Monthly thread: What are you reading?

Endnotes #18, Jan 2026: Slow read news • Substack Live • My recent reads

Hello everyone!

It’s Simon Haisell here, the host of Footnotes & Tangents, a website where I write guides to the books I love and invite you all to read with me at a gentle pace.

• What have you been reading this month?

This is my monthly newsletter and a chance to talk about the other books we’ve been reading. Let us know your recent and current reads below. The comments section gets fairly busy, so please put THE BOOK TITLE in capital letters to help fellow readers navigate the discussion. Thank you!

If you’re new here – hello! You are very welcome, and you may want to check out our big welcome post so you feel even more welcome. It’s a great place to start.

Slow Read News

January is my busiest month, getting three slow reads underway simultaneously: Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace (now in its fourth year!), Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, and Wolf Crawl, our annual slow read of Hilary Mantel’s Cromwell trilogy.

It’s never too late to join these groups. Everyone reads at their own pace. Here’s what past readers have said about our slow reads.

Besides writing and recording new material, I have my hands full helping new readers find their way around the website, Substack and the slow reads.

You’ll find most questions answered in the welcome packs, and I’ve also added a troubleshooting guide at the bottom of this post. If you’re still stuck, just drop me a message – I’m always on hand to help.

OK, let’s have a head count.

Our slow reads: War and Peace | Wolf Crawl | Midnight Children

Quick links for our slow reads

Join a read-along by updating your notifications in your subscription settings.

We’re in Week 4 of all our read-alongs:

War and Peace: Intro | Schedule | Week 1 | … | Week 4

Wolf Crawl: Intro | Schedule | Week 1 | … | Week 4

Midnight’s Children: Intro | Schedule | Week 1 | … | Week 4

Later this year: Regeneration by Pat Barker, The Inheritors by William Golding, Treacle Walker by Alan Garner, and The Children’s Book by AS Byatt.

The slow reads are for paid members, but the first post is always free. Complimentary subscriptions are available to readers on low or no income, and there is a 20% discount on group subscriptions.

Substack Live

One of my goals for 2026 is to do more Substack Lives. Given the choice, I’d hide all day in a book or behind my laptop – so these chats are a good way of getting out of my comfort zone. Plus, they are good fun! Last year, I did one about AS Byatt with Caroline Donahue and another about slow reads with Sarah Stewart Holland.

This week, Sarah Fay, PhD invited me for a chat on her Substack. Sarah works with writers, helping them build their platform on Substack, and we had a great conversation about Footnotes & Tangents’ journey from Instagram side project to bestselling Substack newsletter. You can watch that chat here, or in the video below:

I’ve got more things planned in the next few months, including chats with Claire Venus ✨, Jo Hutton, Bea Stitches, The Middling Place – hopefully also Lacey Bonar Hull and Erin O'Connor down the line. The next live will be with Jeff Rich at 11 Feb at 9 PM GMT. Jeff runs his own slow reads at Burning Archive, and recently put up an excellent video on why slow reads are taking over Substack:

Appreciative reading in good company.

Book clubs and book groups are indeed taking off on Substack, and you can find a big list of them here, maintained by Christina Bieber Lake.

I’m always trying to find the right words to explain what we are doing with Footnotes & Tangents, and I really quite like Jeff’s description of “appreciative reading.” Jeff, I hope we can explore this further when we meet in a couple of weeks.

My recent reads

Here’s what I have been reading this month. The links below are affiliate links to the Footnotes & Tangents bookshop at Bookshop.org.

EVERYTHING WILL SWALLOW YOU (2025) by Tom Cox

If the late great Douglas Adams and the living legend Ali Smith teamed up to write a book loosely based on the adventures of Wallace and Gromit, with less cheese and more vinyl, you would have something almost but nowhere nearly absolutely unlike Everything Will Swallow You by Tom Cox. There’ll be someone out there who says we don’t need more books about semi-aquatic dogs that knit, but that person could not be more wrong. Buy this book. Better still, buy the excellent audiobook narrated by Justin Avoth.

EXCELLENT WOMEN (1952) by Barbara Pym

My first Pym, and what a delight! Mildred Lathbury is a clergyman’s daughter in her thirties, living a humdrum life in shabby post-war London. It’s a quiet, understated sort of book. The humour is sharp and dark: there’s a character who has declared war on all birds and takes every opportunity to reduce their numbers by putting them on her plate. But there is a sad aching heart to the novel that reminds me of Kazuo Ishiguro’s first-person narrators and their longings for lives unlived.

THE ODD WOMEN (1893) by George Gissing

For some reason, I’ve never read Gissing. George Orwell called him “perhaps the best novelist England has produced.” He wrote 23 novels and is best known for New Grub Street, set in literary London in the 1880s. The “odd women” were the supposed “surplus” of unmarried women in Victorian Britain, for whom there were no men left to marry. Gissing uses this idea to explore the lives of women from across society, including a proto-feminist circle of independent women carving out lives and careers without men or marriage. Despite becoming a bit melodramatic towards the end, it felt surprisingly modern and not the sort of book you might expect from the pen of a Victorian man.

SILENCE (1966) by Shūsaku Endō

Translated by William Johnston. I found this book through a recommendation from Sarah Perry, author of The Essex Serpent, Melmoth, and Enlightenment. It’s the story of a Portuguese Jesuit missionary who travels to Japan in the seventeenth-century to investigate reports that his former mentor has renounced his religion under torture. At this time, the authorities were suppressing Christianity in Japan, and the missionary became a witness and a victim of this persecution. Endō was a Catholic, and Silence is often compared to Graham Greene’s religious novels, especially The Power and the Glory. I thought this was an astonishing book.

THE SAMURAI (1980) by Shūsaku Endō

Translated by Van C. Gessel. Written much later in Endō’s career, The Samurai is a more complex novel than Silence, and probably one of the best works of historical fiction I have read in a long time. It is also set during the seventeenth century. A samurai is sent by his superiors to negotiate trade with the Spanish in Mexico. The voyage takes him to the Americas, to Spain, and finally to Rome. He is accompanied by an unscrupulous Spanish priest, determined to convert Japan to Christianity. It’s thoroughly engrossing, as both characters are forced to react to the shifting landscape of seventeenth-century global geopolitics.

BEOWULF translated by Seamus Heaney (1999)

Hwæt a book! I have never been compelled to read Beowulf, so my first full exposure to the Anglo-Saxon epic poem comes with no resentment at weighty obligation. I just fancied a wintry tale of myth and monsters. And of course it is magnificent!

BEOWULF translated by Maria Dahvana Headley (2021)

Bro! Why read one Beowulf when you read two? There are apparently over 600 translations of Beowulf, and more than 50 English versions. Maria Dahvana Headley uses modern vernacular to give the poem the same in-your-face immediacy that the original must have had for those West Saxons in their meadhall. MDH also offers a feminist interpretation by highlighting the story’s female narratives and emphasising the inflated male egos that boast their way to the grave. Utterly terrific.

GRENDEL (1971) by John Gardner

One more Beowulf before we go? Gardner tells the tale from Grendel’s perspective, so terribly misunderstood by those meadhall men. And you do feel sorry for him in the end, although it is a very odd book crammed with existential philosophy and pontificating dragons. I think it’s time Beowulf and I spent some time apart.

What have you been reading?

Now it’s over to you. Let us know what you’re reading in the comments.

And if you can put THE BOOK TITLE in capital letters, it will help others find books they love or may be interested in.

All the best and happy, adventurous reading,

Simon

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