Sonia Turcotte

Book round-up 2025

2025-12-29T00:00:00Z

One of my goals this year was to read (not listen to) 52 books. I have nothing against audiobooks, I love them! Last year I had a pretty even split of audio and reading, and in this age of endless scrolling, I am trying to hold on to a modicum of focus.

I’ve finished the year on 82 books: 62 read, 20 audio.

This was the year of fantasy I never said anything about quality hahahaha. I read classic, pure fantasy (Wheel of Time, Farseer Trilogy), some of those popular “Romantasy” books (ACOTAR, Fourth Wing) and a whole bunch of other shit. I don’t really recommend any of them, except maybe WoT which is genuinely good. Reading this kind of book is the equivalent of binge-watching trash TV: entertaining to varying degrees, often cringe, utterly forgettable, and leaves you completely unchanged save perhaps a mild headache.

Nevertheless, I did also read some truly outstanding books this year. I’ve whittled it down to only my top top favourites, some of which have taken their spot as favs of all time. I’ve left out the academic books, since that’s quite a personal thing. But who knew Foucault was such an enjoyable read? News to me tbh.

As always, you can see the full list on The Storygraph. Ok, let's get into it.

The novels

The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler

If I had to pick my book of the year, I think this would be it. The story, the writing, THE THEMES… just magnificent. What is consciousness, intelligence? The book marries philosophical depth and ecological unease. Octopia approaches, inshallah.

It Lasts Forever and Then It's Over by Anne de Marcken

The most unique book I’ve read this year, a work of art. A zombie novel – and don't let that put you off – unlike any you’ve ever read, written from the POV of the zombie. Lyrical, darkly hilarious, deeply emotional reflections on what it means to be alive (or unalive, I guess).

Prophet Song by Paul Lynch

Ireland is dominating contemporary literature right now and this book is no exception. It is grim, tense, wonderful reading. Dublin is descending into a fascist state, close enough to the UK and to current events to put a chill in your bones. What do you do when there are no good choices?

The memoirs

Writers memoirs are my jam. Three you might like, plus a bonus animal story / memoir.

Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? by Jeanette Winterson

This one somewhat shows its age, but it is very moving. Troubled youth, strict religious parents, growing up gay, and trying to find one’s way in the world through it all. Relatable queen.

Wish I Was Here: An Anti-Memoir by M. John Harrison

I have no idea what this book is about but in every other paragraph is like… tattoo-worthy sentences. Harrison’s mind is upside-down in the best possible way, and I cannot wait for his forthcoming book.

Me & Other Writing by Marguerite Duras

Truly nothing more French than this. Laugh out loud in its outrageousness. Completely devastating.

I have no Catholic guilt. That people kill themselves because of my books won’t stop me from writing. If people turned into reactionaries, political assholes after reading me, yes, that would stop me from writing, but not if they killed themselves. What I write makes me want to die, it’s only natural that it makes others want to die too.

Marguerite! My god.

Raising Hare by Chloe Dalton

The envy I felt reading this, to have that kind of relationship with such a beautiful animal. A very elegant, lovely story, calming to read. Spoilers Animal books so often end in violence and tbh I was low-key clenched the whole time waiting for this hare to die. It was nice to not have to read that, for once.

The animal books

I’m not the animal’s guy for nothing, here are a few that I think you might like. The first two fall under ‘speculative non-fiction’ – a new genre for me and one I would love to read more of.

Animal Revolution by Ron Broglio

I read this because the first Animali text was a paper by Broglio. The paper is great but academic, the book is much more speculative and fun. It’s chock full of stories and beautiful little illustrations. Books like this come at you sideways and burrow in deeper over time. It’s very enjoyable on a sentence level, Broglio is a great writer. Also, I emailed him after our reading group and he responded so kindly and generously, and recommended the book below.

Animals Strike Curious Poses by Elena Passarello

This book was very odd. Each little chapter a different experiment in storytelling. Some of them, I think, missed the mark. But the ones that hit did not miss. I adored Harriet, about the tortoise that Darwin finds in the Galapagos. It’s written from her perspective and she calls him (Darwin) “Charlie”. If you need more convincing, Mozart’s starling is hilarious and Arabella the space spider made me cry.

The Sounds of Life by Karen Bakker

If you are interested in animal research, technology, or sound, you should read this book. Or you could just listen to this podcast about the turtles (my favourite chapter). I cannot describe to you the way I am obsessed with these turtles. I have been talking about them at least once a month since February, maybe more. May we all be more like the turtles.

The theory

The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk

Finally got around to this while undertaking 75Hard Yes, I finished it.. The title/concept is so ubiquitous in our ultra-therapised time, but the book gives a lot more. It was very hard going, but not in the way I expected. I thought it would be hard to read literally, ie. full of jargon and long, complex sentences. Instead, it was very readable – full of stories and anecdotes and simple language – but very painful. My advice, read it when you don’t have to see your parents any time soon.

Black Marxism by Cedric J. Robinson

I didn’t enjoy this book while I was reading it. It’s one of those historical texts that is (to me) very boring. But the work it’s doing is very important and has been quite transformational in my thinking. Sometimes, you just gotta do the work. I should note that I read a few chapters with my reading group and some of the others really liked it.

Perfect Victims and the Politics of Appeal by Mohammed El-Kurd

Succinct and lucid text on making no apologies, and then some. Free Palestine, always and forever!

Making websites

2025-11-25T00:00:00Z

I recently wrote about some work with FF Studio at the V&A, which had me thinking about other no/low-code websites I’ve made in the last few years. I’ve worked with almost every platform you’ve heard of, and some you probably haven’tNHS Futures anyone?.

Webflow for ICCT

One of my favourite independent projects was for a new collective, the Institute for Contemporary Critical Thought. I’m one of the founding members, so it was a labour of love across brand, visual design and the websiteLots of help in the form of ideas and feedback from other members of the team, especially Marina..

I built it on Webflow because we needed a CMS that other members could update and would accommodate events and long-form posts. It was my first time working with Webflow and it was a learning curve, but I was impressed by how much I could achieve without any engineering help.

No-code platforms

I made a little writing website with Readymag for my multi-talented friend Alex. What he wanted was quite simple, but I’m keen to push the capabilities of Readymag in the future.

I’ve explored Notion publishing, both as-is and using Super. One example is Transform your work. There was also a community-organisating project that sadly never took off, but I was really excited about the collaborative potential of that kind of project using Notion.

Everyone in the world has used Squarespace (probably). I’ve done my share over the years, mostly recently helping Iswe with a campaign site for global assemblies. However, I don’t usually recommend it to my clients because all Squarespace websites look the same. It’s also expensive and a pain in the ass.

Hand-coded with love

My favourite kind of website is the hand-coded one, like this one you are reading on. It’s carbon friendly. It feels like old-school internet. It is, to me, an antidote to the bloated, AI-everywhere internet all around usI’m working on another one at the moment and will share when it’s live..

I love making little spaces on the weird wild web. It’s so fun. Maybe you want a website? Let’s chat.

Service design as a Sharepoint site

2025-11-24T00:00:00Z

Working with FF Studio is always a delight and when they asked me to join a project at the V&A, the answer could only be 100% yes.

We joined to help the V&A redevelop their intranet for its new era. Previously focusing on V&A Kensington with content mostly organised by team structure, the old intranet was no longer working for a growing organisation with multiple locations and more opening soon.

Microsoft was already widely used across the organisation and after some technical investigations, we decided that Sharepoint would be the best platform.

The first task was, as always, research. We ran card sorting sessions with a lot of the most-visited content plus a sprinkle of obscure tasks to help us develop a new content structure.

Digital whiteboard with large information architecture tree

Then we started developing the templates. When I come to a new platform, I usually make a draft page and put every available component on it. I’m looking to see how each component works and what it looks like, and how they all fit together.

Top-level landing page showing a range of service-led content

We were also implementing the new V&A Employee Brand. It hadn’t really been used on web yet, so there were things to work out, but it was great to work with lovely visuals. I always want to make beautiful things.

A few rounds of research, iteration and Sharepoint wrangling later, we had a pretty good structure and suite of templates to accommodate service content, news, blog posts, events, directories and more.

All the while, the incredible Jo and some equally excellent in-house content designers were busy re-writing all the content. More like half writing and half service design; content designers are the best.

We left the project before it went live, which is always a bit of a nail-biter. But we did get some nice feedback about it

No challenges to the IA at all so far - super impressive from Sonia

All in all, a nice bit of service design and reform expressed as a Sharepoint site

All in all, it was a great project. The vibes were top tier. Lizzie and the V&A team were wonderful and FF Studio is always the best. Both have high standards and lots of ideas, and it really pushes you to do your best. Good work with good people, the best.

New website, who dis?

2025-06-19T00:00:00Z

It’s actually been live for a few months but I wanted to write a little about this new site, following on from the original post about creating a digital garden and later, my desire to make the site more carbon aware.

The actual design and build aims to minimise energy consumption – which you can read about on this dedicated page. The previous design scored terribly on carbon calculators, mostly because of images. This one ... it’s A+ baby!

Before and after

I mourned a little over using default typefaces but it’s worth it. Back-to-basics web design and carbon aware principles doesn’t have to be ugly. And I’ve had great feedback.

Inspiring anyone to do anything ever is the highest of complements.

There was another motivation to restructure things, and that was to create a space more constitutive of my practice.

My previous site was basically a mini-portfolio for full-time design work. Now that I’m freelance, I tend to take on projects with greater variety. And I've added research to my arsenal FF Studio calls me a unicorn lol I will take it. I also wanted a space to share self-directed projects and work outside of tech. And I’m starting a PhD in September (!!) so who knows what will come from that?

It’s nice to have a place to tinker with, that can grow with me. As Laurel Schwulst says,

If a website has endless possibilities, and our identities, ideas, and dreams are created and expanded by them, then it’s instrumental that websites progress along with us.

Book round-up: Oct-Dec 2024

2024-12-30T00:00:00Z

Final book round-up for the year!

I've been experimenting with format this year, from longer-form narrative write-ups, author deepdives and my classic ‘feeling’ lists.

I’ve been debating whether to continue writing these. Does anyone read them? Because I can just write it in my journal, right? Anyway, if YOU are a person who reads them, lmk for next year.

Anyway, let’s get into it.

2024 in numbers:

63 books
23 non-fiction, 39 fiction
26 book books and 37 audiobooks

As always, full list on The Storygraph.

The books

The Actual Star by Monica Byrne

Incredible range and brings in – like any good speculative fiction – so many interesting ideas about constructing societies. The biological adjustments, ‘hunters’, the utopia/dystopia dualism, present day humans being referred to as ‘hoarders’. Makes you want to go do some psychedelics.

Brotherless Night by V.V. Ganeshananthan

Set in the beginning of the Sri Lankan civil war. Beautifully written, riveting and deeply emotional (also quite historically accurate, if Wikipedia is to be believed).

The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder by David Grann

Astonishingly good storytelling, woven with delightful little nautical quips that have made it into common parlance. For example “takes a walk up Ladder-lane, and down Hemp-street.” I used to think history books were boring, how wrong I wasSee also, The Black Jacobins.

The Winter of Our Discontent by John Steinbeck

In this house, we stan Steinbeck. I didn’t love the characters as much as East of Eden and it didn’t churn me up in the same way. But god can this man WRITE!

The End We Start From by Megan Hunter

London floods. Detail of the visceral and broadbrush strokes of wider context and environments, which I guess is what real life is like.

Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life by Giorgio Agamben

Incredibly hard work but rewarding and generative. It was a reading group book and we discussed it over 2 sessions for several hours each. Not for the weak of will.

We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler

Excellent narrative voice, first-person narration doesn’t always work for me, but this does! Reads lightly but is an incredible story. And the themes! The plot twist a quarter of the way through had me shook! And I cried at the end.

Authority by Jeff VanderMeer (Southern Reach #2)

After finishing Annihilation, I remember feeling an overwhelming urgency to read the next part. That was 2 years ago and I had since forgotten how it ended, so it took me most of the book to re-figure it out. Story and narrative have almost movie-like quality and the descriptions of place and nature are both visceral and stunning.

Parable of the Talents (Earthseed #2) by Octavia E. Butler

Tense! Conflicting! Book 1 sets you up to identify with Olamina but book 2 is narrated through her daughter’s diaries as well. It wasn’t as narratively rewarding as the first one and the ending fell flat for me. But still good (I mean, it’s Butler).

Always Coming Home by Ursula K. Le Guin

My first Le Guin book that I didn’t really like. I do believe you have to meet some books at the right time, and I was not ready for this one.

The Castle of Crossed Destinies by Italo Calvino

Suffers from its own cleverness. An experiment that fell flat, though one has to admire the effort. Worth having on one’s bookshelf for the stunning Tarot illustrations.

Intermezzo by Sally Rooney

The way she writes about disability and neurodiversity is gross, and as a bonus, we also have insufferable characters and lots of unpleasant, unsexy sex. Not chic to get het up about Rooney but this was disappointing.

A future that moves

2024-11-26T00:00:00Z

Last year, I worked with FF Studio on a new fund for Sport England. They have written a great case study about the work, you should start with that.

This post expands on some of the things I really liked about the project.

Nothing about them without them

Reducing inequality is core to Sport England’s 10 year strategy, and we wanted to make sure the pilot fund took tangible steps towards that goal. We designed the assessment criteria and form questions to prioritise equity, including questions about accessibility, long-term engagement and the community’s needs.

The assessment criteria were weighted towards projects from people with lived experience in the community, who had considered accessibility and ongoing support.

“Nothing about us without us” is a phrase popularised by disability justice activists but used widely to communicate that marginalised and oppressed people know best what they and their communities need.

Every issue is a climate issue

One of the principles of designing good forms is to only include questions you actually need answers forBeing data-greedy is uncool and uncouth.. We made an exception to that rule for a climate question, which was the only question that didn’t have a ranking.

We included the question for two reasons: So Sport England could gather data about what’s already happening and better support organisations they work with to increase climate action, and to signal to applicants that climate change is important and is something they should be thinking about.

Equity or scale?

We tested audio and video responses in the pilot fund, because Sport England had a hypothesis that it would be useful for people who may not be as confident in written English, busy organisers and volunteers who don’t spend a lot of time at a computer, or people with access needs.

We went for a hybrid approach, because some questions need written answers (eg addresses), but we provided an option for audio/video responses for the main, open questions.

It required a few creative hacks to work around Typeform’s constraints, but we managed to get a flow that worked for both types of applications.

Out of the 36 orgs that submitted applications, only 4 of them used the audio/video option. But all of them were for organisations that wanted to reach disabled communities.

By common metrics of uptake or demand, prioritising audio and video submissions doesn’t make sense. But when you are designing for equity, the majority approach just doesn’t cut it.

This is something Clara and I talk about in our training course. In tech and product development, often the north star metric is quantity: the greatest number of users or the highest volume journeys. It is past time to start rethinking the way we prioritise work.

Teamwork makes the dream work

The best thing about this project was – as the best work always is – the people. Rod and I were making a new prototype every couple days at the start, alongside the team at Sport England (big up Cassie and Sian).

Many, many prototypes

The ability to think and design and iterate together with another person, to where you don’t know where your work ends and theirs begins, is so great. Rod was a collaborator extraordinaire, so thoughtful and smart. Also the wordsmith behind the greatest report title of all time.

Eliot and Anna ran the project with finesse, providing the wider vision and they had our backs so we could make something to be proud of. Kim kept us on track.

It is rare to work on projects that properly prioritise equity, to do so with such a stellar team was a privilege. Doing good work, together. That’s the dream!

Book round-up: July-Sept 2024

2024-10-08T00:00:00Z

I felt like I hadn’t read much, but in fact I read 17 books this quarter. Here’s the notes on what stood out. Full list of what I’ve read this year on The Storygraph.

Most of these reviews come with a little amuse-bouche. Get a taste before committing to a full book.

Ordinary Notes by Christina Sharpe

Astonishingly powerful and terribly sad. I often choked up while reading it. It was my morning slow-read text, the short note format suits that kind of reading. Beautifully written and paced, with – alongside black thought – reflections of family, friendship, self. I highly recommend.

I am glad I read it when my day-time defenses were still sleping, there is so much to absorb. Even still, I could feel myself trying to pull away, rationalise my own whiteness out of the story... ‘that’s just US-ians, it’s not like that here’, ‘I would never do such a thing, say such a thing, behave like that.’ Maybe, but that doesn’t mean I am not also seeped in the poison that is white supremacy.

I’m grateful to read a book that starts to unstitch the ideologies of racism and white supremacy so enmeshed in our world. It is always good, no matter how uncomfortable, to continue the unlearning.

This essay is equally stunning and heart-wrenching.

The Surrounds: Urban Life within and beyond Capture by AbdouMaliq Simone

I don’t read that much within urban studies, so this was a bit of work. But sometimes the work is worth it, and this is definitely one of those times. Simone’s ideas are very powerful and I have been thinking about this regularly since reading it. The chapter ‘Forgetting Being Forgotten’ is incredible and the ethnographic snippets throughout the book are so good.

This standalone chapter by Simone is also very good, for the Deleuzians in the room.

Animals and Capital by Dinesh Wadiwel

I'm carrying on with my habit of reading everything that Dinesh Wadiwel writes. I don’t think many of you, gentle readers, would usually follow up on an animal’s book recommendation, but this one is also about capital and labour! It is an academic text, but it’s well-written and I found it smoother than Wadiwel’s first book Nevertheless, The War Against Animals might be my most cited book..

Don’t want to read the book? Wadiwel is speaking at the next Animal Scales seminar, which I highly recommend signing up for. It’s online, it’s free and it is going to be so good.

Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg

I’ve read several writing books this year and generally the tips are to write every day Difficult when your job isn’t writing. or just dreadfully boring Pages and pages of grammar tools does not make good reading.. This book managed to be both pleasant to read and useful beyond our boy’s 2000 words a day.

I’ve experimented with various writing practices, from Morning Pages and other kinds of daily journalling (didn’t stick), to trying to work through a list of ideas I want to write about (ended up being rather infrequent).

Goldberg’s suggestions just worked for me and for the first time in my life, I have a regular writing practice. Also, her prompts are very nice. I’ve written a list of them in the back of my notebook to get me started on days when my brain feels too crowded to come up with ideas.

Common European Oak, The New York Public Library Digital Collections

Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler

Re-read in honour of the book’s narrative beginning, 20 July 2024. And because it’s been 4 years since I read it the first time, I wanted the story fresh before starting the 2nd book.

This book is stunning, scary, hopeful, exciting, profound. Robin Sloan calls this the great American novel, and I am inclined to agree.

Extras: Octavia Butler’s writing notes and Parable of the Sower map (thanks Rod).

I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman

This is one of those very weird books where you don’t really know what to say about it. Where it low-key changes your life but also you can’t really recommend it to anyone. It’s understated, leaves you hanging, and is a real mindfuck. Perhaps the biggest recommendation after all.

The Player of Games by Iain M. Banks

Recommended by Jon via Sloan.

Really fun. The character was deeply unlikable (to me) but very compelling. The game/world thing was very smart, and the world Banks builds is vast and rich. I felt the ending was a little abrupt and I’m not sure the bracelet thing was necessary – or at least seemed unresolved. I’d like a spin-off of the young girl he plays early in the novel Spoiler, the one where he cheats..

I enjoyed it enough to get started on another Culture book, Matter. Mostly because Jon is also reading it and I like talking about books with people who’ve read them.

Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier

Enjoyed how tense it is, even though it’s not a very mysterious mystery. Mixed feelings about the portrayal of all the characters and what they get away with. I think I liked Rebecca the most.

One thing I learned was that Hollywood used to have a rule that film characters couldn’t get away with murder (literally), so the original film ending was changed. More recent film unsatisfactory imo.

Orlando by Virginia Woolf

Something in my brain is broken because I just do not get Woolf fiction. Her essays, cool. Lesbian love letters, pour it into my eyeballs. But the novels I find so utterly and dreadfully boring. By synopsis, this should be my favourite book of all time, and yet.

I read To the Lighthouse years ago and remember nothing except that I couldn’t stand it. Not in an interesting, hateful way, just pure apathy. Sorry to the Woolf lovers, I know she’s very important and all that. My friend Sarah says Mrs Dalloway is brilliant, so I shall give that a go one day.

Carbon aware websites

2024-09-23T00:00:00Z

This website, my little hand-coded project, does not score very well on those digital climate calculators. Mostly because of large images, and because I never learned how to serve smaller image sizes based on device.

I’ve been thinking that I’m due a website refresh. It’s been a couple of years since this version came to being and aside from its carbon footprint, it also doesn’t reflect all the different things I get up to.

It’s going to take me a while to get around to actually doing the work because I’m in the middle of PhD applications and that already is a part-time job. But it will be a good winter project. If I say I'm going to do it in the wild (here), then I have to do it, right?

Some inspiration

I’m especially motivated by Rod’s work and friendship. Seriously, browse his website and read everything because it is great.
Victor’s stunning, ecologically conscious website Mater. Read about it in It’s Nice That.
Websites like Formafantasma. They make Times New Roman and Arial look good.
Low Tech Magazine, which goes a step further and removes the font-family declaration altogether, along with a bunch of other cool shit.
My Are.na board for links, research and examples.

I’m already running a static site through 11ty and don’t have any analytics, but the two new requirements of a redesign will be:

System or default typeface(s)
Better image handling to reduce bandwidth

If you have any other ideas or examples, please share them with me.

Another internet is possible. Let’s build it.

Collecting ∞ Connecting

2024-09-22T00:00:00Z

I am in constant search for a different web, a slower web. I am bored by the move to more and more algorithmic content generation and curation.

Here are two digital spaces that I am drawn to as alternatives: Arena and Montaigne.

Arena

I’ve been using Are.na for quite a while now. Gemma got me on it and it quickly became an essential tool. It is like a user-friendly, elegant pinterest without all the ads, though that is to sell it short. I use it as a reference scrapbook when starting new design projects as well as a general bookmark tool. However, where it stands apart is through encouraging connections across disparate disciplines and knowledges.

Every post is a connection, linking to other people who have also added the same thing. It is wonderful to follow the trail across users, the non-algorithmic version of "if you like that, you might like this" – and so much more interesting than machine learning could ever be.

What do ‘Cosmoecology’, ‘acrocybernetics’, ‘six of cups’ and ‘Strange Intimacies’ have in common? A little starfish. I follow the trail and finally learn to remember what the 6 of cups means.

I was a Tumblr baby, and Arena scratches the same itch.

Connections in cosmoecology

Montaigne

Montaigne is much newer, only a few months. I came to it through Russell, the king of connecting, whose own version is a delight in randomness.

Montaigne publishes to a simple webpage via iPhone notes. There is precious little customisation possible. Simple. Perfect.

Back in Tumblr days, I used to take photos of passages in books that struck me and collate them all together every so often. I'm trying to revive that here, but it is also an attempt to replace the validation hook of instagram stories It’s very cliche to do a social-media-is-bad thing. I'm not saying that. Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't – an aside for another time..

I’m still developing this practice and I forget about it for weeks at a time. The old saying that it takes 6 weeks to make a habit; I think it takes me about a year.

My favourite quote from Montaigne the essayist on Montaigne the website

Noticing, Collecting, Sharing

When I am consistent with these practices, I see things in a different way. My attention changes. I notice things I probably wouldn't have otherwise. I am more likely to spot interesting juxtapositions and make lateral connections. I feel more inspired to make things.

Russell Davies introduces his book, Do Interesting, with a simple premise.

You can make your work – and the world – more interesting by practicing three things:

Noticing – if you pay more attention to the world, it starts to look more interesting
Collecting – if you bang together the things you've noticed, they get more interesting again
Sharing – if you get good at sharing all that stuff with people, it gets even better

In the following chapters, he suggests a range of ways to do those things. Arena and Montaigne are two of mine, and I can confirm that Russell is correct. It makes the world more interesting.

Picture from Stefy Loret, found on Arena.

Book round-up: April-June 2024

2024-07-05T00:00:00Z

It’s been a quiet couple of months on the book front because I’ve been reading a lot of papers while I think about phd proposals (!!). Here’s what stood out.

As always, you can see the full list of what I’ve read this year on The Storygraph.

Fiction

It’s Ursula K. Le Guin season. I started with a re-read of The Left Hand of Darkness. I remembered (spoilers) that Genly and Estraven have sex, but in fact, they do not.

After that, I read a collection of all her novellas, The Found and the Lost. Many stories are part of the Hainish Cycle, a few in Earthsea and a bunch of independent stories. I really enjoyed this collection; I often get annoyed with the abruptness of short stories but as novellas, they are long enough to be satisfying.

Buffalo Gals Won’t You Come Out Tonight is possibly the weirdest Le Guin story I’ve ever read.

The last story, Paradises Lost, is a story set on a generational ship going to a new planet and many of the stories in the Hainish Cycle involve planetary travel. It has me wondering what Le Guin would say now, in the age of Musk and Bezos space delusions.

I’ve been slow-reading Le Guin’s rendition of the Tao Te Ching concurrently and it’s so interesting to see how she weaves the philosophy through her fiction writing.

Read this wonderful passage in Forgiveness Day,

Exercises.
‘What do you do with your mind?’
‘Nothing.’
‘You just let it wander?’
‘No. Am I and my mind different beings?’
‘So … you don’t focus on something? You just wander with it?’
‘No.’ ‘So you don’t let it wander.’
‘Who?’ he said, rather testily.
A pause.
‘Do you think about—’
‘No,’ he said. ‘Be still.’
A very long pause, maybe a quarter hour.
‘Teyeo, I can’t. I itch. My mind itches.’

As a person with an itchy mind, I felt this.

Another quote that jumped out at me, from A Man of the People,

Havzhiva thought of justice what an ancient Terran said of another god: I believe in it because it is impossible.

⸻

It’s month 10 of the ongoing and escalating genocide of Palestinians in Gaza and justice often does seem impossible indeed. But cynicism, as Mariame Kaba says, is counterrevolutionary and one of the things that helps me personally stave off the despair is learning. So I’ve been reading Palestinian stories and histories a lot.

Enter Ghost is the second novel by Isabella Hammad. I wrote about her debut last year. In terms of writing style, I preferred this to The Parisian. It is less sprawling and florid, though the stories are also very different. The Parisian is set in the early 20th century before the first Nabka, whereas Enter Ghost is set in modern-day Haifa and the West Bank.

It is good, I think, to read stories – even fictional ones – that represent what life is like for Palestinians and this book gave me a much better understanding of how varied their experiences are.

Hammad is very good at writing complex, nuanced characters, helping you get in their head and understand why and who they are. Even the unlikeable ones.

After I read it, I listened to Between the Covers podcast on the book, which was very good Worth noting that both the book and podcast are before Israel’s latest escalation of violence.. Hammad also wrote a great article in response to Zadie Smith’s extremely shit one.

⸻

Pride month has just gone, and I didn’t do any protests, parades, or parties. But I did 1) exist as a queer person and 2) read some queer books.

The Faggots & Their Friends Between Revolutions by Larry Mitchell is half novel, half manifesto, and full 70s energy. The story is stunning, the characters are weird and magical, the ideas profound. It’s giving ‘let a thousand genders bloom’. Also, the most beautiful illustrations throughout. It should be LGBTQ+ canon imo.

Speaking of LGBTQ+ canon, I would like to strike A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara off it. Emphatically.

I had heard it was a sad book. No less than 4 people told me not to read it, or that they didn’t finish it, because it is horrible from start to finish. I was pre-warned.

It’s even worse than they say. It is gratuitous in its misery. And through the few chapters that don’t directly deal with compounding horrors, you are just sitting there clenching because you know the good can’t last and Yanagihara is going to come up with something more terrible than you can imagine.

I’m so mad about this subject matter being called a ‘gay’ book and find it troubling that Yanagihara, a straight woman, continually writes tortured gay men. Read Andrea Long Chu and skip the book.

Non-fiction

Dog politics: Species stories and the animal sciences by Mariam Motamedi Fraser

What a book!

Anyone who knows me knows that Mariam has been one of the most influential people in my life. Her work and ideas have changed me down to the core. This book encapsulates a lot of her thinking, particularly on species thinking and species stories. It’s so paradigm-shifting and politically important.

Anyone who lives with a dog should read it, but it goes much further than that and I’d really recommend for everyone. It’s open access.

Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity by Katherine Boo

I was ready to be critical of a white woman writing about Indian communities but she makes a compelling argument as to why she wrote the book and I thought she handled the material very well.

It’s an ethnographic account of several families and people who live in a slum near Mumbai airport, but it’s not academic at all. It reads almost like a novel; the depth and detail are incredible and speak to her skill as both a researcher and a writer. I don’t believe objectivity is a thing, but Boo does very well in presenting the narrative without judgment or leading conclusions.

Beyond Sticky Notes by Kelly Ann McKercher

Finally got around to reading this, quite overdue, because there was some talk of a project I’m working on doing some co-design. Actually ‘co-design’ is too often used willy-nilly to just mean collaboration or research, and so I didn’t get to put the whole process into practice but I’m really glad I read it.

It’s packed with useful tips on workshops, facilitation, research, and design more generally. And it gave me more confidence to push for devolving power that little bit more. Highly recommend for anyone in digital, whatever your role.

The more power you have, the more you should read it.

Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for Everyone and No One by Friedrich Nietzsche

I slow-read this over 6 months, a chapter or two in the morning before picking up my phone and starting the day. It’s such a good book to take time over.

The prose is so lyrical. I still don’t understand most of what he’s saying, in the sense that I couldn’t explain it to someone else. But it speaks to me on a vibes level. My relationship with our boy Friedrich is just beginning.

My copy was translated by R.J. Hollingdale and it’s worth comparing them. One evening over dinner with a few friends, we were reading out our favourite – or most outrageous – passages in different translations. It makes a big difference.

Here’s a tiny part I love.

Oh my soul, I have given you everything and my hands have become empty through you: and now! now you ask me smiling and full of melancholy: ‘Which of us owes thanks?
‘does the giver not owe thanks to the receiver for receiving? Is giving not a necessity? Is taking not – compassion?’ R.J. Hollingdale

O my soul, I have given thee everything, and all my hands have become empty by thee:—and now! Now sayest thou to me, smiling and full of melancholy: “Which of us oweth thanks?
Doth the giver not owe thanks because the receiver received? Is bestowing not a necessity? Is receiving not—pitying?” Thomas Common

Oh my soul, I gave you everything, and all my hands have grown empty for you – and now! Now you say to me smiling and full of melancholy, “Which of us should be thankful? –
does not the giver need to be thankful, that the taker took? Is gifting not a deep need? Is taking not a mercy?” FuckTheory, the best imo but not a book yet

Is gifting not a deep need?

Divorcing the algorithm

2024-06-17T00:00:00Z

I’ve been thinking about moving off Spotify for literal years. It’s shit. For musicians, for cultural diversity, and tbh, it’s increasingly shit for discovery.

What finally pushed me, I’m not proud to admit, was not ethics but a duo of terrible user experiences.

I had an open collab playlist and some random user deleted all my songs and added like 7 random shit albums – those kind of generic, no-name “bands” that I’m certain are just made-up algorithmic bullshit created so Spotify doesn’t have to pay anyone.
I accidentally added ALL Bach’s cello suites to the wrong playlist and it was a pain in the ass to fix.

It was time to go.

I did a bit of investigating and asking around and ended up with Tidal + radio.

Apparently, Tidal pays musicians the most. I was paying £5/month as part of a Spotify family plan; Tidal costs £10/month, a small enough bump to be worth it.

Tidal works with a transfer service and it was incredibly easy to port all my playlists over. There were only 2 songs it couldn’t find, a Punjabi tune and a niche Gill Scott-Heron song. A minor sacrifice.

Previously, I had got into the lazy habit of relying on Spotify daylists and discover weekly for random listening. But over time, everything starts to sound the same. Many have written about the reliance on algorithms acting as a flattening of culture For example, Filterworld by Kyle Chayka. You just get served more of what you already consume.

Tidal has some generated playlists but it feels less central to the app, and I wanted to move away from them anyway.

In my asking around, someone recommended Radio Paradise. It’s free, there are no ads and they have a few different stations so you’ve got something for different moods. It has a skip button.

Now, when I don’t have a particular artist in mind, I put on the radio. It is a good antidote to algorithmic bore I’ve started collecting cool indie radio stations. Tell me your favs..

It’s been about a month since I stopped using Spotify and I can only recommend! I’m listening better, more varied music and I get that nice smug feeling that comes from not using a shitty ubiquitous platform.

I also have a get-out-of-jail-free card when Oasis comes on in the office. It’s the radio, innit.

Update 19 June 2025: After a few months of Tidal, there were just too many bugs and issues so I gave in and went to Apple Music. Still better than Spotify, I guess.

Becoming compost

2024-05-18T00:00:00Z

On Wednesday, I spoke at Interesting, along with a bunch of other great people. Here’s what I said, plus some bonus material I couldn’t fit in at the end.

I love composting. I’m obsessed, in fact. A text message I sent to a friend last June sums it up pretty well.

I have a very emotional response to this compost you know. Like, I can't imagine my life without it now.

To start from the beginning, about 1.5 years ago I moved into a flat with a terrace.

My terrace with Bertie

It’s my first home with outdoor space in a really long time. The council doesn’t collect food waste from estates, and as an aspiring grower, starting to compost felt almost required.

A lot of people think compost has to be in a garden. It doesn’t, but for small spaces and balconies, the received wisdom is to have a wormery. Unfortunately, I am scared of worms. I know, it’s very shameful and I’m trying to get over it. This picture is like exposure therapy.

Photo by Anna Goss

Anyway a box of worms wasn’t gonna happen.

One day, my pal Anna forwarded me a newsletter by Cass Marketos called The Rot about composting in small spaces. Cass referenced this book with instructions for composting in a bag. I dutifully bought the book and required materials.

The Rodale Book of Composting

It says to mix wet waste or your food with alfalfa and some dirt from outside which gives the microorganisms a headstart. I got alfalfa from Pets at Home and added the pellets with a week or so’s worth of food. I don’t know what my neighbors thought of me scooping dirt into a bag outside our estate, but I was excited.

Day 1

2 weeks in, it was not smelling good. I wasn’t sure what it should look like but I didn’t think that was right. 1 month in, it looked and smelled truly disgusting. Very literally a rotten bag. I can't believe I had this in my kitchen for so long.

After 2 weeks and 1 month respectively

I was nearly ready to give up, but my unhealthy habit of documenting everything on Instagram paid off and someone told me to mix this sludge with cardboard and it would recover. So I did. And it did. I ordered some 30L buckets online but was impatient so started in a mop bucket.

Mop bucket, cardboard and more outside dirt

30l bucket

The bucket system is fantastic. In the summer, the rate of decay was such that it never got full despite the fact that I eat literal mountains of vegetables.

Within 2 months, sprouts emerged from the pile which apparently is a sign of healthy compost. I transplanted one into a pot, where it became a riotous plant that gave me one tiny, perfect squash.

And it started to smell amazing! Deep, rich and earthy. I spent the summer making any friends who came over smell it.

Over winter, everything started to slow down and my buckets were getting full so I bought some larger rotating tumblers. I actually prefer the buckets because of the intimacy you get with the compost, but the tumblers look nicer and they tripled my capacity.

Rotating compost tumbler with 2 chambers

I’ve been composting for about a year and I’m constantly learning new things. Not least is patience. I want to mix it all the time and I want it to happen quickly. Compost does not happen quickly, it takes months or even years. Recently I was away for a few weeks and when I came back it was smelling so amazing, I realised I had been mixing it too much.

I’m definitely not an expert but through trial and error, I found a process that works for me:

I shred cardboard while I’m watching a movie or in boring meetings. I keep it in a bucket next to the compost bin so every time I add food scraps, I had a handful of carbon, keeping my carbon/nitrogen ratio on point.
I also cut all my food waste into tiny pieces so it breaks down faster.
I still hand mix the tumblers, because regularly communing with it gives me a sense of what it needs.
I have one bin curing, letting it alone to finish decomposition, and one bin where I’m adding new food waste.

It’s become such a normal part of my routine, now when I’m at someone else’s house, I hate throwing food in the normal bin.

Varying stages of decomposition

Before I started, I had this idea in my head that it was this really precise and scientific activity and you had to have all this knowledge to do it.

If you are into soil science, you can get very nerdy about it. But it can also be intuitive and haphazard. If my experience is anything to go by, you really cannot fuck it up too badly.

So, if you don’t compost and have been thinking about it, take this as a nudge to join the rotting pile club. It’s basically all pros and zero cons:

You hardly ever have to take out the rubbish.
It also uses cardboard that would otherwise go into recycling.
I’ve used the first batch of compost from last summer to refresh my outdoor planters, feeding veg this year. It feels like magick.
You can also put it on indoor plants, or if you aren’t a plant person you could gift it to growers.

And that’s to say nothing of reducing environmental impact of food waste Globally ~931 million tonnes of food waste were generated in 2019, an estimated 8-10% of greenhouse gas emissions. 61% of food waste is from households (UNEP report)..

Baby tomatoes and marigolds in last year’s compost

There is also the potential for something more profound. I’m not alone in believing that composting can teach us something about being a person living in partnership with the earth.

It’s joyful and nourishing. You get to participate in the transformation of something. All that rubbish goes into the pile and comes out again as living, fertile soil.

The great compost guru, Cass Marketos says,

We all participate in this fantasy where by throwing things in our trash, they magically disappear. But once you’re managing your own waste stream, you think about buying things differently.

Composting can call into question the values we live by.

It doesn't just turn waste into soil. It can also do something to us. What we do has material impact on who we are, on the values we hold, which in turn impacts what we do. It's a feedback loop.

The philosopher Giles Deleuze Deleuze, G. 2006. Nietzsche and Philosophy. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson. says, after Nietzsche,

... we always have the beliefs, feelings and thoughts that we deserve given our way of being or our style of life.

In other words, we cannot think our way into having different values. They come from the way we live. But we may be able to transform our values by experimenting with the kinds of practices and relations we are engaged in.

Composting can be such an experiment. We may not be able to think our way into another mode of living. But perhaps, through composting, we might live our way into another mode of thinking.

Other compost-related things you might like:

After I spoke, someone told me about their pal who is doing a phd in soil science. Their research shows that people who are unwell recover more quickly if they have contact with soil There were more details I can't remember because I was too wired but I think they’re doing a project to bring gardening into hospitals..

Go touch some dirt, my friends.

While your hands are dirty, the first thing to do is subscribe to The Rot and/or follow Cass on Instagram. They have instructions for all kinds of composting.

Soil is Sexy is another good newsletter, though generally more technical.

Speaking of sexy, ultimate hot girl SZA says,

... soil is the basis of all of our humanity and our health. So I guess I’m into soil! I’m excited just to explore and see what’s the tea, see what I can learn.

That climate meme account called it,

soil is the new mushroom obsession

My clever pal Gemma wrote about archive as compost and other non-literal composting ideas. Gemma collects all kinds of composting things on Arena.

Another clever pal Ella wrote a stunning poem called The Worm. Part of the journey of rehabilitating my relationship with worms,

Wriggling is wrong. It does not wriggle. It undulates.

While I was writing this talk, I searched ‘compost’ in my phone and found a screenshot I took of an article from before I started composting.

A Politics of Habitability by Stacey Ann Langwick is a fantastic piece about plants, healing and toxicity in Tanzania. I recommend the whole thing, but here are some quotes from a section about composting.

In the gardens discussed here, compost is both practical consideration and a form of re-membering. Compost is that which fosters a process of living-through. It trains our attention on the ability of parts of the past that have been left behind, residues and scraps, to transform through specific entanglements into something other than themselves—and, if carefully tended, to transform into the components of rich healthy soil, the entanglement that grounds growth and other life. Compost re-members and in so doing, it decenters the work of crisis and its forms of forgetting.

The pleasures of composting rest in these interconnections, interpenetrations, and transformations. The stuff of the world must alter from itself, change from what it was: corn stalks, bean vines, fallen rotting tomatoes, spinach stems, and other debris from the garden and scraps from the kitchen left after human consumption. Exposure to living decomposers like bacteria, fungi, protozoa, algae, invertebrates, and insects triggers long and complex sequences of physical transformations: decomposition, mineralization, and humification. ... Our stakes in each other cannot be articulated through a loyalty or faithfulness to what one is; rather, the stakes consist in a commitment to becoming other—to becoming that through which other living might happen.

It’s not possible to talk about the land without acknowledging the dispossession of Palestinians of their land since 1948 and the ongoing and accelerating genocide and ecocide.

May we see a free Palestine within our lifetime.

Thanks to Rod, Eliot and Katherine for feedback on early versions of the talk, they made me better. Thanks to Marina for the title and Anna for always exchanging compost updates.

Book round-up: Jan-March 2024

2024-04-08T00:00:00Z

Some thoughts on a few books, some of which I do not recommend and others I’m desperate to discuss with anyone and everyone. You can see the full list of what I’ve read this year on The Storygraph.

The memoirs

Q1 was memoir season. Somewhat coincidentally, though I was doing a writing course at CityLit and many of these were on the reading list.

I’m not sure why I started with 2 celebrity memoirs because I really don’t give much of a shit about celebrities in general.

Anyway, I read The Woman in Me because the free Britney movement was pretty cool. I also read it as a corrective to the misogyny of my youth, when listening to Britney was considered very not cool We listened to LinkinPark and Eminem and clearly had no taste.. When I think of her, I am reminded how profoundly we are raised to hate women. It’s so 90s-feminist-thinkpiece to say now but it remains unfortunately true, cliche for a reason. The vitriol directed toward famous women is ubiquitous and boring.

The writing isn’t great, which is a bit of a dealbreaker for whether or not I enjoy a book. But I thought she handled her story and the conflict with her family with considerable grace, given what happened to her.

I read Pageboy by Elliot Page because he’s trans. I was predisposed to read it generously, I wanted to like it. And I’m sorry but I just didn’t. There are descriptions of things that happened to Elliot which are so horrible and sad, and I feel a lot of sympathy for him as a person. But as a book it made Britney Spears seem like Shakespeare. These guys need to hire some ghostwriters. Or perhaps I am just not the audience for the celeb memoir.

In contrast, On Writing by Stephen King was just spectacular. They call him the king for a reason. I wish I could read his novels but I’m too lily-livered to handle horror. I enjoyed the memoir sections more than the ‘toolbox’ section. His main tip seems to be, start writing in the morning and don’t stop until you get to 2,000 words. Babes, I would if I could.

As a book about how to write, I did enjoy A Memoir of My Former Self: A Life in Writing by Hilary Mantel. It’s not ‘how to write’ from a craft perspective – for that I read the very boring Writing Tools – but Mantel makes you think about writing differently. I remember referencing it in class a lot.

I picked up Twelve Moons by Caro Giles without knowing anything about her or the book, because I thought it would be about the moon and I love that bitch. But really it was about motherhood and I am simply not interested.

The prose was contrived, elaborate descriptors piled on top of each other. Also, making lots of tea is not a personality trait and does not need to feature so frequently.

Which is an entirely hypocritical position because I do not feel the same way about Patti Smith and her endless cups of black coffee in M-Train. (Or Year of the Monkey, which I read last year). Perhaps it is because her complete nonchalance and willingness to drink all kinds of mud, including instant coffee, is effortlessly cool. Perhaps because black coffee is my drink, and so of course I think it is chic.

I am a little obsessed with Patti Smith memoirs I started with her B-side, but have finally bought Just Kids.. Her work is so ephemeral and random, but makes me believe that creativity is possible.

The rest

East of Eden and Disgrace are filed under ‘books that fucked me up’. Especially Disgrace, my god. I read The Lives of Animals a few years back, which is so different I was totally unprepared for this. I was fully clenched the entire way through. Awful awful awful you cannot put it down.

This excellent feature in the LRB came out very shortly after I finished the book. I will be working my way through his bibliography. I’m in my Coetzee era.

When I started East of Eden, I wondered if this was one of those racist books that is considered good because it was written by a White American man. But I kept reading and like, ok, against my will I have to admit it’s a fucking great book. The writing, the characters, the THEMES. Just take a blender to my insides, that’s fine.

Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty by Patrick Radden Keefe is an excellent example of how to write a profile/biography that is extraordinarily compelling. It's a fat brick of a book but doesn't feel like it at all. I haven’t stopped talking about opioids since.

I read Breathe by Joyce Carol Oates because someone I respect said Oates is one of their favs. I hated it immensely, but respect this person possibly more than anyone in the world that I’m going to give her another try. Which of her books should I read?

I won’t talk about the trashy fantasy novels – the The Locked Tomb trilogy by Tamsyn Weir – that I hoovered up the way one binges a shitty TV show, but with less shame. If lesbian necromancy in space sounds interesting to you, DM me.

Fin

That’s all for now. I remain, as always, keen to talk about books at all times. If you have read any of these and want to share your thoughts, I’d love to hear them.

Hofstadter, handshakes and black boxes

2024-03-28T00:00:00Z

In the preface to the 20th edition of Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hofstadter talks about writing it in the late 1970s on one of the earliest word-processing programs, TV-Edit. The program allowed him to write quicker than longform, but also to play with style and form. As he wrote, he designed.

By the time I had a solid version of the manuscript ready to send out to publishers, visual design and conceptual structure were intimately bound up with each other.

In a turn of events that seems unbelievable now, his publisher was willing to let him typeset the entire book himselfThe podcast, Reading Writers, discusses novelists taking liberties with layout., using a computer typesetting system from the same maker of TV-Edit.

I had to insert into each chapter or dialogue literally thousands of cryptic typesetting commands, next chop each computer file into several small pieces – five or six per file, usually – each of which had to be run through a series of two computer programs, and then each of the resulting output files had to be punched out physically as a cryptic pattern of myriad holes on a long, thin roll of paper tape.

This was followed by taking the tape to another building where the hole puncher was located to load the paper tape and carefully monitor that nothing jammed. The task is still not finished. There is yet another building, this one containing the phototypesetting machine used by the local newspaper, and another lengthy process of darkrooms, chemical baths, and clotheslines.

A labour of love that took all summer.

Until disaster struck. After completing nearly all the galleys, Hofstadter discovered that the first ones were faded yellow beyond use. The ageing rollers in the machine no longer wiped the galleys clean, and the acid ate away at the black ink.

He had to do it all again.

⸻

I was raised by a single father, so I often tagged along to all sorts of errands. In the early 90s, one of these was connecting to the internet. What he needed the internet for, I have no idea. Commercial dial-up was brand new and he was an early adopter.

I have clear memories of being squashed in a public phone booth, while he velcro-ed a funny-looking corded telephone handset to the public phone handset. Then came the modem soundThe sound of dial-up.. I now know that he was using an acoustic coupler, and the modem sound is – delightfully – called a handshake.

A portable telecoupler from the Computer History Museum

An acoustic coupler was a speaker device that could send and receive acoustic signals. The dial-up tone and subsequent sequence of digits – each assigned a special tone – is a negotiation between 2 machines. One initiates the protocol, the other responds, and a connection is established.

⸻

Today, I am connected to fibre optic broadband, typing on a word-processorGoogle Docs for drafting, Visual Studio Code to put it online. with seemingly unlimited formatting capabilities. When I choose, I publish it on the internet with a few clicks. Processes that used to take weeks and months take minutes.

I know next to nothing about how these things actually work.

Post dial-up internet mostly relies on radio frequencies. There is still a handshake, but as Oona Räisänen says, modern versions

“vastly exceed the information capacity of human hearing, or of any sense of biological creature, for that matter.”

Google Docs corrects my spelling and if I choose to turn on its AI writing assistantI do not., Duet AI, can suggest the ending of my sentences and more. Gmail users may be familiar with this, Smart Compose was released in 2018. Large learning models – such as those which power Duet AI – are black boxes, incomprehensible to the average user and very often to the engineers who design them.

The workings of technology, increasingly complex, are hidden. As are the values and prejudices encoded in them.

What is the cost of moving faster?

Reading 100 books in 2023

2024-01-04T00:00:00Z

I didn’t start the year with this goal. It was, as always, 52 books, one per week. Enough to make me choose a book over Netflix, but that was not much of a stretch.

January kicked off with the final module of my MA, which was both intellectually and emotionally challenging. I found myself tearing through all kinds of literature to make sense of it — books and papers, fiction and non-fiction, audiobooks and podcasts, from dense academic texts to bestsellers.

Come April, I had finished well over 30 books, and it seemed exciting to aim for 100.

Number of books and pages by month

I finished the year with 100 books over 25,607 pages.

Of these, there were 55 non-fiction/45 fiction. 47 were audiobooks, thanks to Libby. I remain perpetually astonished that Libby isn’t more widely used. It offers free audiobooks through libraries. I have both Barbican and my local council library for maximum selection.

It was great, but I wouldn’t do it again.

In the beginning, I read what I wanted (or needed) to. I wasn’t aiming for numbers and so it wasn’t influencing the choice of what I picked up. By September, trying to finish ~2 books a week on top of a full time job and a consistent training schedule was a lot of pressure. In the last few months, I found myself choosing shorter books and enjoying the act of reading a bit less.

Still, it is exciting to look over the list and remember each of the books. My head feels absolutely full of stories. No regrets.

Reading is everything to me. It’s how I learn, how I process my feelings, how I make sense of the world. Books are an axe for the frozen sea inside me.

As bell hooks says in Teaching to Transgress

I came to theory because I was hurting—the pain within me was so intense that I could not go on living. I came to theory desperate, wanting to comprehend—to grasp what was happening around and within me. Most importantly, I wanted to make the hurt go away. I saw in theory then a location for healing.

True not just for theory.

Next year, I’ll be back to my normal 52 books. And picking up a few of those fat bricks, as a treat.

Here are my roundups of the most memorable books of the year: January-May, June-August and September-December

Book round-up: Sept-Dec 2023

2024-01-03T00:00:00Z

The most memorable books from the last few months. You can read the previous round-ups or see the full list of what I’ve read this year.

This one’s a doozy, I read 40 books over this period.

Free Palestine

The last 3 months of the year were marked by grief at what is happening in Palestine. As Alicia Kennedy writes, ‘I could not put myself amid the bombing, the horror; I could put myself in their grief, their rage.’

The seemingly endless violence coming from accounts on the ground in Gaza coupled with the twisting and obscuring lies from mainstream news are disorienting and overwhelming. Reading long form was one way, along with protests and rallies, I could navigate the unending stream of dystopian horrors. Most of these texts, and more, are available for free on various Palestine reading lists.

The Hundred Years' War on Palestine by Rashid Khalidi

There’s a reason everyone has been sharing and recommending this book. It is incredibly comprehensive but doesn’t read as a dry text. Throughout the whole first part, all I could think was how much Britain has to blame for this mess. We really are heirs to the worst of people. If you want to better understand the context of what’s going on now, or if you've ever been told to ‘get educated’ in attempts to silence you from speaking up for Palestine, read this.

Israeli Apartheid: A Beginner's Guide by Ben White

Good for understanding the similarities and differences between South Africa and Israel/Palestine. Introduction and Part 1 are better than the rest, imo. I haven’t stopped thinking about this

While in apartheid South Africa, the settlers ‘exploited’ the ‘labour power’ of the dispossessed natives, in the case of Israel, ‘the native population was to be eliminated; exterminated or expelled rather than exploited’. … Israel needs the land, but without the people.

Zionism … has tried ‘disappearing’ the Palestinians from Palestine in theory and in practice, yet they are still there.

There’s a word for disappearing a people… genocide.

Freedom is a Constant Struggle by Angela Davis

A collection of essays and speeches linking revolutionary movements in the US to global movements, especially in Palestine. Black feminists are the most influential thinkers in the development of my politics and it is always rejuvenating to read them.

When Grief Dissolves Us bundle from Hajar Press

The Stone House by Yara Hawari is loosely based, from what I can tell, on Hawari’s own family's experiences. It is very real to life, both in its depictions of historical events and what contemporary life is like for Palestinians living under occupation.

Objects from April and May by Zena Agha is a collection of poems on loss, attachment and the violence of dispossession.

We, the Heartbroken by Gargi Bhattacharyya is not explicitly on Palestine but is a beautiful meditation on grief and the revolutionary potential of heartbrokenness.

The Black Jacobins by C. L. R. James

This was fantastic! I picked it up randomly shelf-browsing on Libby (free audiobooks). An unusual choice for me, despite my voracious reading appetite, I don’t often pick up historical texts.

It’s the story of the Haitian revolution. Inspiring and unexpectedly funny. Nothing better than the downfall of colonialism. It was astounding to me how long the revolution took! There were decades of meandering false starts, setbacks and unknowing on the path to freedom. A reminder to remain resilient and resolute.

Azadi by Arundhati Roy

I love her. I have loved everything I’ve ever read by her. This book includes the famous ‘The pandemic is a portal’ essay, which should give you a sense of the vibe. Also, there are essays about her two novels – both of which I adore – that add layers to the stories. See also, Roy in solidarity with Gaza.

Animals

Animal Biographies by Eric Baratay

Recommended to me as a powerful example of how to write about animals and animal-human relations when I was working on my dissertation. Baratay writes about famous animals in history from the side of the animal. I love this book, ist’s so powerful. My tutor wrote a review, if you want a sense of it and why it’s important.

No Meat Required by Alicia Kennedy

Though very US-focused, Kennedy's writing on vegan abundance resonates with me a lot. I appreciate the nuance and expansiveness of her politics, which provides the necessary balance to a lot of more rigid animal rights literature I read. Like all of her work, including her excellent newsletter, it is well-researched and written in a very accessible way.

One liners for the rest

Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk: Novel of the year, brilliant beyond words.

Kindred by Octavia E. Butler: Insane premise, devastating execution.

Young Mungo by Douglas Stuart: Tense the whole way through (let boys be gay).

Sunburn by Chloe Michelle Howarth: Thick with yearning (let girls be gay).

Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan: How difficult and simple it is to refuse complicit silence about the abuse of the Irish Catholic church.

Old God’s Time by Sebastian Barry: More abuse by Irish Catholics, quite a different response.

The Outrun by Amy Liptrot: I have a crush on the Orkney Islands now.

Yellowface by R.F. Kuang: Deeply uncomfortable, a slow-motion catastrophe playing out in front of you.

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin: Unexpectedly conservative, but I’m a sucker for sad stories of broken children.

The Palace of Illusions by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni: Draupadi's story with a sprinkle of feminism.

Yajnaseni by Pratibha Ray: Draupadi's story with beautiful and elaborate prose, and lots of symbolism, but a dreadful universe for women.

The Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac: Weird book but anything is good with Ethan Hawke narrating.

Year of the Monkey by Patti Smith: No idea what she’s saying, loved every second.

Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in Her Head by Warsan Shire: Ouch. Like pressing on a bruise.

On reading groups

2023-10-02T00:00:00Z

Ruth Wilson Gilmore says that reading groups are ‘one of the most beautiful pastimes there is on Earth’. I couldn’t agree more.

I started my first group, a book club, with a tweet (rip) in January 2018. A bunch of people responded, we set up a Whatsapp group and off we went.

Over nearly four years together (!!), we read…

Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders
How to survive the plague by David France
Flights by Olga Tokarczuk
So Lucky by Nicola Griffith
Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward
Milkman by Anna Burns
Heart of the Race by Beverley Bryan
My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante
The Book of Sarah by Sarah Lightman
Lowborn by Kerry Hudson
The Rings of Saturn by W. G. Sebald
Hag-Seed by Margaret Atwood
The Mushroom at the End of the World by Anna Tsing
The Outline by Rachel Cusk
Inner City Pressure by Dan Hancox
Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler
The Topeka School by Ben Lerner
The Three Body Problem by Liu Cixin
Scoff by Pen Vogler
Freshwater by Akwaeke Emezi
Queenie by Candice Carty-Williams

Cor! What a list.

There was a slight fluctuation of members throughout, but the core group – Amy, Angus, Becky, Eliot, Jon, Liv, Lucy – were just brilliant. Many of them are writers, which really enriched the texts and made me think about reading in a different way.

Everyone brought such thoughtfulness, feeling and depth to the discussion. To share this magical space, even during a global pandemic, was a gift.

Book club via Zoom, April 2020. Image by Amy.

My current reading group started in February this year with my wonderful friend Marina, from my second MA at Goldsmiths. We invited people we had met over our studies, so we share a certain theoretical lineage.

So far we’ve read…

‘Nothing Comes Without Its World’: Thinking with Care by María Puig de la Bellacasa
Introduction, The Government of Beans by Kregg Hetherington
Part 1, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments by Saidiya Hartman
Introduction, Abolition Geography by Ruth Wilson Gilmore
Introduction, Azadi by Arundhati Roy
Ch 4, Life Besides Itself by Lisa Stevenson
Ch 1, Animal Biographies by Eric Baratay

We take turns meeting, usually monthly, at different people’s homes. It’s lovely and intimate.

Aftermath of the last reading group at my flat, September 2023

It is a place to discuss ideas and theories, but also a place to poke at questions of knowledge production. Maybe sometimes even a place to explore who we are – as individuals and a collective. A place to consider what it means to be human.

We talk about the text, but also about childhood experiences, family, dreams and desires, about our trauma but also our joy. We share the thoughts that keep us up at night. We gossip a lot.

It is generous and nourishing and challenging.

When I think of this space I share – with Arianne, Marina, Martin, Pei-Chi, Rachel and Toby – I am overwhelmed with love. Love for the people, yes. But also for life.

All the struggle and torment of being alive is worth it for moments like these. Reading and talking and eating and drinking ... is this a buen vivir?

There’s a quote from The Undercommons that I cite all the time, where Fred Moten says,

When I think about the way we use the term ‘study,’ I think we are committed to the idea that study is what you do with other people, working, dancing, suffering, some irreducible convergence of all three, held under the name of speculative practice.

I have the words ‘study forever’ tattooed on my body for a reason.

I’m also reminded of the title of a painting by Egon Schiele:

Photo of an exhibit label from an 2018 RA exhibition on Klimt and Schiele

At their best, reading groups are art and loved ones. Reading groups comprise a form of sociality that, for me, make up a life that is worth dying for.

I think I might start another one.

Book round-up: June-Aug 2023

2023-09-06T00:00:00Z

The most memorable books from the last few months. You can read the previous round-up or see the full list of what I’ve read this year.

This time, I’m including some of my academic research. I’ve just finished my dissertation on farmed animal sanctuaries. When a friend read a draft, they questioned whether the conditions on sanctuaries are indeed better than farms. That question had me shook!

I often forget that farming practices aren’t common knowledge, which is ironic given I actually wrote a section on the invisibility and distance of animal agriculture.

So here are some texts I’ve read recently. There are, of course, many more and I’m always up for giving personalised recommendations if you want.

But let’s get on with it.

Animals

The Cow with Ear Tag #1389 by Kathryn Gillespie

Gillespie provides an in-depth account of the dairy industry in the US. I can tell you from reading UK-based work like Nimmo’s book about milk and Food and Animal Welfare, it’s not that different here. An interesting insight I took from this book is that even smaller, family-owned farms end up adopting intensive farming practices just to keep up with factory farm profitability.

If you can’t be bothered to read a whole book, this 1 min video from rapper JME (Insta link) sums it up pretty well. Also, this film by Andrea Arnold, in which I wept non-stop for 80 minutes in the ICA cinema.

Every Twelve Seconds: Industrialized Slaughter and the Politics of Sight by Timothy Pachirat

Another ethnography, Pachirat gets a job at a slaughterhouse and writes about the three jobs he has while working there. The book isn’t vegan propaganda or a value judgment about eating animals, it’s just a description of what goes on.

It is horrible! I could barely read parts, but I am very soft-hearted about animals. Also, labour conditions are dreadful (we all know this) and the disgusting things that pass ‘quality assurance’ would put me off meat even if I didn’t care a hoot about animals or workers or the earth.

In my anguish upon finishing, I posted an Instagram story saying I think everyone who eats meat should read this book. Outside polemical Insta content, I actually do not want to tell anyone what they should do. But if you want to learn more about how the animals get onto your plate, it’s a good start.

A few others

Space Crone by Ursula K. Le Guin

A collection of short stories, essays and talks. I had very high expectations for this, slightly dashed by the fact that I had already read several of the stories in other books earlier this year. That, and I’m not totally convinced that a talk transcript makes for a good essay.

Nevertheless, I enjoyed quite a few of the essays and the excerpt from Always Coming Home prompted me to buy the book last weekend.

Rememberings by Sinéad O'Connor

There are very few times I think an audiobook provides a better experience than reading a physical copy. One of them is when the author is also the narrator (for example, Arundhati Roy reading The Ministry of Utmost Happiness).

Listening to Sinéad read this was very special. Her death hit me harder than I expected. Listening to her say she’s looking forward to growing old, a few days after she died, was a gut punch. Her story is harrowing, but she is also extremely funny. This feature on her music is also great.

Three novels

If the fiction theme that stood out in the last roundup was magick, this time it’s historical fiction. These three were audiobooks I randomly found on Libby. Love a library for some serendipitous finds.

When Nietzsche Wept by Irvin D. Yalom, chosen solely for the title. I’m on a bit of a Nietzsche kick. Most of the book is Nietzsche in conversation with a doctor. Freud makes an appearance. I am not a Nietzsche scholar, so who knows how accurate the representations of his philosophies are, but the book was very entertaining.

Black Butterflies by Priscilla Morris traces the story of an artist who is stuck in Sarajevo in spring 1992, without her family. But she is not alone, for it is a story about finding and making community. I never feel like I know enough of any histories, the Sarajevo siege is no exception, and so found it very compelling to read alongside an open Wikipedia tab.

The Parisian by Isabella Hammad is not, in fact, about a Parisian but about a young Palestinian man who studies in Paris during WWI and then returns to his hometown of Nablus. It’s quite long, perhaps slightly unnecessarily so, and very meandering. But it is powerful to read about daily life in Palestine before annexation and occupation and the descriptions are beautiful and expansive.

Ode to a tree

2023-08-30T00:00:00Z

There’s a tree in south London called The Oak of Honor, of which Honor Oak derives its name. It’s in a small park called One Tree Hill, with three routes to the top. All of them include steps.

September 29, 2020

In September 2020, I moved to the nearby neighbourhood of Brockley and, on an evening run, visited the tree for the first time. Over the following 12 months, I included it on my runs – once a month or so.

October 6, 2020

November 19, 2020

Throughout the winter lockdown, the Oak and the runs kept me tethered. Turn the corner at the top of the steps and its full magnificence comes into view.

December 6, 2020

January 1, 2021

It was always a welcome pause to catch my breath, seeing the tree and photographing it. In January, I got a headtorch and started visiting at night.

January 28, 2021

February 7, 2021

Jenny Odell talks about a similar ritual in her new book, Saving Time. In it, she describes visiting and observing a single branch of a California buckeye tree over weeks and months, saying,

“This exercise in observation is an example of what I have come to think of as “unfreezing something in time.” To do this means releasing something or someone from their bounds as a supposed stable, individual entity existing in abstract time, seeing them not only as existing within time, but also as the ongoing materialization of time itself.”

...

“Unfreezing something in time can convert it from a commodity into something else, a process that often involves having to acknowledge something—something related to “it”—that is uniquely unassimilable to the process of commodification.”

March 19, 2021

How interesting to be reading, in 2023, of sharing an exercise with someone I’ve never met on the other side of the world. Unbeknownst to each other.

April 10, 2021

But this attention to trees, or a tree, isn’t exactly unique. In 2013, the city of Melbourne set up a website, assigning each tree a unique ID and email, for members of the public to report problems – “Email this tree.”

An invitation which resulted – unintentionally but perhaps in hindsight not unexpected – in lots of emails. Love letters to trees. You can read some of the letters here.

June 3, 2021

June 29, 2021

London also has a map of trees, though sadly we cannot send them love letters.

I’ve spent time browsing the Ancient Tree Inventory, but not sure how I feel about it since Honor Oak does not feature.

August 10, 2021

I am rather fond of trees, in general. But I truly love this tree. Watching it over that year was special. If I hadn’t visited in a few weeks, I felt excited to see the change.

It’s very pleasing to know that it’s been there long before me. I hope it will be there long after I’m gone.

September 15, 2021

Tell me about your favourite trees.

Other tree-related things you might like:

A radio station where you can listen to a random forest.

This short story by Robin Sloan, My Father the Druid, My Mother the Tree (not just for its banger title).

The Word for World is Still Forest, a collection of experimental essays, responding to and jumping off from Ursula K. Le Guin’s novel.

Michaela Coel, interviewed by Durga Chew-Bose, getting her power from trees.

Built by my friends at Common Knowledge, The Smart Forest Atlas is a living archive of digital technologies and forests.

Another archive of trees, this one in the US. Special for its stunning photography.

Book round-up: Jan-May 2023

2023-05-29T00:00:00Z

A short list of the most memorable books of the year so far, excluding academic texts. If you are interested in apocalyptic thought or animal studies, give me a shout and I’ll share some recs. You can see the full list of what I’ve read this year on The Storygraph.

Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments by Saidiya Hartman

One of the most beautiful books of the year. Hartman is powerful. Words that stay with you.

If you need convincing, start with The Plot of Her Undoing, The End of White Supremacy or this interview

We Do This 'til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice by Mariame Kaba

A collection of essays and articles by Kaba and collaborators. Abolitionist thought and practice has been and is hugely influential on my thinking and politics. Kaba is unwavering in dealing with the difficult questions of abolition.

Small Fires: An Epic in the Kitchen by Rebecca May Johnson

I am obsessed with food. The two newsletters I read most faithfully are Alicia Kennedy and Vittles.

RMJ’s visceral, affective account of food and cooking is wonderful, as is her red sauce which I made and enjoyed for weeks after.

Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies by Maddie Mortimer

Sharp, moving, devastating. There are difficult themes aplenty so you are prone to triggers, read the synopsis first. I, for one, like to use literature as a grater on my wounds.

The Passenger Series by Cormac McCarthy and Gun Island by Amitav Ghosh

While also good stories, well written and therefore likely enjoyable to a larger audience, I recommend these novels especially to those mystically inclined.

I read them while learning Tarot and reading pluralist literature – The Will to Believe by William James and Around the Day in Eighty Worlds by Martin Savransky – and for a few weeks, the whole world was awash in magick.

Worlds of Exile and Illusion and The Wind's Twelve Quarters and The Compass Rose by Ursula K. Le Guin

I love everything I’ve read by Le Guin so far, without exception. Nothing else to add.

Making a tiny digital garden

2023-05-23T00:00:00Z

Somewhere between a blog and a journal, a digital garden is a place to think through writing, through connecting and linking with other ideas. It is a place for learning. Over time, in public.

To quote the well-known Caulfield talk

The Garden is the web as topology. The web as space. It’s the integrative web, the iterative web, the web as an arrangement and rearrangement of things to one another.

I had a newsletter originally, all the rage these days. But I was unhappy with Substack’s data tracking and the move to Buttondown never stuck – it was unbearably ugly and the impetus for a regular cadence felt too much after a while.

Denise says, after Matt Ruby, that blogging is dead. Ah well. I like blogs. Every new post on the blogs I follow – Denise, Gemma, Alice, Victor – is a little treat. Good company to be in, imo.

And since this little garden doesn’t have any tracking, I will never know who, if anyone, is reading. Standard data practices have made creepy behaviour the norm and I am absolutely not here for it.

In A Handmade Web, J. R. Carpenter says

I evoke the term ‘handmade web’ to suggest slowness and smallness as a form of resistance.

Resistance to social media giants, multinational corporations, data-saturated systems and surveillance technologies.

I don’t know what shape this will take, but it’s a garden for small thoughts, occasional musings, nascent ideas and slow learning.

Percy Smith, Birth of a Flower, 1910

Thanks to Jon Heslop for helping me get this up and running with Eleventy and Netlify. Your patience with my endless texts is unparalleled.

Sonia Turcotte

Book round-up 2025

The novels

The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler

It Lasts Forever and Then It's Over by Anne de Marcken

Prophet Song by Paul Lynch

The memoirs

Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? by Jeanette Winterson

Wish I Was Here: An Anti-Memoir by M. John Harrison

Me & Other Writing by Marguerite Duras

Raising Hare by Chloe Dalton

The animal books

Animal Revolution by Ron Broglio

Animals Strike Curious Poses by Elena Passarello

The Sounds of Life by Karen Bakker

The theory

The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk

Black Marxism by Cedric J. Robinson

Perfect Victims and the Politics of Appeal by Mohammed El-Kurd

Making websites

Webflow for ICCT

No-code platforms

Hand-coded with love

Service design as a Sharepoint site

New website, who dis?

Book round-up: Oct-Dec 2024

The books

The Actual Star by Monica Byrne

Brotherless Night by V.V. Ganeshananthan

The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder by David Grann

The Winter of Our Discontent by John Steinbeck

The End We Start From by Megan Hunter

Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life by Giorgio Agamben

We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler

Authority by Jeff VanderMeer (Southern Reach #2)

Parable of the Talents (Earthseed #2) by Octavia E. Butler

Always Coming Home by Ursula K. Le Guin

The Castle of Crossed Destinies by Italo Calvino

Intermezzo by Sally Rooney

A future that moves

Nothing about them without them

Every issue is a climate issue

Equity or scale?

Teamwork makes the dream work

Other places to read about this work

Book round-up: July-Sept 2024

Ordinary Notes by Christina Sharpe

The Surrounds: Urban Life within and beyond Capture by AbdouMaliq Simone

Animals and Capital by Dinesh Wadiwel

Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg

Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler

I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman

The Player of Games by Iain M. Banks

Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier

Orlando by Virginia Woolf

Carbon aware websites

Some inspiration

Collecting ∞ Connecting

Arena

Montaigne

Noticing, Collecting, Sharing

Book round-up: April-June 2024

Fiction

Non-fiction

Dog politics: Species stories and the animal sciences by Mariam Motamedi Fraser

Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity by Katherine Boo

Beyond Sticky Notes by Kelly Ann McKercher

Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for Everyone and No One by Friedrich Nietzsche

Divorcing the algorithm

Becoming compost

Other compost-related things you might like:

Book round-up: Jan-March 2024

The memoirs

The rest

Fin

Hofstadter, handshakes and black boxes

Reading 100 books in 2023

Book round-up: Sept-Dec 2023

Free Palestine

The Hundred Years' War on Palestine by Rashid Khalidi