neatly into Hegel’s, actually, in the sense of how we conceive history - and time - really shaping how we experience it.
No full review yet, because I’m really enjoying this, in fact probably savouring it too much to get through at a reasonable pace, so I will speed up. I bought this at the wonderful Books on the Water, a canal boat bookshop near King’s Cross.
River of Forms: Guiseppe Penone’s Drawings
A Helsinki purchase, there was something so vulnerable about these drawings, it was worth carrying this hefty tome back to London with me. Reading in the airport, he’s much more of a conceptual artist than I realised - somewhere between landscape art and performance art.
I love the description of drawings as being the main tool of the creative artist. As with the drawings of Mervyn Peake I find drawings communicate so much more than a painting in some ways, because of its uncertainty. Watch a short flick-through video of the book here and read more about the 2022 exhibition in the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Three reads I enjoyed from other Substacks:
Articles worth your attention: 🔍
The New Renaissance Will Be Techno-Rural by James Taylor Foreman of The Metaphor had so much to screenshot or note-grab about writing method and what AI can and can’t do for us. One line that stayed with me: “it’s much more about each of us taking the time to align our craft and our embodied care for each other”.
As I showed in a recent issue, I like zines! I am semi-seriously considering making this publication in zine format. This post “Why you should turn your Substack into a zine” from Bigette of Commonplace Zines went some way to persuading me.
This interview on megafauna (read: big beasts!) from Sam Matey-Coste of The Weekly Anthropocene was freaking fascinating. I had no idea I could be so riveted by learning about elephants past, mammoths and all.
Inbound books:
Books I recently bought and am ‘stoked’ to read include Beautiful Star by Yukio Mishima and Contingency, irony and solidarity by Richard Rorty.
📅 This Week in Thought
On 19 August 1662, Blaise Pascal — mathematician, physicist, and religious thinker best known for the Pensées — died at the convent of Port-Royal in Paris, aged just 39.
On 19 August 1902: Ogden Nash - “Poets aren’t very useful/Because they aren’t consumeful or produceful” - is born in Rye, NY.2
🎞️ Seen & Heard
For reasons unknown, this has been a good month for me for film watching. Maybe this will spark an idea for you to check these out.
The Night Is Young (1986, Dir: Leos Carax) is such a beautifully shot film. I borrowed the DVD from my local library. It is both whimsical and at times dark, some existential poetry made me smile and roll my eyes (so French!). What makes it stand out is the cinematography — with shots worthy of Hitchcock, or of other references I’m not learned enough to name. What stuck with me was the ache of young love, and how much intimacy can be built though wordless gazes. View the theatrical trailer here. Five stars *****
The Oslo Trilogy: Love was something I heard about on Radio 4’s Front Row and it sounded interesting, so I found a screening. Film Forum says “An ambitious trilogy from Norwegian novelist/filmmaker Dag Johan Haugerud, LOVE – SEX – DREAMS are three distinct feature films linked by their themes of nontraditional intimacy” Oslo looks beautiful. The movie doesn’t tell you how to feel; it’s a thoughtful portrait of the blurred lines between sex and love, the pains and pleasures of both solitude and connection. In select cinemas now. Four stars ****
🧠 Thought Prompt
This issue’s thought prompt comes from a charming debut poetry collection by Carolyn Forché, which won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize. Here’s a New Yorker article about her.
You walk where drums are buried
Feel their skins tapping all night.
Snow flutes swell ahead of your life.
Listen to yourself.
- in Song Coming Towards Us, from Gathering the Tribes (1976)
Do you feel like you are good at listening to yourself? Your heartbeat? Your needs?
I appreciate you taking the time to warm your noggin here with me — until next time.
Ur-Fascism or Eternal Fascism
As I mentioned in my roundup of 2024, I read a poem or two of Nash’s before sleeping fairly often. The deliberate misspellings to form a rhyme reliably make me smile.