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Hold, Please…
I regret to inform you, dear readers, that I wrote an essay for The Wingback at the last minute, and it was absolute shit. So rather than pass that off as anything you might possibly want to read, I am posting a picture of my dog being impatient about her walk time.
If you’re looking for something to read, here are a few things I’ve liked in the past month. If you buy a book through a Bookshop.org link, I’ll get a little commission, which is nice:
Number Go Up by Zeke Faux is a very fun and well-reported read about the wild world of crypto, including the downfall of FTX. If you’ve been skeptical about crypto, this book comes with a satisfying dose of schadenfreude.
Menewood by Nicola Griffith is the deeply researched followup to Hild, which I adored. Both are set in England circa 600 or so, post Roman occupation. I’ve been waiting for this book, so I preordered the hardback. I’m halfway through it now. No regrets.
Allergic: Our Irritated Bodies in a Changing World by Theresa MacPhail gets into the scientific weeds (pun intended, fellow hay fever sufferers!) and yet manages to be a good time. I’m reading it via audio book, and the narrator really gets across how maddeningly hard allergies are to pin down. If you are exasperated by your allergies, you are in excellent company—and have been for centuries.
O, Caledonia by Elspeth Barker is a cult classic, apparently, and I am a new devotee of the cult. It’s Barker’s only novel, and it was written in the early 1990s when she was about my age about her childhood growing up in a remote Scottish castle. Despite the fact that everyone knows the story’s origins, she begins with the murdered body of the protagonist, and it only gets darkly funnier as it goes.
Life Is Hard: How Philosophy Can Help Us Find Our Way by Kieran Setiya is less like a self-help book than it sounds and more like a gentle philosophical primer. It seems like the title was tacked on for marketing reasons.
Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma by Claire Dederer is for all of us who have wondered what exactly we’re supposed to do with our childhood love of Michael Jackson or our appreciation of works by Pollack and Picasso.
Order KHG’s latest translation, Memoirs of a French Courtesan Volume 1: Rebellion, available now as a paperback or ebook.