Slow reading news & summer sale

Endnotes #14: War & Peace poll • News & updates • 20%-off for 12 months

|| quick links: start here | book guides | slow reads | subscribe

Hello!

This is Endnotes, a monthly newsletter from Footnotes & Tangents, the home of slow reads and book guides to enrich your reading. I am your host and guide, Simon Haisell. You can join a slow read and customise your emails, posts and podcasts in your settings. Thank you!

Current and upcoming slow reads

Poll: Would you be interested in a 2026 War and Peace read-along?

I have run the War and Peace slow read for three years now. Thousands of readers all over the world have joined us in reading the 361 chapters of Leo Tolstoy’s epic over a year. It’s been a bit of a hit!

I’m not officially running the read-along in 2026. However, I can set up the reading schedule and send out the posts, podcasts and chat threads to anyone interested in doing the slow read. I’d love to get a sense of whether there is a demand for this!

News & updates

• I turned 42 last week! A very satisfying milestone, thanks to Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Just ask Google. Or watch the TV or film versions where the answer is revealed. Me? I’m happy still searching…

• Wolf Crawl will definitely run in 2026. This is a slow read of Hilary Mantel’s Cromwell books. The read-along is in its second year, and we are two weeks into our reading of The Mirror and the Light. The last two posts: Week 30 & Week 31.

• War and Peace and Wolf Crawl are for paid subscribers. For free subscribers, we are over halfway through Hilary Mantel’s A Place of Greater Safety. Recent posts: Week 11, Week 12 & Week 13.

• Upcoming free read-alongs: Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe in September and The Blue Flower by Penelope Fitzgerald in November.

• 2026 slow reads will be announced in September! There will be no Endnotes newsletter at the end of August, but I’ll be back in September to announce the new read-along picks for 2026. I’m excited!

• The 2026 slow reads are all for paid subscribers. A heck of a lot of work goes into putting these together, so I’m super grateful for all your support. Footnotes & Tangents has a “soft” paywall, which means I give access to anyone on a low or no income to support their reading. If that’s you, please get in touch.

• Special offer summer sale! If you would like to upgrade, there is a 12-month 20% discount, available for the next week. Here’s the coupon!

• I was interviewed by Wolf Hall Weekend about Wolf Crawl and the pleasure of slow reading The Mirror and the Light. Read that interview here. Wolf Hall Weekend is hosting a celebration of Mantel’s final novel on 6 & 7 June 2026 at All Hallows by the Tower of London. I’ll be chairing a conversation with Dr Lucy Arnold on the themes of memory and haunting in The Mirror and the Light. Get your tickets here.

• I’m going live with Caroline Donahue! Caroline is an author, podcaster and writing coach who runs an excellent newsletter & website at Book (& Craft) Alchemy. Substack Live is a live stream session, and oh no, I have never done one of these before – so it will be interesting! Caroline and I are going to talk slow reads and AS Byatt. She’s got a read-along of Possession lined up for September, and I may just announce one of my 2026 picks live on air. So tune in on the app and or in Substack Notes on Friday, 22 August at 16:00 BST.

• Footpaths: a writer’s diary. In June, I began an irregular series of posts on my reading journey and writing process. Here’s the most recent post: #11 My heart is excited. You can get these in your inbox by turning on notifications for Footpaths in your settings.

Customise your Footnotes & Tangents experience

When you subscribe to Footnotes & Tangents, you are automatically signed up to this monthly newsletter. To keep your inbox clear, everything else is opt-in. And there is a lot going on! To customise your experience, edit your notification settings:

For some silly reason, you can’t do this in the Substack app. But it works fine from email, mobile or desktop browser. By the way, don’t turn on notifications for Marginalia, which is a section for further resources like character summaries. When the 2026 books are announced, you will be able to opt in to each of these separately.

August Book Groups

In our library of further reading resources, you can find the Substack Book Group Directory – a list of read-alongs, book clubs and book groups hosted by readers and writers on Substack.

This will be the last month I update this list. It’s been rather time-consuming, and I need to refocus my energy on other projects. I hope it has been useful!

If you run a Substack newsletter and would like to take over running the Substack Book Group Directory, please get in touch.

Here is a list of some of the books people will be reading in August:

• The Audacious Book Club with Roxane Gay: Nice Girls Don’t Win: How I Burned It All Down to Claim My Power by Parvati Shallow

• The Austen Connection Read-Along with Plain Jane: Mansfield Park by Jane Austen (Jul - Aug)

• The Big Read with Jeremy Anderberg: Moby Dick by Herman Melville (Jun - Sept)

• The Book Club for Busy Readers with Jeannie Ewing: Live Love Now by Rachel Macy Stafford

• The Burning Archive Slow Read with Jeff Rich: The Books of Jacob by Olga Tokarczuk (Feb - Sep)

• Chasing Fog Book Club with Laura Pashby: Chasing Fog by Laura Pashby (all 2025)

• Close Reads HQ with David Kern, Tim McIntosh, Heidi White: Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë (Jul - Aug)

• Closely Reading with haley larsen, phd: Middlemarch by George Eliot (May - Aug) / The Custom of the Country by Edith Wharton (Aug - Oct)

• Commonplace Philosophy with Jared Henderson: Zhuangzi (romanised as Chuang Tzu)

• Creative, Inspired, Happy: Read Like a Writer Book Club with Evelyn Skye: The Incredible Kindness of Paper by Evelyn Skye

• The Cultural Diegetic with Kode: Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett (all 2025)

• Deep Reads Book Club with Matthew Long: Homer’s The Iliad (Jan - June)

• The Eclectic Reader with Chelsey Feder: Quicksand by Nella Larsen

• Elizabeth Goudge Bookclub with Elizabeth Goudge Bookclub: Child from the Sea by Elizabeth Goudge

• The First Books Book Club with Sarah Stewart Holland: The Hunt for Red October by Tom Clancy & a secret modern spy novel (Aug - Sept)

• 4,000 Ideas: The Oliver Burkeman Bookclub with Heidi Fiedler: Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman (Feb - TBD)

• FrizzLit with Christopher Frizzelle: Joan Didion Book Club (Jul - Sep)

• Genius & Ink with Vashik Armenikus: Dante’s The Divine Comedy (all 2025)

• The Kindred Spirits Bookclub with Briana Kohlbrenner: Rainbow Valley by Lucy Maud Montgomery

• Love of Literature with Maddie Dobrowski: The Fellowship of the Ring by J.R.R. Tolkien (Jun - Aug)

• More Magic Book Blub with Demi Utley: Ink Blood Sister Scribe by Emma Törzs

• Mystics Reading Society with Emma Veritas: When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times by Pema Chodron (Jul - TBD)

• Personal Canon Formation with John Halbrooks: ChaucerReading Challenge (continued)

• Pirate Seminar with Eleanor Konik: A General History of the Pirates by Captain Charles Johnson (Jun - Aug)

• Pomus Aureus with Ellie: Arturo’s Island by Elsa Morante (Jun - Sep)

• Read the Classics with Henry Eliot: Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy (all 2025) / The Summer Book by Tove Jansson

• The Reader & the Writer with Shari Dragovich & Rhea Forney: War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy (all 2025) / Phantastes by George MacDonald

• Reading Revisited with Jessica Risma & Kelsie Hartley: Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen

• The Sixty-Minute Book Club with Emma Kriskinans: Lamb to the Slaughter by Roald Dahl

• To All My Darlings with To All My Darlings: Miss MacIntosh, My Darling by Marguerite Young (all 2025)

• Well-Read Weekend with Taylor D'Amico: The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy

Thank you!

And that’s all from me. Many thanks for subscribing to Footnotes & Tangents and joining our slow reads. Remember to grab the 20%-off discount on subscriptions; the special offer runs until next Friday.

I’ll be back in September to announce the 2026 slow reads! Until then, happy reading.

Simon