The Complete Wolf Hall, Audio Alice, and a special offer
Read my complete Wolf Hall guide • Join our Bring Up The Bodies read along • New Audrey guided audiobook of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland • 25% off Footnotes & Tangents
Hello!
This is the first time I have emailed all Footnotes and Tangents subscribers since the start of the year! I have been super busy running two fantastic book groups, War and Peace 2024 and Hilary Mantel’s Cromwell Trilogy. Both of these are still going strong and taking on new readers, so do check them out and join the conversation – everyone welcome!
If this is the first email you’ve received from me: I’m Simon Haisell, host of Footnotes and Tangents, a community for curious and creative readers and book groups that explore great books slowly, savouring every word. We have a great intro post here.
So I’ve got lots of news:
Read my (very almost) complete guide to Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall
Join us for Bring Up The Bodies, starting next Monday 29 April
Download for free my new guided audiobook of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
Join the Alice listen-along in May
Subscribe to Footnotes and Tangents with 25% off
Recommend a book for our slow book group
1. Wolf Hall: The Complete Guide
Over the last 17 weeks, I have written a 50,000+ word (🤯) guide to Wolf Hall, including discussion of themes, characters, language, historical background and tangents. All the posts have voice-overs and link to chapter-by-chapter plot summaries for each character. I have now compiled all these posts on one page, along with
’s excellent complementary posts on the food of Wolf Hall.2. Join our Bring Up The Bodies read along
Next Monday, the adventure continues. We will be reading Bring Up The Bodies over 12 weeks, starting 29 April and finishing 21 July. The second book in the Cromwell Trilogy charts the dramatic fall of Anne Boleyn over a few hell-raising months in 1535–36 from the perspective of Henry VIII’s chief minister, Thomas Cromwell.
Over one thousand people from all over the world joined us for Wolf Hall in January. You don’t have to have participated in that read-along to join us in May, June, and July. It is a very laidback and friendly affair where I encourage you to take as much or as little as you want from the experience. Everything you need to know is in this post.
To sign up and get weekly emails: turn on notifications for the Cromwell Trilogy on your manage subscription page:
3. Guided Audiobook: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
Audrey is a fantastic app that offers audiobooks of classic stories with specially curated multimedia guides to help you get the most from your listening. I previously created guides for Leo Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis.
I’m delighted to announce that you can now download the audiobook of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, with myself as your guide and with beautiful illustrations by Lotte Budai. Here at Footnotes and Tangents, we specialise in rabbit holes, and this is the original rabbit hole. I had a fabulous time exploring the meaning behind the nonsense of Wonderland.
If you haven’t already, do check out the Audrey App and their growing library of classic audiobooks. I love what they’re doing, and it has been a pleasure putting these guided notes together.
And just for Footnotes and Tangents subscribers, you can get a free copy of the audiobook with this promo code:
Audrey Promo Code: ALICE-Footnotes&Tangents-09
4. Join the Alice listen along in May
Audrey hosts their own listen-alongs on Storygraph, and they will be doing Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland in May. Here’s the listening schedule:
Read more and sign up on the blog post.
5. Footnotes and Tangents Special Offer
To celebrate the first complete book guide on Footnotes and Tangents, I’m offering a discount on annual subscriptions. There is an enormous amount of work going into creating these guides and probably too much work for one person. In the future, I hope to bring an assistant on board to help, so your support will help make that happen.
Paid subscribers get access to bonus posts: The Haunting of Wolf Hall and All Tolstoy’s Parties and can create their own discussion threads in the chat area. From January 2025, you will have automatic access to the book guide archive, which will include:
Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace
Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, Bring Up The Bodies, and The Mirror and The Light
Current offer ends 30 April and is 25% off an annual subscription. That’s £26.25/year
Alternatively, you can also donate to my tip jar on Stripe. Thank you!
6. Recommend a book for our slow book group
And that’s all from me today.
Thank you so much to everyone who has participated in the book groups so far this year. It’s been a real pleasure. Lots more to come, and there will be new books to explore in 2025!
And if you’ve got a book you’d like us to read slowly in the future, let me know in the comments or hit reply and send me a message. And I’ll see many of you in the book group posts later in the week.
All the best
Simon
Thank you for your work, Simon. I am new here, but I am already impressed and I have regained my inspiration to read for the soul. It's worth a lot.
I have many ideas for possible books for future readings. But I want to focus on the non-obvious - the book of the Polish Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk "The Book of Jacob".
It's funny that this book of hers was compared with War and Peace and Mantel's trilogy. Such a coincidence. It is a 1000-page book in the style of magical realism, where fiction is intertwined with the history of Eastern Europe. This is a book about the role of women in history.
Fantastic, Simon! An assistant sounds like a good idea as I can imagine the amount of work involved in this endeavour is huge.
I love the help and support you're providing for the #Wolfcrawl. Wolf Hall is an absorbing read, and not an easy one, so your commentary is invaluable. I look forward to continuing throughout the year and already I feel a deep sense of satisfaction in my reading of Mantel's work. Her writing is truly dazzling and I'm learning a lot from it. This is my second reading of the trilogy; there are few books I want to read more than once, but these three are very much worth the time. Your input and guidance makes the experience much richer and the community you've created around these slow reads is one I'm grateful to be part of.
My suggestion for a future slow read is Cormac Mccarthy's 'The Border Trilogy'.