Hello dear Off-Topic readers,
I know in the past I’ve promised randomness and then done that thing where I get attached to the first item on the agenda and it becomes the whole newsletter, but this time, I’m aiming for the absolute full variety1. Let’s see how I get on.
I keep track of my reading on GoodReads (I don’t link to it here as I only ever record a star-rating, rather than a review, as it’s intended more for myself than anyone else). But I keep wondering about more organic ways of doing this. I don’t think a notebook would work so well for me, as I know I’d probably end up wanting to shift things about into categories, but I sometimes think about getting one of those little index boxes students fill with revision cards, where I could also make notes. Although I’m yet to actually do that. Anyway, I came across this idea on Twitter, which keeps track of the titles - I love the idea of ending up with 50 years’ worth of bookmarks. This makes me think of Jane Mount and her beautiful spine illustrations :)
Getting dressed in a hurry, my son regularly ‘irons’ the creases from his t-shirts by putting them on and then blasting his chest with my hairdryer. I wasn’t a fan of this method. Partly because I didn’t understand why he couldn’t just use the iron like a normal person. But also because a drunk houseguest once blew up my hairdryer while trying to inflate her airbed with it, and ever since, unorthodox usage has felt synonymous with catastrophe. But a few days ago, I was late leaving the house and thought, Oh for goodness sake, I’ll try it, and was amazed to find it’s incredibly effective and that I was crease-free in about 10 seconds flat. I’m imagining it costs less than heating up the iron for one garment and I was left nice and warm (even in hot weather, warm clothes feel nice, don’t they).
You know those ideas that seem so obvious once you’ve seen them, but aren't actually obvious at all? That’s what it felt like when I saw Studio Spelling’s beautiful work painting miniature pictures on Farrow & Ball paint charts. Total perfection. (Neve, if you’re reading, I thought you’d love this :).
In one of my book groups, we’ve been thinking about choosing a big deep pie of a book to read together over the course of a few months, stopping at various points to discuss it before reading on. This reminded me of a website I came across a few months ago, where you can type in the title of any book and see how many words it contains, how many pages, how many hours the audiobook is, and how long it will take for you to read based on your own personal reading speed. Here are the results for Delia Owens’ Where the Crawdad’s Sing. I'm always particularly fascinated by the word count of different books, so was really happy to find this :)
Anyway, within minutes of thinking about extra thick books, I opened Instagram and instantly saw a stack of doorstop reads in my feed. Which then made me think of something I’d read about a few months ago, called Baader-Meinhof Syndrome (aka frequency illusion / frequency bias). You know that thing where you hear about something once and then suddenly you notice it everywhere, whether its doorstop novels, poor breathing technique being at the root of health problems, or the relentless popularity of floral maxi dresses. Sometimes it just provokes an ‘Oh, that’s weird’ response in me to notice the same thing in quick succession, but at other times it prompts a ‘maybe the universe is trying to tell me something,’ feeling. And yes, I’ve occasionally even let myself be guided by that. Either way, it’s oddly pleasing to find something that feels so familiar, actually has a name2. I’d assumed it referenced the psychologists who studied it btw, but it’s actually much more on-topic3 than that and borne out of someone randomly hearing two references to the terrorist group, Baader Meinhof, within 24 hours. As this article explains in more depth, the phenomenon has nothing to do with the gang itself.
Elizabeth Day posted recently about how the Top Ten non-fiction list is currently dominated by men. It made me think back through my non-fiction reads (which I actually think are pretty well-balanced between the sexes, even if that doesn’t reflect what’s being published) and it suddenly made me crave one of those books that goes into great detail about some obscure profession or passion, like Bespoke: Savile Row Ripped and Smoothed by Richard Anderson. If you’re interested, it’s a book for true needle-and-thread geeks, suitists4, or just those who enjoy books that go into great depth around a particular topic (I totally do - if a similar book were written about being a tractor mechanic, I’d gobble it up). Anyway, it maps out Richard Andersons's time at the Savile Row tailor Huntsmans, and gives an absorbing account of how it’s run, the expectations of its clients, the pressures of the work, the characters who make up the workforce...but perhaps even more interesting were his descriptions of learning to cut patterns and the errors and triumphs he experienced in that process.
Finally, some highlights from my week:
- A conversation with our vet about judging a local dog show - the conundrums involved were unexpectedly joyful and endearing. And when I came out, my husband had walked up to meet me by surprise and was sitting on a wall waiting like the best kind of garden gnome (I know there will be some readers thinking there is no good kind of gnome, but I can’t help you with that).
- Sitting in the the sunshine in a friend’s garden, eating eggs, chatting, and drinking icy-from-the-fridge water - we have ours straight from the tap, so this always feels like a real treat.
- Finally getting to wear the new sundress I bought with some birthday money from my parents. I’m not a summer creature, but nice clothes make it more bearable.
- Listening to the audiobook of The Girl With the Louding Voice by Abi Daré, a recommendation from my dad. I’m about three-quarters of the way through and really enjoying it (and can already confidently say that I’d recommend it). The story is narrated by an immediately likeable 14-year-old Nigerian girl, Adunni, whose main motivation is to be educated. But following the death of her mother, she’s forced from one horrifying situation to another, although her circumstances are made slightly less gruelling for the reader by the comfort of there always being someone good in the wings, and there’s also quite a bit of unexpected humour. I know some readers mind swearing, so feel I should say that even I - who doesn’t actively mind it - have been left slightly overwhelmed by the sheer number of mentions of p*ss and sh*t (it almost becomes comic). But I’d encourage you to just attempt to neatly sidestep it and read it anyway. On a personal level, I was unsettled to find a particularly noxious character known as Big Madam, is actually named…Florence 🤷🏻♀️.
- Working on a new English paper piecing project (there’s a photo of it at the top of this post - many more rounds to go, but I’m really enjoying it), while watching Five Bedrooms, an excellent recommendation from Jill in the comments last week. It’s an Australian drama series about five random people who decide to buy a house together. Please do leave suggestions of what can now fill this gap…I’m bereft.
- The music I play in my car is not always met with as much enthusiasm as I’d like, but this week, by freak accident, my husband seems to have actively enjoyed it. Van Morrison’s Ballerina; Dolly Parton’s Jolene; and Sister C’s Faint of Heart (we have gone quite country for the last two, but that’s more by - another - accident than design as I just have my music set to fire off tracks at random5) were all met with unexpected delight. Oddly gratifying.
- Seeing a mole run for the first time ever. Did you know they moved like this???
With love, thanks for reading, and wishing you a happy weekend,
Florence x
Ps. I’m imagining it may have made you feel almost dizzy to whizz from topic to topic like this…is it a newsletter or a fairground ride?
The aim for randomness is two-fold. I actually really love writing a newsletter around a particular theme - it’s just fun - but I want to avoid ending up with a structure that then feels too weird to break out of (let’s call this the hangover from writing a blog for nearly 15 years that was meant to be about a specific thing). The other is that I keep a running list of things I want to share, and occasionally it’s just easier to put them in front of you in a big splat (Nb. I’m not actually intending it to resemble a cowpat, even if I’ve just made it sound like one 🙈).
I’ve noticed people (myself included) seem delighted when we hear about the Japanese term Tsundoku, which is the act of letting books pile up around the house unread. I think probably because it’s just so satisfying to finally have this thing named and to know it’s something that fits neatly inside an officially labelled box, rather than it just being a uniquely-ours over-buying / under-reading sickness that we must attempt to cure ourselves of. Although I do still try not to do this.
I try to stay off-topic, and then all around me see examples of others sticking to it like glue. Inverse Baader-Meinhof.
Those who like suits.
More splatter.
I feel a lot better about my own tsundoku since someone on Twitter said to not think of unread books as a to-do list but as a wine cellar. One book which did stay unread for too long was Ducks, Newburyport. And then I finally read it, and have to recommend you add it to your doorstop pile. It's so very good, though so very massive.
Well, you've walked right into this one, Eggs Florentine*: it is non-fiction by a woman so I will once again recommend 'Braiding Sweetgrass' by Robin Wall Kimmerer! I've also just got Suleika Jaouad's 'Between Two Kingdoms' which fits the bill as well, but let me ask you as you seem likely to be an expert - have paperback books become slightly less... nice, somehow, at the same time as becoming shockingly expensive? This one's Penguin so I got a few older (1990s/2000s) Penguin paperbacks off the shelf for comparison and can't help feeling the quality has dropped a bit, despite the embossed font on the cover. (Also this is one where the US and UK covers are COMPLETELY different and make it seem like a totally different kind of book; all the online publicity I've seen has used the US version so I feel like I have the wrong book, and was only stopped from actually getting one from America by the even more shocking price of books over there.) But so far the words are all good. Have you dropped a glass yet? x
*Footnote! Sorry - with your love of eggs and a previous footnote about lengthening your name, this seems too obvious a nickname to pass up.