Discussion: How slow is too slow?

Friday Fireside #11 | A video thank you - Meet the writers - On taking 28 years to read a book

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Dear slow readers,

I’m feeling immensely grateful for all the support Footnotes and Tangents has received in the last few weeks. Footnotes and Tangents is now a bestselling newsletter with over a thousand subscribers! So, I thought I’d push myself outside my comfort zone and record a video to say thank you and explain a little bit about this newsletter and next year’s read-alongs:

Thank you for watching. If you haven’t already, do check out last week’s post where lots of readers have introduced themselves:

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Meet the writers…

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I am all about building a community of readers and writers. Many of those who introduced themselves last week have their own newsletters on Substack. So, I thought it would be nice to tell you a little more about what they write about and where you can find them. My apologies in advance if I’ve missed anyone.

• Bea Stitches
  writes The Thread of Her Tale. Bea has been stitching Hilary Mantel’s Cromwell trilogy for almost a decade. Fabric plays a big part in the trilogy, and in her newsletter, Bea shows her workings and writes about her constant Cromwelling.

• Barrie is one-half of

  Feasts and Fables
  and writes Encourage Meant, a regular burst of positivity, and Just Write, Right, a provocation to himself to write every day.

• Sarah Harkness
  writes Advocating for the Ignorant: The Macmillans' crusade about her upcoming biography of Daniel and Alexander Macmillan, and her other literary projects.

• Nathan Slake
  writes Slake, home to his weird thoughts and weirder fiction.

• Brian Funke
  writes Poetry & Process, where he shares his poetry and reflections.

• Dr. Kathleen Waller
  writes and produces The Matterhorn, a rather inspiring newsletter and podcast about truth in fiction, and how to layer stories with ideas, culture, places, and texts.

• Dave Graham
  writes Elemental Collision on culture, photography, community, and purpose.

• bookstrider
  is Gabby. She writes The Unread Pile on reading and literature, especially but not exclusively sci-fi and fantasy.

• Chloe Hope
  writes Death & Birds, about, well, death and birds. Chloe is an End-of-Life Doula and cares for birds at a Wildlife Rescue Centre. She writes lyrically about her experience of both.

• Katharine Beckett Winship
  writes Matters of Kinship about our kinship with the ecosystems we inhabit.

• Susie Mawhinney - A hill and I
  writes A Hill and I, an eclectic journal from a small mountain in South West France.

• Matthew Long
  writes The Books of Our Lives about the impact of literature on people’s lives. He’s working his way through the complete John Steinbeck.

• Anne Thomas
  writes Anne of Green Places, essays and photography from places she has lived and travelled. I especially enjoy the Detail Diary she keeps on Substack Notes.

• Lizzy Co
  writes The Lizzy Co Show, memoir, poetry, pictures, and stories, seen through the lenses of tarot and therapy.

• Tiffany Chu writes

  Fellowship of the Inklings
  , where she made her own case for slow reading and is currently hosting a slow read of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go.

• Susan Earlam
  writes The Wild and the Quiet. She writes weird stories, loves nature and shares her writer’s notebook here.

• Jodi writes

  Beautiful Things
  about travelling the world and all the beauty she finds there.

• Kath writes

  The Braver Mom
  to dispel the rumours of the evil stepmother.

• Winston
  writes Coffee Times on writing, self-development and self-discovery.

• Amy L Bernstein
  writes Doubt Monster. Amy is a writer and book coach helping creatives fight their doubts.

• Jeffrey Streeter
  write the English Republic of Letters, on joining the dots between international culture, life and literature.

I know this is just a small slice of the talent we have here. And I look forward to getting to know all of you better!

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Choose your own adventure…

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You are reading a Friday Fireside letter from me,

Simon Haisell

. You can pick and mix which

Footnotes and Tangents

letters you want to receive by turning on and off notifications on your manage subscription page. By default, you won’t receive read-along updates unless you choose to join one of them.

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

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Discussion: How slow is too slow?

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A book club in Venice, California, has just finished James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. They read the first page in 1995. They began at a breakneck pace of two pages a month, slowing to one page per discussion. Twenty-eight years later, they have finally read the last page.

It took Joyce 17 years to complete his 628-page experimental novel. It has a reputation for being one of the hardest books to read, full of puns, allusions, invented words and roughly 80 different languages. Even the author himself said, “my head hurts just thinking about it."

So my questions to you are:

1. Have you read Finnegans Wake? Is it worth it?

2. What’s the longest time you’ve spent with a book?

3. And how slow is too slow?

Let me know in the comments.