Somewhere along the way, I became interested in interiors. Not interior design, exactly, but a proper home, a “lived-in” space. The difference feels important here; I’ve realised that I’m much less interested in beautiful houses than I am in houses that look as though somebody genuinely lives there. Books left open, fresh flowers on a table that has probably been there for years; rooms that seem slowly assembled rather than decorated.

Perhaps this is simply what happens as we get older: over the past year, I’ve found myself thinking about homes in a way I never had before.

Part of it is practical, I guess. My boyfriend and I have been slowly making our rented flat feel like ours. It isn’t permanent - we don’t own it - but I’ve become increasingly convinced that permanence has very little to do with feeling at home. A rented flat deserves flowers just as much as a forever house. It deserves books on the shelves, candles on winter evenings and photographs that make you stop for a second on your way to the kitchen.

I’ve also been helping my parents renovate parts of the house where I grew up, which has been a strangely emotional experience. I guess it’s odd to watch the geography of your childhood change while remaining fundamentally the same.

I used to think homes were built all at once: now I suspect they’re just accumulated. A chair that belonged to your grandmother; books that migrate from room to room until they accidentally settle somewhere permanent.

None of these things matter individually but, together, they become a life.

A short reflection for today, but sharing some pictures below for inspiration :)

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1. On books & writing

• Memory, Virginia Woolf and the importance of forgetting - by Esther

  A beautiful meditation on Woolf, memory and the curious role forgetting plays in remembering well - quietly changed my perspective on rereading.

• No Atonement for novelists? - by Paige

  Thoughtful, literary and refreshingly unconcerned with easy conclusions. The sort of essay that asks where the novelist’s responsibility really begins - and where it should end.

• Between Plath and Didion - by Caroline

  Two writers I return to constantly, brought together with care and sensitivity. Less a comparison than a conversation between voices that continue to shape contemporary writing.

• How I write an essay - (another one) by Caroline

  As someone fascinated by other people’s creative process, I loved this. Honest, practical and demystifying.

• Everything I read in July - by Petya

  Exactly the kind of reading diary I trust most: personal rather than exhaustive. The books matter, but so does the reader behind them.

• What to read when you lack the time or attention span- by Natasha

  For anyone who has ever looked at an unread pile with equal parts excitement and guilt. Gentle, realistic and reassuringly free from the usual productivity rhetoric.

• The wall - by Bárbara

  Part literary reflection, part philosophical meditation. The kind of essay that makes you want to pick up the book immediately, but also sit with its questions long afterwards.

2. On learning & paying attention

• How I’m self-educating post-college - by Bella

  A thoughtful reminder that curiosity doesn’t end with formal education. Less about productivity, more about building a life in which learning is a daily habit.

• Why you should be a person of no consequence - by Thuli

  One of the most quietly liberating essays I’ve read in a while. A reflection on ambition, visibility and the unexpected freedom that comes from stepping outside the pressure to constantly be seen.

• How to stop maladaptive daydreaming - (another one) by Thuli

  An unexpectedly nuanced piece about imagination and attention. It resists easy advice, choosing instead to understand why our minds wander in the first place.

3. On places, objects & everyday beauty

• New York Recap (Part I) - by Carina

  One of those travel pieces that pays attention to the right things. Less about ticking off landmarks, more about noticing atmosphere, bookshops, cafés and the rhythms that make a city memorable.

• How I’m Thinking About Summer Dressing - (another one) by Carina

  Far more reflective than its title suggests. Not trend forecasting, but a thoughtful essay on personal style, simplicity and dressing in a way that actually feels like yourself.

• Sodium Radiator - by Alex

  Difficult to categorise in the best possible sense. Observant, unexpected and beautifully written, the kind of piece that reminds you how much literature can emerge from paying close attention to seemingly ordinary things.

• The Tuesday Five - by Alex Patel

  A wonderfully curated collection of recommendations that consistently sends me towards books, essays and ideas I wouldn’t have found otherwise.

• The Friday Five (ft. Lucy Akin) - (another one) by Alex Patel

  The same pleasure, with the added joy of another thoughtful reader joining the conversation. The internet feels a little smaller (in the best way ) after pieces like this.

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Reading all like this feels less like catching up and more like drifting slightly outward.

So if there’s a piece you’ve read recently that has stayed with you, I hope you’ll send it my way - some of my favourite reading has come from other people’s recommendations. Perhaps the next one will come from yours.

This time, it happened with A Wave in the Mind, Ursula K. Le Guin’s collection of essays. The word essay itself felt somewhat dense to me, at first; now, it contains a stong image that stayed with me throughout the book. Le Guin suggests that the mind does not move like a machine: thoughts don’t progress from one neat conclusion to the next. They rather circle, move around, dancing like ocean waves. They advance, retreat, gather force, collide with other ideas, disappear beneath the surface. Understanding isn’t linear, but tidal.

It is such a simple image, but once I came across it, I realised that it described not only the way Le Guin writes, but the way she thinks. The way we all do, in some way, I guess.

On paper, the book should feel fragmented: it has completely different pieces on fantasy, language, feminism, literature, ageing, education and the art of writing. Another writer might could have produced a miscellany - a curated collection, at best. Instead, A Wave in the Mind feels coherent as every essay is animated by the same curiosity: Le Guin isn’t trying to defend a particular ideology or persuade the reader of a certain thesis; she is simply trying to understand something. Reading her, I got the impression that she sits down to write not because she already knows what she thinks and is trying to tell you, but because writing is the process through which she understands herself - the mind wanders, chooses a path, goes down the rabbit hole, gets lost, then dives back in. Should I have chosen the other path, in the first place?, she may ask. And there she goes again, until she untangles her mind around a certain subject. There is no landing point, exactly. Writing - or thinking on paper - is the whole thing.

It feels lightweight to not be certain, to not have it all figured out. Maybe, because somewhere along the way, we started expecting people to just know, to have opinions on everything; sometimes, I think the speed with which opinions are made and spit out has become much more impressive than the opinions themselves. Even essays (I guess) are now expected to arrive carefully packaged, perfectly sealed and delivered to one’s doorstep: each one proving a point before moving efficiently towards a conclusion - like a machine. Waves are trickier.

Le Guin refuses that kind of efficiency: she lingers over an idea. She complicates her own arguments. She follows unexpected tours unapologetically. More than once, I found myself smiling as an essay was getting somewhere I hadn’t anticipated. Not because it had wandered carelessly, but because its movement felt organic, folding in on itself.

That generosity of mind runs through the entire collection: Le Guin approaches the world with genuine curiosity, with non-stop witty questions. Perhaps nowhere is this more evident than in the essays on fantasy (my personal favourite): Le Guin spent much of her career defending a genre that has often been dismissed as escapism. Yet, her argument is never that fantasy is better than realism. It is that imagination is just another way of telling the truth. Fiction does not compete with reality; it enlarges it. By inventing other worlds, we become better equipped to question our own. We notice assumptions that had become invisible simply because we had lived with them for so long.

I kept returning to that idea after I had finished the book, like I had a Eureka! moment. That’s it. She got it.

We are often asked what novels teach us, as if their only value lies in the information they contain. And so we go on, justifying reading because it “builds empathy”, “broadens our horizons” or “deepens our understanding of history”. All of that is true, but Le Guin suggests something more fundamental: literature is valuable because it exercises the imagination, and imagination is one of the ways we investigate reality.

That, I think, is the thread connecting the entire book: not the arguments themselves, but the example they set. Le Guin reminds us that thinking doesn't have to be efficient to be worthwhile. To have the willingness to resist immediate judgement, to question assumptions and to let an idea unfold at its own pace rather than forcing it towards a conclusion. To sit with questions that continue moving through the mind, like ripples trembling long after the stone has disappeared beneath the surface.

The first was a reflection on his writing as a whole - an attempt, perhaps inevitably incomplete, to understand a writer whose prose always seems one sentence ahead of the reader; the second came after his death, as a way of saying goodbye to a writer who had shaped so much of contemporary Portuguese literature.

I thought that would be enough - then Livro de Poemas arrived.

Published posthumously, the collection brings together poems that Lobo Antunes never published during his lifetime, partly because he believed he had what he once called an “imperfect relationship with poetry”. There is something deeply moving about that admission coming from one of Portugal’s greatest writers. A novelist capable of transforming the Portuguese language into something entirely his own still felt that poetry remained, somehow, beyond his reach.

Reading the collection, however, I found myself thinking the opposite.

Lobo Antunes had been writing poetry all along; I guess we simply insisted on calling it fiction.

I’ve often struggled to explain his novels to people who haven’t read them. If you’re looking for plot, they can feel almost impenetrable. Characters emerge and disappear inside one another’s memories. Time refuses to move in a straight line. Dialogue becomes interior monologue before returning, unexpectedly, to the present. His books don’t progress so much as accumulate, building emotional intensity through rhythm rather than narrative.

That is precisely what these poems do: reading them doesn’t feel like discovering a different writer. It feels like standing closer to the source of the novels. The same obsessions are there - childhood, parents, ageing, solitude, Lisbon, death, memory - but stripped of the architecture a novel inevitably requires.

Only the voice remains.

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So what becomes immediately apparent is that Lobo Antunes never really wrote about emotion - maybe he wrote from inside it.

His sentences have always resisted summary because they don’t attempt to explain experience; they just recreate it. Memory doesn’t arrive neatly organised, so neither do his paragraphs. One image calls another. One voice interrupts the next. The rhythm matters as much as the meaning.

The poems operate according to exactly the same logic.

They ask to be read slowly, almost musically, without trying to decode every image or resolve every ambiguity. Their emotional force comes from recognition - from the strange feeling that someone has managed to put into words something you have felt but never articulated.

There is a temptation, whenever a celebrated novelist publishes poetry, to read it as a curiosity: a minor work beside the novels that established their reputation.

I don’t think that’s the right way to approach this book - if anything, Livro de Poemas reveals something essential about the fiction. It confirms what attentive readers have perhaps always suspected: that Lobo Antunes cared less about plot than cadence, less about chronology than emotional truth. His novels have always been propelled by rhythm. Their true architecture is quite musical rather than narrative.

Which makes his remark about having an “imperfect relationship with poetry” all the more poignant.

Perhaps he measured himself against poets he admired (João Cabral de Melo Neto often mentioned), or perhaps poetry represented, for him, an impossible standard that he never felt he reached.

Readers, I suspect, will feel differently. These poems don’t diminish the novels, they illuminate them. They allow us to see that the novelist and the poet were never separate figures. One simply found a form he trusted more than the other.

There is also something quietly beautiful about the timing of this publication.

After writing my previous pieces about António Lobo Antunes, I thought I had reached (sadly) the end of that conversation: his novels were complete. His voice, however alive on the page, belonged to the past.

And then this book appeared - one last opportunity to spend time with a writer who, even after decades of extraordinary novels, still believed there was a part of literature he had never fully mastered.

It is a characteristically Lobo Antunes ending.

One of Portugal’s greatest writers leaving behind a book that reminds us, above all, of his humility as a reader of poetry - and of the impossibly high standards he held for himself.

Perhaps the greatest surprise of Livro de Poemas is not that António Lobo Antunes wrote poetry - it is that he never quite believed he had.

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Not easy, necessarily, but linear: you chose a career. You found work you cared about. You kept your friends. You spent weekends with your family. You travelled. You had hobbies. You read more books than you bought. And somewhere in between, if you loved writing enough, you wrote.

I don’t remember thinking there would be enough hours in the day. I simply assumed there would be enough... life.

I often think about Sylvia Plath’s fig tree from The Bell Jar. The image is almost too well known now: a tree full of figs, each one representing a different possible future, and the fear that choosing one means watching all the others slowly wither away.

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For years, I thought that was the tragedy - now, I’m not so sure. Because at twenty-eight, it doesn’t feel as though I’m standing beneath the tree, paralysed by choice: it feels as though I’ve climbed into one branch and spend most of my time trying not to fall off.

The figs are still there: writing is still there, my family is still there, my friends are still there. The books I want to read, the places I want to visit, the ideas I keep writing down in notebooks because I’ll “come back to them later” - they’re all still hanging from the branches.

The problem is no longer choosing between them: the problem is time; or, perhaps, energy.

By the time I leave work, it’s usually close to eight. There are dinners to have. Messages to answer. Birthdays not to forget. Parents to call. Friends I genuinely want to see. A body that deserves movement after spending the day behind a screen. Laundry. Groceries. The quiet maintenance required simply to keep a life functioning.

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And then, only after all that, there’s the novel. Always the novel. Waiting patiently inside a Leuchtturm notebook, exactly where I left it.

It doesn’t complain. It doesn’t demand. It simply waits.

Which somehow makes the guilt even worse - because writing is unlike almost everything else in my life. If I don’t answer an email, someone notices. If I don’t show up to work, there are consequences. If I forget a birthday, someone gets hurt.

But if I don’t write? Nothing happens. Except that, slowly, I become someone who isn’t writing - and I think that’s the part I underestimated.

People often talk about creative work as though the greatest challenge were talent, discipline or inspiration. Increasingly, I think the greatest challenge is simply protecting it from everything else.

Not because everything else is unimportant, quite the opposite, as the hardest interruptions are the ones that matter. None of these things are distractions - they’re life. Which means writing is never competing against trivialities. It’s competing against things you also love, things that are also necessary, things that deserve your attention just as much. That makes the negotiation infinitely more difficult.

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Sometimes I wonder whether my sixteen-year-old self imagined adulthood as a series of additions. You collect things as you grow older: a career, a partner, friends, projects, responsabilities.

But nobody tells you that every addition quietly demands a portion of the same twenty-four hours - nothing gets bigger except the list.

Perhaps that’s why I find myself returning to the fig tree - not because I’m afraid of choosing the wrong future. I’m already living one of them.

I’m afraid that, in trying to care well for everything, I’ll slowly stop caring for the one thing that has always felt most like myself.

Writing has never shouted the loudest - it has always been the quietest voice in the room. The one that politely waits until everything else is done.

The trouble is, everything else is never done. So maybe adulthood isn’t about choosing one fig after all. Maybe it’s about becoming the tree itself and embracing the complexity. Feeding, again and again, one branch after another.

But I don’t have this figured out.

Perhaps that’s another thing nobody tells you about growing up: you don’t become more certain. You simply become more responsible for your uncertainty.

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Not by graduations, weddings, promotions or funerals.

Instead, it has been built almost accidentally, through ordinary afternoons that seemed entirely forgettable while you were living them. A family dinner. A summer holiday. A conversation you barely remember having. The kind of moments that don’t announce themselves as important until years later, when they are all that remains.

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I don’t think I’ve ever read a novel that understands this better than Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse.

Calling it a family novel feels strangely insufficient. Yes, it follows the Ramsays and the people who orbit them during holidays on the Isle of Skye. Yes, there is the long-promised trip to the lighthouse that gives the novel its title. But plot has never been Woolf’s real interest.

Her subject is consciousness.

More specifically, the invisible distance between what happens and what we experience while it is happening.

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The brilliance of the novel lies in its ability to move effortlessly between minds. A single conversation is never just a conversation. It is transformed by each person who experiences it. A casual remark becomes a wound for one character, passes unnoticed by another, and is forgotten entirely by the person who uttered it. Woolf reminds us that we never inhabit the same moment as anybody else. We simply occupy the same physical space while living through entirely different emotional realities.

Reading the novel, I kept returning to Mrs Ramsay.

For decades she has been read as the archetypal maternal figure, endlessly giving herself to her family and guests. But what struck me this time was something quieter: how much invisible work goes into maintaining harmony. She notices what everyone else misses. She anticipates discomfort before it surfaces. She spends the novel arranging not just dinners, but emotional equilibrium.

Today we would probably call this emotional labour.

Woolf simply observed it.

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Without praise, without criticism, without trying to turn Mrs Ramsay into either a martyr or a heroine. She simply understood that some people spend their lives carrying atmospheres rather than objects.

And then there is time.

The middle section of the novel, “Time Passes”, remains one of the most astonishing things I’ve ever read. Woolf compresses years into a handful of pages. People die almost in passing. War arrives almost parenthetically. The house remains while everything inside it changes.

The first time I read it, I found it almost cruel.

How could events of such magnitude occupy so little space?

Only afterwards did I realise that this is precisely how life works.

History rarely feels historical while we’re living through it. Loss rarely announces itself with the gravity it later acquires in memory. Most of our lives happen quietly. Rooms gather dust. Parents grow older. Children leave home. Friendships loosen almost imperceptibly. By the time we recognise the change, it has already happened.

Perhaps this is why To the Lighthouse continues to feel so contemporary.

It refuses the idea that meaning belongs only to extraordinary moments. Instead, Woolf insists that meaning accumulates slowly, almost invisibly, through repetition and attention.

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Lily Briscoe’s struggle to finish her painting captures this perfectly. She spends years trying to make something that never quite matches the image she carries in her mind. Reading those passages, I couldn’t help thinking about writing. About how impossible creative work often feels. About continuing without certainty that what you’re making will ever become what you imagined.

Woolf offers no solution to that uncertainty.

Only the suggestion that creation depends less on confidence than on persistence.

You continue because the work asks you to, not because you’ve finally become sure of yourself.

I finished To the Lighthouse feeling that almost nothing had happened: a family had spent time together, people had aged, someone had completed a painting.

A boat had finally reached a lighthouse.

And yet it somehow contains almost everything one can say about memory, love, art and the strange, unstoppable movement of time.

Very few novels ask so little of plot while saying so much about life.

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That happened to me the past weekend in Porto. After going to Flanêur I spent the afternoon at the Botanical Garden - not knowing much beyond the fact that, before becoming one of the city’s quietest green spaces, it had once been the home of the Andresen family (Quinta do Campo Alegre, later sold to the State, turning into the city’s Botanical Garden). It was here that Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen grew up, alongside her cousin Ruben A. (short for Ruben Andresen) whose O Mundo à Minha Procura I had already read and loved.

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I did not enter the house - instead, I had a snack overlooking the gardens and spent some time wandering through them. And somehow, that felt enough.

We often talk about writers as though they were shaped primarily by the books they read, the people they met, or the ideas they encountered later in life. Those things are, of course, important. But before all of that comes geography: the first garden you remember, the trees you walked past every day, the places where you learnt what silence sounds like. Childhood is, in many ways, a collection of landscapes. Walking through the gardens, I kept thinking about how difficult it is to separate Sophia’s writing from her relationship with nature.

The sea is the obvious symbol in her work, but gardens appear too. Trees, light, flowers, the changing seasons - nature is never decorative in her poetry. It carries an almost moral quality. It represents permanence in contrast to the disorder of the human world.

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Among the lake, there is a bronze statue which is believed to have inspired “O rapaz de bronze”, by Sophia

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Standing there, watching people wander slowly between the paths, it became easier to imagine where that sensibility began. Not because the gardens explain her writing - they don’t - but because they remind you that every writer first learns to observe somewhere.

Ruben A.’s work feels entirely different, and yet I found myself making the same connection. After reading O Mundo à Minha Procura, what stayed with me wasn’t simply his childhood, but the extraordinary attention he gives to place. Memory, in his writing, is never abstract. It lives in houses, gardens, rooms, staircases, everyday rituals.

He reconstructs not just people, but the spaces that allowed those people to exist. It made me realise how much our memories depend on geography. We think we remember people directly, but often we remember them through places. A kitchen before we remember a conversation. A garden path before we remember a summer. A particular window before we remember who stood beside it.

Places become repositories of memory long after the people themselves have disappeared.

Outside view of the house

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Perhaps that’s why literary landscapes feel so compelling: not because they reveal some hidden secret about an author’s work, but because they restore a sense of scale.

We have a tendency to think of writers only once they’ve become writers. We forget that, long before publication, prizes or literary history, there were ordinary mornings and afternoons spent outside with no awareness that these seemingly insignificant moments would later become part of an imaginative world.

Maybe that’s why I enjoyed the gardens so much: not because they brought me closer to Sophia or Ruben A., but because they reminded me that literature is often rooted in places that, at first glance, seem entirely ordinary.

However, Ruben A. refuses to do that: instead, he recreates childhood from the inside. Not as innocence, and certainly not as nostalgia, but as a way of inhabiting the world. A world in which adults are mysterious creatures, language constantly slips away from certainty, and everyday events carry a significance that later disappears almost entirely.

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From my perspective, it’s an extraordinary literary achievement. Published in 1964, O Mundo à Minha Procura (unsure of the title in English, if there is one), is often described as an autobiographical novel, and while it certainly draws heavily from Ruben A.’s own life, calling it autobiography somehow feels insufficient. It is less interested in documenting a life than in recovering its texture. Holding together three volumes, each focusing on a different stage of his own life - from child to adulthood - I must admit it was the early years that surprised me the most.

The difference between those two things is enormous: facts are easy to recover, and sensibility is not.

What stays with me after reading the novel is not a sequence of events, but a way of looking: the world appears simultaneously enormous and strangely contained. Rooms feel larger. Conversations are overheard rather than fully understood. Adults seem to possess access to a hidden logic that the child spends the entire novel trying to decipher.

Reading it, I kept thinking about how rarely literature captures that imbalance successfully, as many novels about childhood are, ultimately, books written by adults about children. On the contrary, this feels like a book written from within childhood. The distinction is subtle, but it changes everything.

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There is also something wonderfully difficult to categorise about Ruben A.’s prose. It is playful without becoming whimsical. Intelligent without becoming self-conscious. There is humour almost everywhere, but it never dissolves into parody. One sentence can make you smile; the next can leave you unexpectedly reflective. He writes as though language itself were something to be explored rather than merely used, turning sentences over and following associations wherever they lead. Allowing memory to move according to emotion instead of chronology.

Perhaps because memory itself rarely behaves logically: it loops back on itself, and privileges insignificant details over supposedly important moments. It remembers the smell of a room but forgets an entire year. It recalls the exact expression on someone’s face while losing the conversation that accompanied it.

Ruben A. understands this instinctively. The novel unfolds less like a traditional narrative than like consciousness itself, and yet it never feels chaotic. Instead, there is an underlying rhythm holding everything together, a confidence that allows the reader to surrender to the movement of the prose without worrying too much about destination.

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I also found myself thinking about parents while reading it: not because they occupy the centre of the novel, but because they exist in exactly the way parents do for children: as enormous presences whose interior lives remain largely inaccessible. One of the quiet achievements of O Mundo à Minha Procura is that it reminds us how mysterious adults once seemed. As children, we rarely think of our parents as people who are also improvising their way through life: they appear complete, certain, as if they belonged to another category of existence altogether. Only much later do we realise they were simply people, carrying doubts we were too young to recognise. Yet, the novel never says this explicitly: it doesn’t need to.

All stages of life are somehow represented, yet always contained in the distance between what the child sees and what the adult reader now understands. And perhaps that’s what moved me most. The feeling that childhood is not lost because we grow older: it’s lost because we gradually replace one way of seeing with another.

And perhaps that’s Ruben A.’s greatest accomplishment: we doesn’t ask us to go back - he simply reminds us that the person who first encountered the world is still somewhere inside us.

They’re built around serendipity.

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Unlike larger bookshops, where algorithms seem to have escaped the internet and made their way onto the shelves - “if you liked this, you’ll probably like that” - places like Flâneur operate according to a different logic: a slower one.

The logic of conversation, of curation, of trusting that someone else’s taste might lead you somewhere unexpected.

Walking into Flâneur, I had that familiar feeling of not knowing where to look first. Part bookshop, part publishing house, it doesn’t feel designed around bestsellers or urgency. Instead, there’s a quiet confidence to the selection. The books seem to have earned their place there - I guess that’s what struck me most.

Every independent bookshop tells you something about the people behind it. Their obsessions, their interests, and their belief in what deserves to be read. Flâneur’s shelves feel deliberately assembled rather than endlessly stocked.

Alongside the books they publish themselves are titles from other independent publishers - smaller houses that often struggle to find space in larger bookstores, despite producing some of the most interesting work being published today, and there is something deeply reassuring about that ecosystem: an independent publisher supporting other independent publishers. A reminder that the literary world doesn’t have to be organised around scale. That there is still room for smaller projects, slower ambitions, and books that don’t fit neatly into market trends.

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Perhaps especially now, when so much of our reading lives are shaped by recommendation algorithms, bestseller lists, and the subtle pressure to keep up with whatever everyone else is reading, places like Flâneur offer an alternative. Not resistance exactly, but a different pace: a reminder that reading doesn’t have to be optimised.

That not every book needs to arrive throw a recommendation engine or a perfectly targeted advertisement. Sometimes the best books enter our lives because we happened to pick them up. Because a cover caught our attention. Because someone behind a counter suggested it. Because it was sitting next to something we already loved. I left with a book by Ursula K. Le Guin (kindly gifted by my inlaws), not because I had planned to get it, and not because it was on my list. Simply because it felt right in that moment.

And isn’t that one of the great pleasures of bookshops? The permission to be led by curiosity rather than intention. Online, I tend to know exactly what I’m looking for. I search, I find, I order.

In a bookshop like Flâneur, the process works in reverse: you arrive without certainty and leave with something you hadn’t anticipated.

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The French poet Charles Baudelaire described the flâneur as someone who wanders without destination, observing the city with openness and attention. Someone who values the experience of moving through a place without a fixed purpose. And, indeed, it’s a fitting name for a bookshop.

Because the best literary discoveries rarely happen when we’re searching efficiently. They happen when we allow ourselves to wander. When we remain open to surprise. When we trust that not knowing exactly what we’re looking for might be the point.

And in a world increasingly designed to anticipate our preferences before we’ve fully formed them ourselves, that kind of uncertainty feels less like inefficiency and more like freedom.

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What makes Vertigo endure is not its famous twist, or even its technical brilliance - though both are undeniable. It’s the fact that Alfred Hitchcock’s film understands something most people would rather not admit: how easily love can become projection. On the surface, the story is deceptively simple. Former detective Scottie Ferguson, forced into retirement by a debilitating fear of heights, is asked to follow Madeleine Elster, the wife of an old acquaintance, who seems to be behaving strangely. What begins as surveillance slowly transforms into fascination, then desire, then something far more destructive.

Yet, Vertigo is not really interested in suspense. I believe it is more interested in possession. More specifically, it is interested in what happens when we fall in love not with another person, but with an idea of who they are. Scottie never truly knows Madeleine. In many ways, he never even tries to.

What he falls for is a carefully constructed image: her mystery, her apparent sadness, her distance. She becomes less a person and more of a story he wants to inhabit. And because stories are easier to control than people, he clings to that version of her long after reality begins to intrude.

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Watching the film now, what strikes me most is how modern this feels: we like to believe that projection is a contemporary problem, amplified by social media and the endless opportunities we now have to curate ourselves into more desirable versions. But Vertigo suggests otherwise - the impulse is older than technology.

We have always been tempted to turn people into symbols. To confuse our interpretations with their reality. To love not who someone is, but who we need them to be - and Hitchcock understands this impulse with frightening precision. The famous visual motifs of the film - the mirrors, the spirals, the repetitions - are not just stylistic choices. They reinforce the central idea that obsession is circular. It doesn’t move forward. It returns endlessly to the same image, trying to perfect it.

And perfection, in Vertigo, is always destructive.

Scottie’s tragedy is not simply that he loses Madeleine. It’s that he cannot accept the difference between the woman he loved and the woman who actually exists. Faced with that gap, he chooses fantasy: again and again.

What makes this particularly unsettling is that the film never allows the audience complete distance from his perspective. We are implicated in his obsession. Hitchcock draws us into the same act of looking, of searching, of trying to recreate something that was never fully real in the first place.

The result is a film that feels both romantic and deeply critical of romance, asking uncomfortable questions. How much of attraction is genuine curiosity about another person, and how much is projection? At what point does admiration become possession? How often do we mistake being seen for being imagined?

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These questions feel particularly relevant now, in a culture that often encourages us to turn ourselves into versions of ourselves - more polished, more coherent, more desirable, and Vertigo reminds us that there is a certain violence in that process. Not physical violence, necessarily, but the quieter violence of refusing to let people exist outside our expectations.

The film’s visual beauty only intensifies this tension. San Francisco becomes dreamlike, suspended between reality and fantasy. Bernard Herrmann’s score moves with the emotional force of an opera. Every frame feels deliberate, controlled, almost hypnotic.

And yet, beneath all that elegance lies something deeply unsettling. A recognition that desire, left unchecked, can become a form of erasure; that loving someone is not the same as understanding them; and that intimacy requires accepting the distance between who a person is and who we imagined they might be.

I think that’s why Vertigo lingers: not because it offers answers, but because it exposes a contradiction at the heart of so many relationships: our simultaneous desire to know people completely and to reshape them according to our own fantasies. So, perhaps, that is the true vertigo of the title: not the fear of heights, but the dizzying realisation that the people we love exist beyond our understanding of them.

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That is the territory Georges Simenon explores in The Mahé Circle, and he does so with an unsettling level of precision.

At first glance, the novel seems almost too simple. Dr. Mahé is a respected physician living in a small coastal town. He has a family, a profession, financial stability, and a place within his community. He is not struggling in any obvious sense. There is no crisis waiting at the beginning of the novel, no dramatic event that pushes the story into motion.

Instead, Simenon starts somewhere much more uncomfortable: with a life that works. Or at least appears to.

What follows is not so much a narrative as an excavation. Page by page, Simenon begins to uncover the gap between the life Mahé inhabits and the life he experiences internally. The novel becomes an investigation into the strange distance that can develop between appearance and reality.

How can someone have everything they thought they wanted and still feel vaguely detached from it? How can a life become unfamiliar without changing at all? - these questions sit at the heart of the novel, and what makes them so effective is that Simenon refuses to simplify them.

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There is no villain in The Mahé Circle. There is just oneself, year after year. Years of routine. Years of becoming a particular version of yourself without ever fully examining how it happened. That, I think, is what makes the novel feel so modern despite being written decades ago.

We’re often told that self-knowledge is a natural consequence of adulthood. That age brings clarity. That experience gradually reveals who we are and what we want.

But Simenon seems deeply suspicious of that idea: his characters often discover the opposite. They reach middle age and realise they have built entire lives around assumptions that were never properly tested. They have become people they recognise intellectually but not emotionally.

Dr. Mahé belongs to this tradition - the more the novel progresses, the more you realise that his dissatisfaction is not really about his marriage, or his work, or his circumstances. Those things matter, but they are not the root of the problem: the real problem is that he has never fully examined the story he tells himself about his own life. And once that examination begins, it becomes difficult to stop.

Contemporary culture tends to frame self-discovery as inherently positive. We are encouraged to “find ourselves,” to pursue authenticity, to reject whatever feels restrictive or inauthentic - Simenon offers something much more ambiguous, as self-knowledge, in his novels, is rarely liberating. Often, it is destabilising. Sometimes the stories we tell ourselves are simply what allow our lives to function, and the structures we inhabit are imperfect, but necessary.

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Recognising that doesn’t make the questions disappear. It simply makes them harder.

And this is where The Mahé Circle becomes genuinely compelling. The novel is not asking whether Mahé is happy: it’s asking whether he understands himself at all.

Throughout the book, there is a growing sense that Mahé has spent years moving through his life almost automatically. Fulfilling expectations, performing roles, inhabiting routines that have gradually solidified around him. None of these choices are necessarily wrong, but they have become so familiar that he no longer distinguishes between what he genuinely desires and what he has simply accepted.

Reading the novel feels a little like watching someone wake up slowly and gradually becoming aware of things that were always there. And because Simenon’s prose is so restrained, these shifts feel even more powerful. He doesn’t rely on dramatic psychological monologues or elaborate revelations. His style is deceptively simple - clear, economical, almost invisible.

Yet beneath that simplicity lies extraordinary psychological insight. Every scene feels purposeful. There is no fluff. Every observation seems to move the novel closer to a truth that Mahé himself is reluctant to confront.

By the end of the novel, I wasn’t thinking about the plot as much as I was thinking about the questions it raises: how much of adulthood is choice, and how much is momentum? At what point does routine become identity? How many of our desires are genuinely ours, and how many have simply been inherited from expectations, circumstances, and habit? And, most importantly, do we know the difference?

These are not comfortable questions, which is probably why the novel lingers. The best books don’t always provide answers. Sometimes they simply make certain questions impossible to ignore.

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Which is why taking a creative writing course felt strangely intimidating.

Not because of the writing itself, but because it requires a small shift in identity. Writing privately is one thing. Writing in front of other people - people who also write, who also care about sentences and structure and character and voice - is another entirely. Suddenly, the thing I’ve been doing quietly becomes visible. And visibility changes things.

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The strange thing about writing is that most of it happens before anyone ever sees it. I spend hours trying to solve problems that only exist in my head; I move paragraphs around, delete pages, convince myself a scene works and then decide, three weeks later, that it doesn’t. The work is invisible - only the outcome is shown to others (I mean: 3-4 people); and a course interrupts that invisibility.

It feels overwhelming at times: people read your work differently than you do, and they notice things you didn’t realise you were doing. Sometimes they understand exactly what you were trying to achieve - while other times they completely miss it. Both can be equally unsettling.

Still, I think what is surprising me most was how quickly the romantic image of writing disappeared: not because the course made writing less interesting, but because it made it more practical. Characters aren’t mysterious beings waiting to reveal themselves. They are constructed. Scenes don’t simply appear. They have to be built. Pacing can be discussed. Dialogue can be improved. Problems that felt abstract suddenly have names. It’s a little bit like watching a magician explain a trick. You lose some mystery but gain something far more useful.

A way forward.

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Because the reality is that writing a novel often feels less like inspiration and more like engineering. You are trying to build something large enough to stand on its own while simultaneously having no real idea whether it will work until much later.

I’ve been writing my novel for nearly two years - I’ve around fifty-five handwritten pages. Whenever I write that number down, it feels ridiculous: fifty-five pages is not a novel. It’s not even close. If anything, it’s a collection of attempts.

And yet, those pages represent hundreds of decisions, dozens of abandoned directions, countless evenings spent choosing the novel over something easier.

Taking a creative writing course while carrying that reality around is an interesting experience. You meet people who write every morning before work. People who have finished manuscripts. People who can produce ten pages in a weekend. People who seem to move through projects with a confidence that feels completely foreign.

And then you go home to your notebook. To your fifty-five pages. To the fact that your working day ends at seven o’clock. To the gym, the pilates class, the laundry, the grocery shopping, the ordinary maintenance of a life. To the reality that writing exists alongside everything else rather than instead of it.

The course doesn’t solve that problem. If anything, it makes you more aware of it. But perhaps that’s what I appreciate about it. It forces you to confront the difference between wanting to write and actually writing. Because eventually every writer runs into the same uncomfortable truth: there is no ideal future version of your life where writing suddenly becomes easier. There is only the life you have: the tired evenings, the fragmented weekends - the page you write despite not feeling particularly inspired.

The course can’t give you more time. It can’t make the novel arrive faster. It can’t solve the fact that some projects take far longer than you’d like them to. But it does something else: it’s not an aspiration. It’s a practice.

Nobody knows exactly what they’re building until much later. And for some reason, I find that reassuring.

The rise has already happened. The mechanisms are no longer hidden. The Snopeses - Flem, specifically - are not entering the system or learning how to move within it. They are inside it, established, fixed in place in a way that feels, at least on the surface, complete. And that changes the entire tone of the novel - because what follows a rise is not stability, but something much less defined.

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If The Hamlet was about emergence - slow, unsettling, almost absurd in its opportunism - and The Town about consolidation, about the ways power embeds itself quietly into structures that should resist it, The Mansion turns inward. It is less concerned with how power is gained, and more with what it does once it is there.

And what it does, is accumulate.

Not in a visible, measurable way, but in something closer to pressure. Emotional, psychological, almost atmospheric. The novel feels heavier, not because more happens, but because everything that has already happened begins to matter differently. The past is no longer background - it is active, pressing into the present, shaping how every character moves through the world. Time, in The Mansion, is unstable.

The narrative doesn’t unfold cleanly from one point to another. It circles. It returns. It shifts perspective. What you are given is not a sequence of events, but a series of understandings: partial, sometimes contradictory, often incomplete. Different voices take over, and none of them feel entirely authoritative.

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Which makes the act of reading it feel less like following a story and more like doing a puzzle without knowing what the final image is; because Faulkner doesn’t want you to fully assemble it. He wants you to sit in the uncertainty of it, in the gaps between what is known and what is inferred, in the way memory distorts as much as it reveals. The fragmentation isn’t stylistic for its own sake - it reflects the fact that what’s being dealt with here cannot be neatly contained: what has happened is too dispersed for that.

And at the centre of it, still, is Flem Snopes - but he is no longer the same figure.

In The Hamlet, he is almost abstract - defined by movement, by ambition, by the quiet calculation that allows him to rise. In The Town, he becomes more visible, more integrated into the structure, but still, in a way, elusive.

In The Mansion, that elusiveness begins to collapse: he is present, fully, but that presence feels different. Less dynamic, more static. As if the act of achieving power has, paradoxically, limited him. There is nowhere further to go in the same way, no upward movement to disguise the underlying emptiness of what has been constructed.

What remains is maintenance and exposure - as once power is no longer in motion, it becomes something that can be examined more closely. And what Faulkner reveals is not a grand corruption or a dramatic fall, but something quieter and more unsettling: a system that continues to function, even when its foundations are clearly unstable.

Nothing collapses - there is no fall after the grand rise. Which is, in its own way, the most disquieting outcome.

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Around Flem, the focus shifts increasingly to other characters - particularly those who are caught in the wake of his rise. Their stories don’t necessarily intersect in a clean, unified way, but they echo each other. There is a shared sense of disillusionment, of something having been altered in ways that can’t be easily reversed. And yet, there is no clear moment of recognition and no collective realisation that something has gone wrong.

Instead, there is adaptation. Adjustment. A gradual incorporation of what once felt disruptive into something that now feels, if not acceptable, then at least inevitable. The extraordinary becomes ordinary simply by persisting long enough.

This is where The Mansion feels most precise.

It captures not just the fact of change, but the process by which that change becomes normalised. How systems absorb what should destabilise them. How people accommodate what they once might have resisted, not out of agreement, but out of fatigue, or practicality, or the absence of any clear alternative.

And within that, something else emerges: consequence without resolution. What has been set in motion across the trilogy does not resolve into a moral conclusion. There is no balancing of accounts, no sense that things have been corrected or even fully understood. Instead, there is a kind of lingering imbalance - an awareness that something has shifted fundamentally, and that the shift cannot be undone simply by recognising it.

Which makes the title - The Mansion - feel deliberately misleading. It suggests solidity, permanence, something established and secure. But what Faulkner presents is far more fragile than that. The structure exists, but what supports it is unstable: perception, memory, reputation, all of which are subject to change.

What the novel leaves you with is not closure, but exposure - you see the system from the inside. You see how it works, how it sustains itself, how it continues even when its contradictions are visible. And you are left with the understanding that what has happened here is not exceptional.

It is, in some ways, entirely ordinary. Which is precisely why it feels so difficult to resolve: because there is no clear endpoint. Only the recognition that the story, in one form or another, is still continuing.

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You enter differently when you’re alone. Slower, usually. Less certain. You don’t have a structure imposed on you, so you start to build one without really noticing. A room holds you longer than expected, then the next one barely registers. You double back. You skip things. You stand in front of something for too long, not because it’s necessarily extraordinary, but because you haven’t decided to move on yet.

That lack of urgency changes the whole thing.

Museums are often framed as places you’re supposed to understand. To recognise movements, references, importance. Even if no one is explicitly asking that of you, it’s there - somewhere between the wall texts and the way people move through the space with quiet certainty.

Alone, that expectation softens. You don’t need to know what you’re looking at. You don’t need to have an opinion ready. You can just let things register, or not, without turning that into a judgement about yourself.

And most of it doesn’t register.

That’s something I think gets lost in the idea of museum-going—that you’re not supposed to be affected by everything. You move through a lot of work that does very little. It’s fine. It’s there. You notice it, briefly, and then you don’t. Which makes the moments that do interrupt you feel sharper - for me, it was The Matter of Time [below].

It’s a series of massive steel sculptures you walk through - curved, disorienting, heavier than they look and exactly as heavy as you’d expect. From the outside, they feel contained. Almost simple. But once you’re inside, the space shifts in a way that’s difficult to anticipate.

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You lose your sense of direction slightly. The curves close in and then open up again. Sound changes. Your pace changes without you deciding it should. It’s not visual in the usual sense.

You’re not standing back and looking at it; you’re inside it, moving through it, adjusting to it as it unfolds. And doing that alone makes the experience more internal. There’s no one else to react to, no shared “wow” moment. Just you, slightly disoriented, trying to understand what exactly is happening.

And not fully needing to.

That was the part that stayed; not the structure of the work itself, but the feeling of being inside something that didn’t require explanation to be effective.

In a different room, there was a Retrospective of Ruth Asawa [below].

Completely different scale. Different material. Wire sculptures, suspended, delicate, almost weightless in comparison. And yet they held attention in a similar way - not through impact, but through precision.

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You have to look closely. The lines repeat, fold into each other, create forms that feel both controlled and slightly organic. Nothing is overstated, nothing asks for immediate reaction. You stand there a bit longer than you expect, not because you’re trying to decode it, but because it takes a moment for your eyes to adjust to what’s actually there.

It’s quieter work. And again, being alone makes that quietness easier to sit with. There’s no pressure to move on because someone else is done looking. No need to articulate what you’re seeing. You can just stay until you don’t want to anymore.

That, more than anything, is what feels different about going to a museum alone.

It removes the need to perform attention.

You don’t have to prove that you’re engaged, or that you “get it,” or that you’re extracting something meaningful from the experience. You can be inconsistent. You can be distracted. You can miss things. You can return to something later without explaining why.

It becomes less about consuming the museum properly and more about moving through it in a way that feels natural.

And what you leave with reflects that. Not a clear summary, not a structured understanding of what you saw, but fragments. The curve of something. The feeling of being slightly lost inside a space. The way light hit a surface at a certain angle. A piece you didn’t expect to care about but did, briefly.

Sometimes it’s just about being there, paying attention for longer than you usually would, and letting that be the whole thing.

Not just to the Snopes family, but to the mechanisms that allow them to embed themselves more deeply into the fabric of the community. The setting shifts from the more rural, diffuse world of Frenchman’s Bend to Jefferson, the county town - more structured, more visible, but not necessarily more resistant. If anything, it proves easier to navigate; and what changes most noticeably in The Town is the perspective.

Faulkner moves away from the looser, almost panoramic observation of The Hamlet and introduces a more layered, subjective structure. The story is told through multiple narrators, voices that overlap , contradict, interpret. Instead of watching events unfold, you’re pulled into how those events are seen, remembered, and quietly judged.

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And that shift matters: because Flem Snopes is no longer just a presence moving through a system, he is now something closer to a force within it. His rise is no longer gradual or uncertain; it is happening, visibly, and yet still without anything that resembles direct confrontation.

Which raises a different kind of tension. Not will this happen, but how far it will go, and why no one seems able - or willing- to stop it.

The town sees him. That’s what makes it more unsettling. There is awareness. There are opinions. There are moments of resistance, or at least discomfort. But they don’t consolidate into action. The structure holds, outwardly intact, even as something inside it shifts.

And that’s where Faulkner becomes particularly precise: hhe’s not just writing about ambition anymore, but about power - how it accumulates, how it normalises itself, how it becomes part of the landscape without ever fully being accepted. Flem doesn’t need to be liked, or even respected. He only needs to remain and, when needed, to push a bit further. And he does.

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So, around him, the novel becomes more psychological and less focused on the plot itself. Characters are not just reacting to events, but interpreting them, filtering them through their own biases, limitations, and desires. The multiple narrators don’t clarify the story - instead, they complicate it and give it more and more layers. They make it harder to fix a single version of what’s happening, harder to define the boundaries between perception and reality.

Because The Town is not interested in certainty; it’s interested in how things are understood, or misinterpreted, in real time. How people justify inaction. How they accommodate what they don’t fully agree with, simply because it becomes easier than opposing it. There is less of the overt absurdity that punctuates The Hamlet, but something else replaces it: a quieter unease.

The sense that everything is becoming more structured, more controlled, but not necessarily more stable. That the very systems that should resist someone like Flem are, instead, being used by him. That legitimacy can be constructed, slowly, simply by occupying the right spaces for long enough.

And again, there is no dramatic rupture - no moment where the town collectively recognises what has happened and reacts accordingly. The change is incremental, almost administrative. It happens through positions, through transactions, through time.

Which makes it harder to contest.

What The Town does, more than anything, is remove distance. You are no longer just watching the rise of the Snopes - you are inside the process, seeing it from multiple angles, none of them entirely reliable. And that proximity makes the whole thing feel less like a story and more like something unfolding in real time, without clear resolution.

It is the middle of the trilogy, but it doesn’t feel transitional in a simple way. It deepens rather than bridges. It takes what The Hamlet established and makes it more precise, more contained, more difficult to dismiss. The patterns are clearer now. The consequences more visible.

And still, nothing quite stops it. Which, at this point, starts to feel less surprising and more inevitable.

The problem is that I already know what works - it’s not complicated; it just doesn’t always happen. So, in case you need it, here’s a little guide for a better day.

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1. Mind

This is the quiet part of the day - the one that sets everything else slightly off or slightly right. I know it works when I don’t rush into it. When I don’t immediately reach for my phone and let everything external take over before I’ve even had a thought of my own. So, concrete things that actually help:

• write a page (by hand, always better)

• read a few pages of a book before anything else

• sit with coffee without doing anything else for five minutes

• avoid your phone for the first 20 minutes (even if you fail, try again tomorrow)

None of this is ambitious. That’s the point. It’s just enough to feel like the day started with you, not around you.

2. Body

This is the one that should be simple, and somehow isn’t.

I know I feel better when I move - not in a dramatic way, just enough to shift something internally. The mistake is turning it into a task, something to complete or optimise. For me, these actually work:

• go to the gym, but don’t overthink it

• do a pilates class (or a short one at home)

• go for a walk without a destination

• take the longer route home, even if it makes no sense

It doesn’t need to be intense. It just needs to happen. The difference is always there afterwards, even if I forget that beforehand.

3. Space

This is the one I ignore the most and feel the fastest. The space around you quietly dictates how the day feels. Not in a dramatic, aesthetic way; just in whether things feel slightly easier or slightly harder than they need to be.

Small things that change more than they should:

• make your bed (or at least fix it a bit)

• clear your desk before sitting down to work

• buy fresh flowers (unnecessary, but effective)

• light a candle in the evening, even if you’re just at home

• open the windows, even if it’s still a bit cold

None of it is essential. But it all accumulates into something that feels… better.

So, for today: I’m not trying to perfect this. Just trying to remember that a good day isn’t something abstract - it’s built out of small, obvious things I already know, and choose (or don’t choose) to do.

And that instability is the point.

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As the first novel in Faulkner’s trilogy, The Hamlet introduces a world that feels both grounded and distorted. Set in rural Mississippi, in the fictional Yoknapatawpha (easiest name ever to write down) County, it presents a small community that should, in theory, be familiar - recognisable rhythms, shared spaces, a kind of local coherence.

But into that world comes the Snopes family. Or more specifically, Flem Snopes.

He doesn’t arrive with drama, and there’s no immediate disruption. Instead, he inserts himself gradually, almost invisibly, into the structure of the town. He observes, calculates, and waits. And then, slowly, he begins to rise.

What’s striking is not just the fact of that rise, but how little resistance it meets.

Because Faulkner isn’t interested in a clear moral opposition. There are no heroes here, no figures strong enough or willing enough to push back in any meaningful way. The town is not corrupted by Flem Snopes so much as it accommodates him. And that’s where the discomfort comes from.

Because ambition, in The Hamlet, is not framed as admirable or even particularly impressive. It is opportunistic, patient, and often absurd. Flem’s success doesn’t feel earned in any traditional sense; it feels like the result of understanding a system well enough to manipulate it, combined with the willingness to operate without hesitation or scruple.

And yet, it works.

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Around him, the novel expands into something more diffuse. It doesn’t follow a single narrative line, but moves through episodes, characters, small incidents that seem, at first, only loosely connected. There is a looseness to the structure, a sense that you are observing a place rather than being guided through a story.

Within that, Faulkner allows for something else to emerge: a kind of dark humour.

There are moments in The Hamlet that feel almost absurd in their exaggeration - the famous horse trading episode, for example, or the strange, obsessive fixations of certain characters. These aren’t just comic relief. They expose something fundamental about the world of the novel: its susceptibility to illusion, to greed, to the idea that something worthless can be made valuable if enough people agree to treat it that way.

Which brings the focus back to the Snopes.

They don’t dominate the novel in a traditional sense. They don’t need to. Their presence is felt through shifts of all kinds: economic, social, psychological, that ripple outward. What they represent is not just a family, but a way of operating within the world. A way that prioritises gain over stability, calculation over community.

And the town, in its passivity, allows that way to take hold.

Faulkner doesn’t moralise this. He doesn’t step in to correct it or to frame it as a clear downfall. Instead, he lets it unfold with a kind of detached attention, as if the process itself is more important than any judgement attached to it.

Which makes the novel feel, at times, strangely contemporary, because what it captures - quietly, without forcing the point - is how easily systems absorb the very things that undermine them. How ambition, even in its most questionable forms, can move unchecked if it aligns with the underlying logic of a place.

And how, over time, that movement begins to look like inevitability.

What stays, after reading The Hamlet, is not a particular plot point or resolution, but a mood. A sense of something shifting, slowly but decisively. Of a world that isn’t collapsing, exactly, but changing in ways that are difficult to resist once they’ve begun.

It’s the beginning of a larger story , the first movement in the Snopes trilogy, but it doesn’t feel incomplete. Which, in Faulkner’s world, is rarely a reassuring thing.

Which sounds like a long time, until I tell you what that actually looks like: around 75 handwritten pages. Not typed, not formatted, not even fully legible in parts - just pages in a notebook, written slowly, crossed out, continued, abandoned, returned to. Only then, typed into a simple Word document, Times New Roman 11, simple spacing, down to 55 pages in two years.

There’s a version of this where that feels like failure. Or at least like something adjacent to it. Because the expectation - spoken or not - is that progress should be visible, measurable, consistent. That if you care about something enough, it should move.

And it does move. Just not in the way I imagined it would.

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Part of it is practical; I mean, I only really feel the novel when I write it by hand. It’s not a romantic preference, it’s just how it works. The sentences come differently. Slower, yes, but also more deliberately. There’s less room to escape them, less temptation to edit too quickly or skip ahead. It forces me to stay inside the writing in a way typing never quite does.

But that also means everything takes longer. A paragraph isn’t just a paragraph - it’s time, physical time, spent writing it out, sitting with it, letting it take the shape it’s going to take without rushing it into something more efficient. Hand hurting at times. There’s no acceleration built into the process.

And then there’s everything else: A full-time job that stretches, realistically, from 9am to 7pm. The gym, pilates, the small routines that are meant to keep everything balanced, functional, “together.” The sense that you are, broadly speaking, doing what you’re supposed to be doing.

Which leaves the novel living in tthe margins. What I love is kicked to “whatever is left” at the end of the day. Not neglected, exactly, but not central either. Something you return to when you can, rather than something your life is structured around. And that “when you can” becomes inconsistent. Uneven. Sometimes weeks pass without touching it, and then suddenly there’s a day where something opens and you write three pages in one go, and it feels like you’ve remembered how to do it.

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And then it closes again. So what’s difficult is not the slowness itself, but what it does to your perception of the work.

Because when progress is this gradual, it’s hard to hold onto a sense of momentum. The novel doesn’t feel like something that’s unfolding - it feels like something that exists in fragments, loosely connected, waiting for a version of you that has more time, more clarity, more… something.

It’s very easy, in those moments, to start measuring it against an imagined pace, and doing a “habit tracker” to push yourself harder. The version where you wake up early and write every day. Where weekends are structured around it. Where the novel moves forward in a way that is visible, trackable, reassuring. The version where, after two years, you have something closer to a draft than a collection of pages.

That version exists, but not here.

And I’m starting to think that might be the point, as hard as it is to admit it. Not that slowness is inherently better, or more meaningful, or more “authentic.” But that this is the version of writing that fits into the life I actually have, not the one I imagine I should have. A life where time is limited, where energy is uneven, where creativity has to exist alongside everything else rather than in place of it.

Which makes the process less clean, but also more real. Because the truth is, I am writing it - yes, slowly and inconsistently. In a way that doesn’t always feel like progress. But those fifty-five pages do exist. They weren’t there before. They hold something that didn’t exist before. And even if the movement between them is barely perceptible from one week to the next, it’s still movement; just not the kind that translates easily.

So, I guess I’m trying to accept that some things take longer not because you’re doing them wrong, but because they require a different kind of time. Not the efficient, optimised kind, but the kind that stretches, pauses, returns. The kind that doesn’t align neatly with schedules or expectations.

The novel might take years (please don’t). More than I expected. More than feels comfortable to admit. It might remain, for a long time, something that exists in notebooks rather than as a finished object.

And still, I think it’s worth continuing.

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Not because of the end result, which feels distant and abstract, but because of the act itself. The sitting down, the writing by hand, the small, stubborn insistence on returning to it even when it doesn’t feel like it’s going anywhere.

Because maybe progress, in this context, isn’t about speed or volume. Maybe it’s about staying. About not letting the slowness turn into abandonment. About allowing something to take the time it needs, even if that time doesn’t fit neatly into the rest of your life.

Fifty-five pages in two years - it’s not nothing, but it doesn’t feel like enough either. And that tension, between knowing you’re doing it, and still feeling like you’re falling short, is where the whole thing seems to live.

Less of a theme, I’d say, more of a rhythm: moving between the personal, the literary, and the occasional piece that pulls you out of your own head entirely. The kind of mix that doesn’t necessarily resolve into anything cohesive, but still feels right. So, here are some pieces that stayed with me lately - divided, as always, between books first, and then everything else that makes life feel slightly more alive.

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1. (All things) books and literature

• Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina: a rereading - Methinks Books
  Rereading as a form of attention rather than nostalgia. The kind of piece that reminds you that some books don’t stay still, they shift depending on who you are when you return to them.

• The Master and Margarita (0 of 5…) - Henry Eliot
  Playful, slightly irreverent, but still precise. A good reminder that literary criticism doesn’t have to feel heavy to be sharp.

• Evelyn Waugh vs modern therapy culture - Books Worth Reading
  Unexpectedly compelling. A conversation between literature and contemporary self-help culture that shouldn’t work as well as it does, but… it does.

• Festival du Livre de Paris 2026 - Barbara Reviews Books
  The kind of piece that makes you wish you had been there, or at least nearby. Please take me in your suitcase next time, Bárbara.

2. On thinking about how we live (and read, and focus)

• How to stop going to bed feeling like you waster your day - Chic Girl Moment
  That low-level, end-of-day dissatisfaction, named without overcomplicating it.

• How I actively learn and research - Ayushi Thakkar
  Practical, but not rigid. More about mindset than method.

• How reading books regulates your nervous system - Big Think Books
  A useful reframing of reading as something that shapes attention, not just fills time.

3. The world, slightly zoomed out

• Why this war? A conversation on Iran - NYRB
  Measured, informed, and worth ALL the attention it asks for.

• A poltrona invisível da escola do Largo - Manuel Fúria
  Sharp, observant, and very smart in the way that makes it resonate more broadly.

4. Culture, taste, and everything in between

• Mother’s Day gift edit 2026 - Domino Homefront
  A reminder that even the most commercial formats can feel thoughtful when done right. And even though the “official” Mother’s Day has already past when this post goes live, a surprise treat is even better :)

• A kaleidoscope of sound - The Culture Crunch
  More atmospheric than analytical - in a good way.

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Reading all like this feels less like catching up and more like drifting slightly outward.

Not everything stays, but something always does. Hope you enjoy :)