Hello!
Hi. It’s a new year, etc, etc.
Thank you to those of you who took out discounted subscriptions for my birthday! That was a nice thing to do. I appreciated it.
A….Tom Scocca special?
I first became quite obsessed with Tom Scocca’s writing just over a decade ago, when he wrote a mammoth essay for Gawker called “On Smarm”. I’ve read it again a couple of times since then and it’s still aggressively good. It’s also aged really well - truly one of the foundational texts of online culture. I’d really recommend digging in if you’ve not read it before, it’s incisive and spiky and very clever. It’s also on Wayback Machine now, because old Gawker is dead. To hell with the people deleting good writing from the internet.
Anyway - I was thinking about On Smarm because Tom published another big piece recently, on how human bodies still sometimes fail in ways we don’t understand, but also sort of about the slow death of the journalism industry, and it’s very bleak but hard to put down. The website says it’ll only be free for a short period of time so run while you can.
Finally, on the topic of Tom Scocca, someone tweeted out this piece which I’d missed at the time, on ageing and parenthood, and it’s quite emotionally tough but properly beautiful. Isn’t it enraging when writers can just…write well about everything. I hate it.
A column
Right, do you want some real book recommendations? Because I can give you some. I’ve posted about my books of the year before but the list was either incomplete or dishonest, depending on how you choose to look at it.
“Oh I do love some Rachel Cusk”, I wrote, “and there’s this terrific Nigerian novel full of queer magic realism”, I added, but I was hiding some things from you. If I were to really make a complete list of the novels I read and thoroughly enjoyed in 2023, I would have had to add those:
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