August is always a mad month. People travel, schedules change, new terms begin, and the reading we meant to do remains… sitting exactly where we left it.

So I am approaching September with a deliberately small and approachable plan for finding my way back into The Curiosity Commons: choose one room, begin with ten minutes, and let the salon at the end of the month provide a finish line.

We are now entering the final month of the summer edition. That gives us four more weeks with Homer, heroes and the stories we tell ourselves before we bring everything together at the end of September. Don't worry about having to catch up on anything. This letter contains a few ideas for returning to the edition, taking something meaningful from it and reaching the end with a proper sense of closure.

First, the book club

The Son of Nobody discussion was one of the best conversations we have had in here.

We did not agree, and that is what made it so much fun. There were some strong differences of opinion over the character of Harlow: what to make of him and how far to trust his work. Beyond that, there was a wider split over what Martel is doing with the book as a whole. Is the retelling a correction, setting straight a record that Homer skewed? And is Psoas even a real example of “a nobody”?

We did not settle on anything definitive, and I would love to hear from anyone who could not attend, as well as those who joined us but had not quite finished the book yet.

Leave a comment

Tips I am giving myself for the next four weeks

Here is what I am trying in September:

– Pick one area to focus on. For me, that will be the psychology room. Check out the map to see where you fancy wandering for the month here.

– Lower the bar for starting to ten minutes. Twenty realistic minutes during a Tuesday lunch break will get me further than the optimistic hour I keep promising myself after work and then never quite managing to sit down and do.

– Attach it to something I already do. For me, that means morning coffee and my lunch break at work. I am much more likely to read if I give it a place in the day instead of waiting for some miraculous stretch of free time to appear.

– Let the salon be the finish line (September 27th!). Having a particular date in mind gives the season a shape. I do not need to complete everything by then, but I would like to arrive with one thought, question or discovery that I want to talk about.

An introduction to the psychology room

The psychology room begins with a question that sounds abstract until you spend a few minutes applying it to yourself:

If you can no longer tell the story of your own life coherently, are you still you?

Narrative identity is the idea that we create a sense of who we are by arranging our memories and experiences into an evolving story. We connect what happened in the past to the person we believe ourselves to be now and the person we expect to become next.

Research suggests that being able to make some sense of our experiences can be associated with well-being. When that sense of continuity breaks down, it can sometimes cause distress. This does not mean that everyone needs a perfectly ordered life story, or that there is only one correct version of the self. It raises a more interesting question: how much editing, interpretation and even invention goes into the story we call “me”?

This connects closely to what happens to Harlow in Son of Nobody. I will avoid saying anything too specific for those who have not finished, but I would love to discuss his mental state at the end with anyone who would like to.

If you are reading the free preview, the rest of this letter includes my three recommended places to begin in the psychology room, four journal prompts for September and details of our next Sunday study session. If you would like to join us for the final month of the summer edition and the closing Curiosity Salon, you are very welcome to come in.

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When my husband enquired what I was cooking, I was quick to correct him lest his perception of me be irrevocably changed. No, I wasn’t cooking. I was researching. I wasn’t simply making honey and sesame pancakes; I was conducting experimental archaeology. There would be a full report and photographic documentation, after all.

I had stumbled upon The Classical Cookbook by Andrew Dalby and Sally Grainger, a delightful little book that combines recipes reconstructed from ancient sources with context of what household life and festivities would have looked like across the Mediterranean. The British Museum lists a few of them here. Since I had spent much of the summer immersed in ancient Greek storytelling and history, it occurred to me that tasting something from that world might offer a form of understanding that reading alone could not.

Check out the book here.

Beyond that, I have always loved a side project. I read through the recipes, briefly entertained more ambitious experiments involving tuna steaks and stuffed chicken, and then happily convinced myself that the pancakes were not merely the easiest option, but the most historically illuminating.

According to The Classical Cookbook, pancakes like these were most likely sold on the streets of ancient Athens from portable braziers. Surviving writings mention “mist rising at dewy daybreak from warm pancakes” and describe them as “drugged with sesame seeds” (p. 38). The result was delicious. We ate the pancakes warm, drizzled with honey and scattered with sesame seeds.

Luckily, misshapen pancakes taste just as sweet.

There was something faintly thrilling about it. The ingredients were ordinary and the recipe was simple but it allowed the ancient world to cross briefly from the abstract to the sensory. I was no longer just reading about people thousands of years ago eating them. I know understand their slightly cloying sweetness and stickiness. I had enjoyed a delicious brunch, tried a new recipe and learned something too. This is the sort of thing I mean when I talk about cultivating a joyful intellectual life.

Still life with eggs, birds and bronze dishes, from the House of Julia Felix, Pompeii.

What even is an intellectual life?

Perhaps “an intellectual life” sounds grander than I intend it to. The phrase conjures a well-lit study, shelves of intimidating books and a person who has both read Proust and retained enough of him to make a relevant observation over dinner. Somehow, the picture rarely includes a woman in her pyjamas photographing a slightly misshapen pancake at nine o’clock on a Sunday morning.

At its core, though, I think it is simply a habit of noticing what interests you and giving yourself permission to pursue it in a way that you enjoy. You encounter something, wonder about it and decide that the question deserves a little of your time. There is a particular satisfaction in learning something just because you wanted to know it. And I think this matters because it makes ordinary life more interesting. Curiosity gives significance to things that might otherwise pass without much notice. It also gives us interests chosen for our own pleasure, consciously away from the demands of work and the expectation that everything we do must be productive. I think this is why knowledge becomes more pleasurable the more it connects with life. A fact remembered for an examination is useless. A fact that changes what we notice or how we understand something gains significance. The value of learning is that more of the world becomes available to us.

So how exactly do you do it?

Curiosity requires a degree of mental looseness, for want of a more elegant phrase. This mindset is difficult to achieve when most portions of the day have already been assigned a purpose, and the few that remain tend to be immediately filled with whatever our phones decide to show us. I do not say this from the serene distance of someone who has transcended distraction. I am perfectly capable of picking up my phone to investigate a passing thought and resurfacing twenty minutes later with no answer, but a detailed knowledge of a stranger’s morning routine. The machinery of modern life is extremely good at catching our attention before we have decided where we would like to place it and we need to resist it.

If we want an intellectual life, then, we must protect some small portion of our attention from being spoken for. This can be achieved through small, conscious effort. It might be twenty minutes without a screen in the morning with a coffee, a walk taken alone without headphones or one evening a week in which we resist the urge to be productive. Taking time for solitude is also important here, in the sense of creating a place in which to think independently and feel free from the need to react to whatever has been put before us. We need to cultivate a mental space in which nothing has to be posted, explained or transformed into something useful before we can work out what we actually think.

For me, prioritising this kind of life has also meant accepting that I cannot be equally interested in everything at once. The abundance of knowledge is exhilarating, but it can also become overwhelming. There are always more books to read, languages to learn, films to see and subjects about which I remain embarrassingly ignorant. Faced with all of it, I am occasionally tempted to devise an ambitious system that would allow me to become proficient in medieval history, astronomy and Japanese ceramics by Christmas. These systems burn out quickly, however. What works better is choosing a question and loosely following it. This kind of path may look inefficient from the outside, but efficiency is not the point.

This is also why simplifying other parts of life can be so valuable. Every routine we make easier returns a little attention to us. Simplification can be as ordinary as eating the same breakfast, leaving an evening unplanned, borrowing books instead of researching the perfect edition or deciding that not every minor decision deserves a committee meeting inside one’s own head. The purpose is not to optimise life until we have converted ourselves into highly efficient knowledge-acquisition machines. It is to create enough breathing room to notice what we want to know. And once we discover what we want to know, one question rarely remains only one question.

It is one of the great pleasures of learning that, despite what the structure of formal education might lead us to believe, knowledge does not actually arrange itself into neat little categories. Take my pancakes. I suppose they belong to culinary history, but they also open onto agriculture and trade: where were the wheat, honey and sesame grown, and how did they reach Athens? They raise questions about labour: who ground the flour, tended the braziers and sold the finished pancakes? And they raise questions about historical survival. Why did this recipe happen to survive, while countless other everyday foods disappeared? And that is just looking at the history adjacent questions. I could go on more and delve into food science, anthropology or language.

This is also why an intellectual life should not be reduced to reading. Books give us language, history and ideas, along with access to lives we could might not encounter. But knowledge becomes more meaningful when it is brought back into the world. This touches upon one of my greatest irritations. Online, we often see knowledge being treated as a form of display. We announce how many books we have read, arrange our interests into an identity and become anxious when someone mentions a writer, theory or historical event of which we know nothing. The intellectual life can then become strangely defensive: an endless attempt to prove that we belong among the people who know things.

Yet learning, properly pursued, tends to have the opposite effect. Every answer reveals several questions we had not known enough to ask. Every subject has its own histories, arguments and complications, most of which remain invisible from the outside. As our knowledge grows, so does our awareness of everything beyond it. An intellectual life is not built by conquering all knowledge. It is built by remaining willing to engage with it: to admit that we do not know, to investigate the questions that matter to us and to take pleasure in whatever they allow us to see.

Later that Sunday morning, I could not claim that making honey and sesame pancakes had transformed my understanding of the ancient Mediterranean. I had not uncovered a lost civilisation or made a meaningful contribution to the field of experimental archaeology. I had made breakfast. But a book changed my usual morning routine, and the morning had made the distant past feel slightly less distant. I had read something, wondered about it and followed the thought far enough to taste it. My life was a little more interesting because I had.

That, more than the number of difficult books on the shelf or facts available for deployment over dinner, is the intellectual life I want: one in which curiosity is given room to escape the page and interfere with the day.

-Lauren x

This essay is also the beginning of a series about building an intellectual life as a more curious way of inhabiting the world.

If that sounds like the kind of life you would like to make more room for, you may enjoy The Curiosity Commons, my paid reading community for the intellectually restless. Each season, we follow a rich central theme through literature, history, culture and ideas, with plenty of room to wander down the paths that interest you most.

Our next season begins this autumn, when we will be venturing into witches, folklore and the stories societies tell about knowledge, power and the people they fear. You do not need to complete everything or keep pace with anyone else. Think of it as somewhere to find your next question, rather than another syllabus to finish.

Join the Curiosity Commons

The day has come to talk about our anchor novel, The Son of Nobody. I've loved seeing the different reactions to it in the threads so I'm looking forward to having a good chat about it this weekend.

Here are the details:

When: Sunday 23 August, 9:00pm Japan time
Australia (Sydney/Melbourne): 10:00pm
Australia (Perth): 8:00pm
Central …

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There are already so many wonderful recommendations being shared this month, which got me pondering the kind of reading guide I wanted to create. I’m the kind of reader who can’t help connecting things. I like making books talk to each other - noticing how they agree or diverge, and noticing how writers from different places, languages and traditions approach similar questions in different ways. So this year, I’ve put together a small syllabus centred around a single theme:

Women & Power

Why power?

Earlier this month, I stumbled across an article from the World Economic Forum discussing research that ranked countries according to the legal protections offered to women. Out of the 190 countries examined, only 14 received a score of 100, meaning that, according to the measures used, they offered women the same legal protections as men. The balance of power between people in a society shapes daily life intimately. Who gets to make decisions? Who controls money, movement, work and the direction of their own life? Who is protected by the law, and who has to rely on the goodwill of others? These questions are political and personal and they shape our relationships, homes, bodies and even how we understand ourselves, to an extent.

So this year’s guide is centered around women and the topic of power.

It won’t offer any conclusions about what women’s lives are “really like.” The books included here come from different languages, histories and cultural contexts, and reading them as reports on some universal female experience would flatten what makes them interesting. Instead, I hope they might create an interesting space for comparison.

Reading books in conversation with one another can show us things that aren’t always revealed when we read them individually. One book can complicate, or even undo, an assumption we have carried over from another. A question that appears peripheral in one story can become pressing when it reappears somewhere else. For me, that is one of the greatest pleasures of reading widely.

To help with instigating those kinds of reflective conversations, here are five questions you can ask about any of these books. Of course, you don’t need to answer all of them every time. I like writing them in my reading journal and loosely using different coloured tabs for passages that seem to connect to each question.

1. Who holds the power in this story?

2. How do they use it?

3. What does it cost them?

4. What does it cost the people around them?

5. Whose power, or what kind of power, do people overlook?

With that in mind, let’s begin.

I. Power over the body

“Being a woman is a really violent experience.” - Kristen Stewart

Kristen Steward (love her) said this last year while discussing her directorial debut, The Chronology of Water. She was speaking about how our bodies are one of the first places power is exercised over us. They are legislated, watched, judged, desired, controlled and commented upon. Other people have strong opinions about what they should look like, who should have access to them and what we should be willing to sacrifice on their behalf. And there is no escape from this experience. We can disagree with societal rules and refuse them, but we can’t step outside of our bodies and the associated experiences completely. Which is why I think the body is a compelling place to begin a conversation about power.

1. The Vegetarian by Han Kang, translated by Deborah Smith from Korean

   • What happens when a woman refuses the role that others have assigned for her body?

2. Hunchback by Saou Ichikawa, translated by Polly Barton from Japanese

   • Who is permitted desire, sex and reproductive autonomy?

3. Woman at Point Zero - Nawal El Saadawi, translated by Sherif Hetata from Arabic

   • What does bodily autonomy mean when control over the body is inseparable from money and survival?

4. Still Born by Guadalupe Nettel, translated by Rosalind Harvey from Spanish

   • How freely can we choose motherhood, or choose not to?

Things to think about

Who believes they have the right to decide what happens to this body?

What does this woman gain or lose by resisting expectations of her body?

How free can a choice be when the choices available to us have already been shaped by society?

II. Power inside the home

"A woman's happiest kingdom is home, her highest honor is the art of ruling it not as a queen, but as a wise wife and mother." Louisa May Alcott

Throughout a lot of history, the home was the only domain that a woman was allowed to govern, and running one well is real, relentless work. But the home is also where power gets tangled. In the same four walls someone decides who works and who rests, who serves and who is served, who controls money, who makes decisions, who is free to leave. It can contain a woman’s dominion and her confinement at the same time. The domestic sphere is often presented as entirely separate from the political one, but I think that it is the place that power is most intimately enacted.

The following books explore what happens when a house becomes a place of inheritance, service, expectation and control.

1. Woodworm by Layla Martínez, translated by Sophie Hughes and Annie McDermott, from Spanish

   • How does power linger in a house after the people who first exercised it have gone?

2. So Long a Letter by Mariama Bâ, translated by Modupé Bodé-Thomas, from French

   • What happens when the structure around which a woman has built her life suddenly reveals how little power she actually possesses?

3. The Waiting Years by Fumiko Enchi, translated by John Bester from Japanese

   • What forms of power are available to women whose lives are organised around facilitating the desires of others?

Things to think about

Who does the work that keeps this particular household functioning?

Who is free to leave?

Is there a separation between care and control?

III. Power and the State

“There are only the deliberately silenced, or the preferably unheard.” Arundhati Roy

Roy said this during her acceptance of the 2004 Sydney Peace Prize to challenge the idea of that some people are “voiceless”. People may speak but not be heard. Their experiences can never make it into official records, despite their suffering, resistance and protests. Institutions can actively choose to focus their attention elsewhere. This is the power of institutions. The state can transform questions of women’s bodies, movement and worth into matters of policy and law.

These books ask what happens when private lives collide with the machinery of history and the state.

1. Minor Detail by Adania Shibli, translated by Elisabeth Jaquette, from Arabic

   • What happens when someone’s suffering becomes a “minor detail” in someone else’s version of history?

2. The Age of Goodbyes by Li Zi Shu, translated from Chinese by YZ Chin

   • How do political borders and national histories shape the lives that women can build?

3. Tomb of Sand by Geetanjali Shree, translated by Daisy Rockwell, from Hindi

   • What might be possible when a woman crosses the boundaries that were supposed to define her?

Things to think about

When does a woman’s private life become a matter of public policy?

Whose suffering enters the official record?

What forms of resistance remain possible when institutions meant to protect you don’t.

IV. Power between Women

“Chloe liked Olivia.” Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

A deceptively simple sentence considering how much it signifies.

In A Room of One's Own, Woolf imagines Chloe and Olivia as a way of thinking about relationships between women outside their relationship to men. Much of the fiction available to her, Woolf observed, seemed to position women primarily as daughters, wives, lovers or rivals. But what happens when women are central to one another’s stories?

Relationships between women can offer the exact same intricacies of those between men: intimacy, solidarity, liberation, rivalry, cruelty, hierarchy. After all, women don’t exist outside the structures of power that shape society as a whole.

These books explore the complicated power women can hold over one another as friends, rivals, colleagues, family and community.

Out by Natsuo Kirino, translated by Stephen Snyder from Japanese

• What happens when a group of women discover that solidarity can be a source of liberation and a danger?

My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante, translated by Ann Goldstein from Italian

• Can intimacy exist without comparison? And what happens when the person who knows you best is also the person against whom you measure yourself.

La Bastarda by Trifonia Melibea Obono, translated by Lawrence Schimel from Spanish

• Who gets to decide which women belong and what happens to those who refuse the roles their community assigns them?

Things to think about

Can intimacy become a source of power?

How do women reproduce, or resist reproducing, the hierarchies that constrain them?

Can friendship exist without comparison?

V. Power over the self

“Definitions belong to the definers, not the defined.” Toni Morrison, Beloved

Morrison’s line refers to one of the most fundamental forms of power: the power to name. Throughout this syllabus, we have moved through different territories where power is exercised. The body. The home. The state. Our relationships with other women. But there is one final frontier: the self.

After institutions, families, communities and other people have each attempted to lay their claim, what remains of our ability to define who we are? Who has the authority to name us? Which identities do we inherit? Which do we reject? And is freedom the ability to become somebody new or to finally live as the person we already are?

These books approach selfhood as something unstable, contested and continually in the process of becoming.

Near to the Wild Heart by Clarice Lispector, translated by Alison Entrekin from Portuguese

• What happens when a woman’s inner life doesn’t fit the identities available to her?

Bad Habit by Alana S. Portero, translated by Maya Faye Lethem from Spanish

• Who gets to define who a person and what does it take to claim that power for yourself?

Women without Men by Shahrnush Parsipur, translated by Faridoun Farrokh from Persian

• Can becoming someone else be an act of freedom?

Things to think about

Who has the authority to name or define the self?

What identities has this character inherited? Which do they reject?

Is freedom the ability to become someone new or to live as who you already are?

Where to begin

You don’t need to read all of these books. In fact, I rather hope you don’t approach this guide as another challenge to complete.

I would suggest choosing the section that interests you most, picking one or two books that seem as though they might have something interesting to say to one another and having a read. Keep a few of the questions in your mind as you read, maybe use some sticky tabs and note something down if it surprises you. Feel free to change your mind and let the books complicate each other. For more guidance on how to approach reading a little more deeply, my Permission to Read series covers literary analysis skills in an approachable way that will enable you to have better conversations about the book you read. The foundational episodes are out, and the toolkit will be being updated regularly.

If you enjoyed this…

If you’re new here, you can subscribe for free to receive future reading guides, essays and recommendations.

And if you enjoy this kind of reading - placing books alongside each other and following a question across different cultures and seeing where the conversations lead - you might enjoy being part of The Curiosity Commons.

This autumn we’ll be delving into witches and folklore, exploring the stories, history and ideas surrounding them through literature and beyond. And, inevitably, we’ll be returning to some of the questions raised here too: power, the body, women’s relationships with each other, and who gets to define what a woman should be.

If that sounds like your kind of rabbit hole, I’d love to have you join us.

Join The Curiosity Commons

Until then, happy Women in Translation Month and happy reading.

-Lauren x

A teacher's copy of Homer survived for nearly two thousand years. It is a small wooden tablet from third-century Egypt, carrying eight lines from The Iliad, written out as an example for students to learn from. This particular object (see it in all its glory below) made it down for our viewing pleasure today. Innumerable others didn't.

An example of a classical text surviving through use in school – eight lines from Homer’s Iliad written on a wooden tablet by a teacher: Egypt, 3rd century British Library

Considering how influential classical thought has been in shaping the world, surprisingly few texts have actually made it down the timeline. When we think about why, what often comes to mind are dramatic book burnings or losses due to the fall of empires. However, according to historians, the real reason for the dearth of primary sources from this period is much more banal. It really just depended on which texts were copied down for the purpose of medieval education.

Most people throughout history couldn’t read or write, so the select few who could were the ones acting as incidental gatekeepers to which historical fragments would get passed down. And because most of those people were in religious sects or schools, that was the filter texts had to pass through. Sappho’s poems, for example, have largely not survived because they weren’t deemed suitable educational material for young medieval minds. Ancient grammatical texts teaching Latin and Greek, however, are in comparative abundance. Homer, Virgil, Cicero, Horace and Ovid all survived due to their use in medieval education.

Another fruitful source of ancient texts is the papyri of ancient Egypt, because the conditions there - dry and hot - preserved the scrolls much better than Europe’s humid, wet environment. After reading about this, I fell down a rabbit hole through the British Library’s digitised collection of ancient fragments. I do absolutely recommend you go and have a look through their collection if this interests you. It was mind-blowing to see an actual scan: to see the handwriting of people who lived thousands of years ago. I spent a fruitful hour investigating and marvelling at the feat of humanity that means I, sitting in a Vietnamese cafe, can stumble upon papyrus fragments of Sappho’s works.

Papyrus 739 : Sappho, fragment of a poem concerning her brother Charaxus. 3rd century. British Library

The Bankes Homer, consisting of Iliad 24.127-804. Includes, in the margins, the names of characters to indicate passages of direct speech, as well as abbreviated notes marking narrative sections of text. The breathing marks and accents have in most cases been added by a later hand. British Library

Seeing these fragments really gave me a new appreciation for Harlow's story in Son of Nobody - I could imagine poring over damaged texts and how difficult it would have been to piece anything coherent together, but also how thrilling.

And then, naturally, I started wondering what historians of the future will make of us.

As a teacher I am cognisant of how much we have moved away from using paper in schools. The majority of my students take notes on their laptops or iPads, and a lot of teachers and schools now encourage digital delivery of slides and textbooks. So if we look at the historical precedent of educational texts being the ones to survive, what will happen now that classrooms are producing less physical records?

Texts got lost in medieval times because they weren’t copied down or preserved where, by contrast, we increasingly record everything digitally: photos, messages, notes, documents. So, perhaps this means more will be available for future historians to dig through and try to make sense of?

I am not sure. Just because a lot of material exists now doesn’t necessarily mean these things will exist permanently, and I can think of a few different ways the information could be lost.

If you want a more intellectually restless life, consider becoming a paid subscriber and joining The Curiosity Commons. Members get weekly essays, seasonal curriculums, and live events, alongside a community of readers and learners scattered right across the world. Come and build the thoughtful life you know you deserve.

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I am writing to you this week from a book cafe in Vietnam, sipping on a salt coffee and gathering my thoughts on the various things I've been investigating. I have been meandering in the history room. Before I get to that, I wanted to say how lovely it has been watching so many of you make your way through Son of Nobody, and how s…

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I had just read that more than half of Gen Z now say they want to be influencers, and I had turned to my husband, my face already sliding into the wry, pinched expression of every disapproving elder before me, when I came to my senses and stopped myself.

Article from Fortune on July 31st, 2026

Dismay at the young is the oldest and laziest take there is, and I know it. I have, in fact, two half-written essays in my drafts folder bemoaning that same tired generational discourse.

And anyway, their wanting is entirely natural. After all, you become what you spend your time with. If a child spends their time staring into the night’s sky, maybe they’ll want to be an astronaut. Watch films together and perhaps they’ll hear the siren call of the stage. Point their eyes at a tiny screen filled with heavily filtered people paid to be looked at, and there’s a good chance the child will want to become one of those instead. The phones and the algorithms manufacture this aspiration to a glamorous, easy-looking life, and the grubby end of it will now sell you a degree in chasing it: a university in America offers one in content creation for 140,000 dollars, so your child can graduate into flogging diet teas to teenagers.

So I won’t ask anyone why they want this, I’ll ask something more useful.

What, exactly, do you want to influence me to do?

Influence is a transitive, nebulous thing that is hard to measure and quantify, but at its core it is related to an action, and in most of the things we scroll past in a day, the action is the same small, three-letter word. Buy.

Buy this cream. Guys I am obsessed with this.
Buy this powder. Make sure you run don’t walk.
Buy this version of a morning. My 5-9 before my 9-5 featuring runs with Strava and a De’Longhi coffee machine #ad.
Buy this idea of what chic is. I’m chic and you can be too in this matching set and lipgloss.

Vanity, 1907. Frank Cadogan Cowper RA

Our feeds are, for the most part, shops wearing friends’ clothing.

Which is the first hint that the influencer may not be the one doing the influencing at all.

What I mourn keenly is the waste. Persuasion used to be part of education, there was an art to it - rhetoric, of bending a human heart towards new thought or action. The ancient Greeks (I have discovered recently in my forays into reading The Odyssey) had a slightly different concept of the idea of fame than we do: Kleos. It meant glory that came from doing something. Interestingly, the word has roots in "hearing", because kleos was seen as an echo of what people heard about you. It was the sound of a great act as it travelled out into the world. Even until relatively recently, fame used to be a consequence of something you did well, or accomplished - you were good at football, acting, painting, speaking, whatever, and the fame came after. The trouble now is that we have separated being known from the thing that used to earn it. We have confused influence with attention, and attention with achievement.

It is the difference between Demosthenes rousing a city to defend itself and a man in flattering light rousing you toward a marginally better water bottle.

And you can see this play out in the modern age in what happens with “ad” labels. If you have spent much time on Instagram or TikTok, you may have noticed that the label often gets buried in tiny font at the end of a caption, or conveniently left off altogether. Why so shy? Because when a post from an influencer is clearly labelled ad, it doesn’t perform well. Persuasion only seems to work, in that sphere, while it stays invisible. And yet when a respected actor or chef, or someone admired for something or other, puts their name to a brand, it often does extremely well. What’s the difference?

The admired person has a self you already trust. You aren’t really buying the product so much as buying their judgement. It’s why Barack Obama’s seasonal book recommendations are always such a highlight for me and for many others. That is kleos in action. And it shows exactly what the pure influencer is missing. They don’t really have anything underneath. Amassing a following is the whole achievement, so there is no deed underneath for trust to attach to.

Because when you get down to it, they aren't really influencing anyone. To exert real influence you need something of your own to transmit, a belief or an idea you actually want another person to think or do. The brand has that. The influencer does not. The enthusiasm they perform so convincingly on screen was handed to them with deliverables. They are functioning as a pipe the brand's message travels down on its way to an audience, and a pipe is replaceable, because nothing about the message depends on which one it runs through. Swap the face and the campaign runs identically. Real influence cannot be swapped out like that, because it comes from a particular person wanting a particular thing. This comes from nobody, and is aimed at anyone.

So to anyone who aspires to this as a career, I would say something simple. Be a person before you are an influencer. Do something first.

I suspect that a lot of teenagers, staring into the burning blue light of their screens, think influencing is an easy gig. Turn up, press record, exclaim how "life changing" the water bottle is, pass go and collect 200 pounds. I tend to disagree. If your whole identity is built around having an audience, you are only ever as stable as their attention. You can be a fantastic influencer and still wake one grey morning to the sinking realization that, despite dedicating your life to being seen by millions, if you were to disappear that afternoon not one of them would remember a thing about you.

This is what I most want a teenager considering studying a degree in content creation to hear. Having a real reason for what you do, a why, is not just what makes your influence worth anything. It is also the only thing that holds you together when the job turns on you (and it always does). Discourse online is often a cesspit, and it will find you. Your following will wane, because every following wanes. Public opinion will swing against you, because it always eventually swings. If all you ever built was reach, you have nothing to shelter you when any of that arrives. But if there is something additional, a thing you actually believe in and were doing first, then you have a core the storm can batter without carrying you off.

Despite what you just read, I don’t sneer at anyone who wants to influence people.

Wanting to move others is one of the most human and oldest things there is. To be influenced, in the most literal sense, is to be changed by someone else’s alien ideas, and I think that is necessary and beautiful for a curious and fulfilled life. Every book that changed the way you thought about something was an act of influence. Every teacher who made you open yourself a little to a subject you had no confidence in, or a friend whose advice helped you see a problem in a new way. That is all influence too, but the kind that enlarges you. It leaves you more yourself, not less. So the task is not to blithely condemn influencers, but to be more discerning in telling the two apart. To stay porous to the influence that improves us while refusing the influence that only wants to hollow us into a customer. To keep, in an economy engineered to turn you into a buyer, the far older and more precious ability to be changed for the better by other people.

So here is my answer to my own question, the one I asked at the beginning.

What do I want to influence you to do?

I want to influence you to find joy in reading and learning. To hand yourself over, sometimes, to minds larger and stranger and wilder than any feed will let you see, and to let them change you. Everything else I make is only its echo, and I am at peace with that.

If you, or the young people in your acquaintance, want to influence people, then good, truly. Only aim that ancient power at something more solid than becoming a human checkout, and be able to answer the question honestly before a brand answers it for you.

So. What do you want to influence me to do?

Leave a comment

Thanks, as always, for reading.

Lauren x

That, more or less, is the whole reason this Substack exists. If your answer has anything to do with reading, with learning for its own sake, with wanting the internet to feel like a conversation again rather than a shop that smiles at you, there is a room over at The Curiosity Commons where a few hundred of us are doing just that. The door is always open.

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Sources

Fortune Article - More than half of Gen Zers want to become influencers—so now Arizona State University is offering a content creation degree for $142K

CNN Article - Influencing looks like the new American Dream for young people. Universities are taking advantage

The Telegraph - People are desperate’: The cut-throat race to become an influencer

In this week’s letter, we’ll look at the highlights from July, I’ll share my reading and thinking from this week, and at the bottom there’s an announcement about regular and upcoming live events.

First off, the highlights.

I think a lot of us dove into July by getting stuck into the anchor novel, dipping a toe into the literature room, and embracing Odyssey fervor. Thanks again to everyone who has shared comments in the rooms and dropped interesting things into the chat. Please do keep going, because it’s fantastic to collate this body of knowledge together.

From the literature room:

• Bodopi kicked off a good discussion about the difference between discovering things in books versus on the internet.

• Marcello explored whether ‘polytropos’ might be better expressed in Italian or Latin.

• Anna discussed how she found her way into Greek myth, and posed the question of what is gained or lost by writing stories down.

From the Son of Nobody room:

• Jen brought up Thersites and connected the character to the Iliad, which led me down a fruitful rabbit hole and made fantastic connections to the History room themes.

• Lee, Victoria, Sherri and Kathleen were debating the unique structure of the book and how best to tackle it.

• Catherine asked whether the book might be nihilistic, something I’m currently thinking about and think will make for a fantastic debate on our book club discussion day. She also brought up again this split in how heroes and nobodies are portrayed.

• Anna questioned Martel’s intent in the naming of the characters and asked some very poignant thematic questions.

If you’re making progress with the book, definitely check out the Son of Nobody room, as there’s lots of food for thought there. It will mean we can have a wonderful discussion at the end of August for the book club.

So, what’s your plan for August’s Commons? For me, I’ll be meandering more in the history section this month. But now that I’ve done a large amount of input, I also want to try some of the creative and academic challenges posed for us in the rooms. Is anyone else up for a creative challenge?

Not a member yet? Consider this your invitation.

August is a lovely place to begin. We’ll have Reading Hours to sink into together, and on the weekend of the 23rd, our book club discussion of Son of Nobody, which is shaping up to be a proper debate. You don’t need to have been here since the start, and you don’t need to catch up on a thing. Every edition stays open for good, so nothing is ever missed, only waiting.

As Gandalf would say: you’re not late. You arrive exactly when you’re meant to.

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When I started the Commons, the part I most wanted to get right was the community. It’s one thing to have a map of rabbit holes to fall down; it’s another to have people falling down them at the same time as you. So this edition I’m adding a few ways for us to actually be in the same room – reading together, talking about the nov…

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They all die. Every man who sets sail out of Troy with Odysseus dies before the poem ends. Odysseus washes up on his shore alone, displaced by the years, and unrecognisable to everyone except his dog.

Of course, we don’t tend to remember the Odyssey this way. For most, thinking of the Greek epic conjures images of adventure: monsters, magic and exploration. But if you read it again with an eye on who actually survives the adventure it looks less like a triumph and more like a grim test of survival. Through that lens, the poem is not just the story of the man who makes it home. It is also a catalogue of all the ways you don’t.

I used to wish, as a child, that we lived in a world of magic and fantastic beasts - monsters that captivated and enthralled as well as posed danger. I thought our world, in contrast, was dull and two-dimensional. But actually, we do have monsters. The monsters that nearly stymied Odysseus, and caused the demise of his crew, do exist in our world. Each one represents a particular way of failing, and acts as a mirror to the things most likely to entrap us and keep us from the place we really want to reach. And none of the really dangerous ones have sharp teeth.

Monsters that feel like comfort

The Lotus Eaters, 1883, Charles J. Staniland

Let’s start with the Lotus Eaters. They live on an island dominated by the lotus tree and eat flowers “sweet as honey” which cause soporific contentment. Of course, once you take a nibble, there is the small catch that you also forget your home, your loved ones and long to stay only with your fellow dreamers. Odysseus had to drag his men back to the ship screaming.

Lotus Eaters haunt our realm too. Not in an embodied sense, but I can think of plenty of modern scenarios where that flower has been offered and nearly overtaken me.

I want to work out, I want to write, I want to study and travel and have a social life and meal prep and… but it has been a long week, and don’t I deserve a Saturday on my bed, scrolling? It would feel so good to just turn my brain off for a little while. Sometimes I feel so overstimulated it aches, so tired of caring and thinking. A weekend with no decisions and no output feels like the only thing I want…

But that is the danger. The rest itself isn’t an enemy. If you are tired, the occasional Saturday in bed wouldn’t ruin anything.

The trouble is that this digital flower doesn’t actually provide rest. The lotus doesn’t return anyone’s strength, it just smothers the motivation. The list above - writing, training, friends - these aren’t chores standing between me and life. It is life, the self, I am trying to nurture. So when I reach for the flower, the risk is that I come back up wanting a bit less than I did before. And the next Saturday is easier to give away, and the next, until one day the voice in my head screaming at me to do the list is quiet and I don’t even miss it.

We have digital flowers now and they offer comfort and faux-company for the small price of the only thing that would have gotten us home: the desire to stand up, sore and tired, and keep walking.

Monsters that feel righteous

The Cyclops by Odilon Redon

Polyphemus is a giant who traps Odysseus and his men in a cave and devours them in pairs. He actually does have teeth, but they don’t pose the sharpest threat to our hero’s journey home.

Odysseus gets out fine. He does what he needs to do, and he’s sailing away, open water widening between him and the island he was trapped on. And then he can’t bear the silence of his own victory. He turns back and shouts his real name so the giant will know exactly who beat him. Winning wasn’t enough. He needed to feel the satisfying heat come from his chest as he bellowed his success for all to hear, and that is his undoing.

Polyphemus is the son of the sea god Poseidon, who calls down a curse using the name that Odysseus just handed him. It is that curse that drowns the crew and costs Odysseus another agonising delay.

That turn-back-and-shout feeling, I know it intimately.

Someone is saying something wrong about me, in a way I could so easily correct, and I have already decided not to respond. It is a waste of time. I close the tab, I walk away, I block. But then… I open it again, I turn around, I draft the reply I am not going to send, and then I send it. I reread the comment that got under my skin. I screenshot it and send it to a friend. I unblock and say my piece, acid clogging in my throat.

The argument is, in most instances, utterly meaningless to my life and if I moved on gracefully it would have minimal impact on me at all. But the monster isn’t the argument.

It’s the need for them to know my righteousness, and its form is constructed with every hour I don’t spend on the things I actually want to be known for.

If the Lotus Eaters deleted the wanting, the Cyclops hijacks the doing. While I am turned around, facing the island I already escaped, drafting and redrafting, rereading and defending, I am not moving. And the most pernicious face of this monster is that it is really two in disguise: the Cyclops and Poseidon. Once I get involved, I hand the steering of my ship to someone who does not have my best interests at heart, and who indeed may enjoy watching me flounder for their own particular hit of lotus flower.

Monsters that feel like being sensible

The Sorceress, William Waterhouse, 1913

Circe offers Odysseus comfort. She provides food, shelter, requires nothing too strenuous and although he only means to stay a little while, somehow a year slips by. It takes his own men, eventually, to come and remind him that this was supposed to be a temporary pause, not a destination.

This is the monster I am most afraid of, because it can be mistaken for good sense.

It can take lots of different shapes. The job that is passionless and burning you out but at least offers some degree of stability. The relationship that is comfortable and kind but also no longer right. The city you meant to leave five years ago and represents the version of your life you were going to trade in later.

Whatever the shape, the voice is the same. It could be so much worse. People would kill for this. You would be mad to give it up. You won’t find better. So we stay another year, and then another, feasting at Circe’s table and telling ourselves that comfort is wisdom.

The viciousness of this particular monster is that in the night it creeps in and gently nibbles away at the part of you that can tell the difference. I don’t know if I am happy anymore, or if I have just acclimatised to misery. A monster that devours your ability to tell whether you want to leave is far more dangerous than one that blocks the exit.

The Lotus Eaters delete the wanting and the Cyclops hijacks the doing, but Circe is worse than both, because she eats years. It’s an ordinary, survivable Tuesday, two hundred times over, until you look up and cannot remember what you were walking towards, or even really that you were walking at all.

On having a sturdy mast

Ulysses and the Sirens, John William Waterhouse, 1891

Which brings us to the most important moment in the poem, because it can offer us modern wanderers, a trusty sword to use in our own battles.

The Sirens sing a song so beautiful that every sailor who hears it heads towards the rocks to get closer, and dies. Odysseus wants to hear it, because of course he does. So here is what he does not do: he does not resolve to be strong or tell himself he can handle it. Instead, he plugs his crew’s ears, and asks them tie him to the mast, with instructions that if he cries to be released, they should just to tie him tighter.

And it happens as he knew it would. The song comes, and he struggles against the ropes, and he screams to be untied, and his deaf crew, following the orders of the man he was an hour ago, only bind him harder and keep rowing.

The lesson we can learn from the most famous temptation in Western literature is not resist better. Odysseus treats his future self, the version who will be experiencing the song, as someone who cannot be trusted with the decision. So he takes the decision away from that self in advance, and gives it structure in the form of rope and people who cannot hear him change his mind.

We tell each other to be stronger and develop better willpower. Homer, three thousand years earlier, says: don’t rely just on being strong. Build the thing that saves you when you aren’t. Behavioural science caught up to this recently and gave it various fancy names, commitment devices, friction, precommitment, but the insight is ancient. Willpower fails in the strongest point of wanting. The mast and rope have to be built and assembled before you hear the song, by a version of you clear-eyed enough to know the wanting is coming.

This is why Odysseus survives and his men do not. He knows how he is going to fail, and he engineers around it. The hero of the Odyssey is the one with the most accurate map of his own weaknesses.

What has “home” got to do with it?

When Odysseus stays on Calypso’s island she offers him everything. Paradise in the form of immortality and an end to the whole exhausting business of trying to get somewhere. He could… just stop. But he sits on the beach and cries, looking out to the sea, because he wants to go home.

Home, for Odysseus, is literally a rocky island he has not seen for years, overrun by men eating his food and courting his wife, where he is presumed dead. It is objectively a worse offer than literal paradise. But home is also the place that represents him - his family, his responsibilities, his pride in being able to make the return. Home is a hard, uncertain, mortal life that is his.

Home is not just a place. It is the life you actually meant to be living and the self you actually deep-down want to be. Every monster is a way of losing control of that life. Making it home means gripping on to it through all the things that they offer, very kindly, to let you put it down.

Here is the part that isn’t really about the Odyssey any more. It’s about you.

You have a monster. Not all of them, but one you keep facing, the one that comes creeping in the dark when you feel weakest. For some people it is the flower, the comfort that smothers the plan. For others it is the shout from the deck, the pride that reopens a fight already won. For others the year or two stalling on Circe’s island or the song they steer toward knowing exactly what it does to them.

There’s nothing wrong with having monsters. Odysseus had all of them, and he is the hero. The only mistake is in believing you will beat yours by being strong in the moment, which is the one strategy one of the oldest survival stories we have tells you does not work.

The question was never whether you would meet your monster. You will. You do.

So before it comes: do you know where you are going?

And have you tied yourself to the mast yet?

Thank you, as always, for reading.

ーLauren x

New here? This is what I do, read closely and write about what the books turn up, the way this one turned into a piece about how we lose ourselves. Some of it's personal, like this. Some of it's a series where I teach the close reading itself, no jargon, no gatekeeping. It's free to follow along, and you'd be very welcome.

How is it here already? What happened to the first six months of the year? My dissertation deadline is suddenly looming frighteningly close and my maybe-change-my-job hope is looking like it'll have to be pushed back again by at least another year.

It's not really July's fault. It's just that she announces herself as the beginning of the last six months, and it makes me sit down and take stock of the first. What have I actually achieved this year, what did I do in February… it has slipped past me in a blur.

Maybe the problem that time isn't moving faster though, I think I'm just remembering less of it.

Around the same time this familiar dread showed up, my algorithm helpfully started delivering batches of “monthly favorites” content.

An example of the type of post my algorithm thinks I would appreciate

I took it as a sign from the universe and started thinking about if categorizing months like this would actually help. Maybe if I paid closer attention to my favorite things and made an effort to highlight them every few weeks, perhaps the year would stop passing me by unnoticed.

They didn't. A pair of shoes, a candle, earrings laid out in a flat-lay against a neutral background is presented with the intimacy of a diary entry but is essentially functioning as a haul. It's probably not dishonest; I can admit to loving a good serum myself, so I understand the sentiment. But would I remember March better if I'd classified my Hadalabo serum as a favorite? Would April's particular flavor stand out more if I'd catalogued the snazzy headscarf I bought and have been too afraid to wear ever since? I'm unconvinced. They are marketed as a way of memorializing a month but for most of them you could swap out “July” for “October” and aside from the sandals being switched for boots they would be pretty much indistinguishable.

So, if products don't help you remember a month better, what does?

I embarked upon some frantic rabbit holing and uncovered some interesting information. Research into how memory works seems to have produced a fairly settled answer for how to subjectively slow down time and remember it more: essentially, we remember novelty. According to Claudia Hammond, a BBC broadcaster and psychology lecturer whose book Time Warped is a pretty approachable account of this, the brain records what it finds distinct. That is why a week on holiday can feel like it flew by while you were in it, but clearly stays in your memory — she calls it the Holiday Paradox. It's also why adults often remember a disproportionate number of their teens and twenties, because of a so-called "reminiscence bump." Those years of our lives are full of firsts and they are what the brain keeps.

There's a second piece to this, which is about variety rather than novelty specifically. Neuroscientists studying time perception (I have dropped the articles I read down at the bottom for other time-stressed parties to peruse) have found that the brain partly tracks time by counting distinct events. A day with several different contexts (different places, tasks, sensations) leaves more impressions than a day where everything looks the same. Days that follow a steady routine tend to be compressed or dropped, however pleasant it was to live through.

Anyway, reading all of this made me feel better and also realize that I had been asking the wrong question. I don't want to own more memorable things. I want to have a more memorable July, and really, 2026.

Living in Japan, happily for me, does help in this endeavour. Seasonal flavors are built into the calendar here. April is predictably sakura, June is mint (my favorite; if you're ever here in June, the mint Crunky ice cream is god-tier), August turns to watermelon, November to sweet potato. Each season also has special events and focus on flowers and fruits, and there is usually at least one national holiday with some kind of special event (July's is tanabata a star festival where you make a wish and hang it on bamboo).

If you want to try this yourself, here’s what I will be doing in the hope that it may be helpful to you too:

• Stop and listen to whatever sound marks your season. It is cicadas here.

• Go to a local event you’ve never been to. I went to Gion Matsuri for the first time

• Watch films that match the texture of the month. It has been hot, oppressive, claustrophobic ones, for me (Picnic at Hanging Rock, The Virgin Suicides)

• Eat what’s in season where you are

• Pick a theme and let it run for a season — mine is Greek myth and retellings. (If you'd like to study with us, check out the curriculum here)

• Go somewhere new once a month, it doesn't have to be far, just new. I have bought a “Summer in Kyoto” magazine which lists cafes and day trips, so I intend to flick through the pages at random and discover my afternoon plans that way.

• Make a moodboard, playlist, or note at the end of the month.

• If you have the budget, spend it on things with an expiry date like a concert, an exhibition or a festival, rather than an object.

• If you travel, build in something specific to that place so that the entire experience doesn't disappear into a blur of ambiguous sun and cocktails, which is lovely but is also the kind of undifferentiated time that vanishes fastest. (More on this soon! I’ve got a piece in the works on traveling like an anthropologist.)

We cant stop July becoming August, and 2026 becoming 2027, but perhaps if we pay as much attention as we can to the small things each month, it will leave a bigger imprint in our memories and time will pass slowly.

I would love to know what you will be doing this summer to create some novel memories! And also, what is your local version of the cicada (the summer seasonal sound)?

Leave a comment

I hope this was helpful, and as always, thank you for reading and supporting my work.

-Lauren, x

References

Claudia Hammond, Time Warped: Unlocking the Mysteries of Time Perception (Canongate, 2012).

David M. Eagleman, “Human time perception and its illusions,” Current Opinion in Neurobiology, Vol. 18, Issue 2 (2008), pp. 131–136. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.conb.2008.06.002

Kondo, H.M., Gheorghiu, E. & Pinheiro, A.P. Malleability and fluidity of time perception. Scientific Reports 14, 12244 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-024-62189-7

This week’s letter comes in three parts: a discovery, a confession of fomo, and some exciting plans for live events.

I’ve been making headway with the Odyssey itself, and honestly, it’s more readable than I expected. I’ll write a little more on that below but first — the chat has been an absolute goldmine of discoveries and res…

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I’m writing to you from a very hot and humid Kyoto this Sunday morning, so it’s a relief to have an excuse to stay inside with an iced coffee and think out loud with you for a while. We’ve had a bit of time now to settle into the new edition, have a look around, and get hold of copies of Son of Nobody for those reading along with the anchor novel.

Thank you to everyone who’s been sharing finds in the chat. I’ve loved stumbling across them, and they’ve given me some proper food for thought.

I’d love to hear how your week has been. Have you read something that made you think? Encountered something interesting? It doesn’t have to be related to the edition. I think as a group we love a curious tidbit, so share whatever strikes you and I’ll look forward to reading and replying tomorrow.

Anyway, on to my weekly rabbit hole.

With the Odyssey film getting close, my feeds are filling up with coverage: the beautiful premiere looks, but also a surge of outrage about the film existing at all, the casting and a plethora of other directorial choices.

Which got me wondering: what is it about retellings that gets people so worked up? It reminded me of the furor over the Wuthering Heights film earlier this year (which, for the record, I saw and didn't much like, though not on principle, just as a film), and Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein caught similar criticism for its deviations (I haven't seen that one yet). Emerald Fennell said she was inspired more by the feeling of Wuthering Heights than its specific plot points.

But isn’t that allowed? To be inspired by an original, keep some of it, and let the rest be new? Retellings tend to reflect the concerns of their own moment; they tell us something about where we are now. So I wonder if the demand that canonical texts stay fixed and untouched says less about the texts and more about us: maybe when the present feels unstable, we want the past to hold still. A “faithful” adaptation promises us that something is solid and reliable.

The irony, of course, is that the Odyssey is the worst place to look for that because there is no original. The Homeric poems came out of an oral tradition which were performed differently every night by singers who kept what worked and dropped what didn’t, and were only stitched into a fixed text centuries later. Retelling is in the nature of the Odyssey itself. Every generation has kept parts that interested them and let the rest go (which relates very well to the question at the center of this whole edition).

That said, I don’t think faithfulness worship and endless remakes are our only two options. I do wish Hollywood would gamble on new stories more often. And a slavishly faithful adaptation would be its own kind of dull, because readings of a text aren’t stable either; no two of us are reading quite the same Son of Nobody right now.

So I’m curious to see the film. It comes out later here in Japan than most places and I eagerly await the opinions of those of you who get to it first. My only preconceived complaint is the casting of very famous faces: I’d have liked to watch Odysseus, rather than Matt Damon as Odysseus. But that may just be me.

What do you think? Are there retellings you’ve loved? Or ones you felt lost the thing that mattered?

See you in the threads.

Lauren x

p.s. I’d love your answers to the retellings question in the comments on this one. I’ll be replying through the week and of course in the threads as always.

Leave a comment

I read Heart the Lover by Lily King and Just Kids by Patti Smith earlier this year, and although they are different genres, time periods and subject matters, they're both love stories that properly got under my skin. Heart is about a campus love triangle in the 1980s, and Kids is a memoir of two cash-strapped artists finding each other in a 1960s New York that still allowed poor people a pinch of possibility. Both books are fantastic and I recommend them. But the thought that stuck with me more than either of their particular storylines was this: why do the romances that actually move me always seem to need some distance from 2026 to work?

Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog, Caspar David Friedrich, 1818

My initial answer was the obvious one: curiosity, uncertainty and surprise. These are the magic ingredients that make you ache for someone, and modern life has, to a startling extent, taken a Miley Cyrus worthy wrecking ball to all three. I mean, think about it. You meet someone interesting, so what do you do? Add them on social media, and their whole life is now presented to you, pre-sorted into separate exhibits: LinkedIn for their career history and slightly embarrassing networking attempts, Facebook for their university status updates from 2012, Instagram for the polished holiday photos and an insight into their algorithm through their liked posts. Each one a curated character profile you can sift, analyse and judge before you even consider whether you’d want to meet them again. And let’s say you do meet them again — curiosity and surprise are now faked, because you already know they work in tech and went to Thailand in 2014 and used to write on their friends’ walls in 2011 asking if anyone was going for drinks at The Phoenix on Thursday.

Anyway, that’s all true, but I bored myself thinking about it because it’s also obvious.

What does it even mean to be romantic?

A cursory scan of popular media will give you different but similarly trite answers. Charli XCX’s hit song “Everything Is Romantic“ lists things like “bad tattoos on sun-tanned skin” and “early nights in white sheets with lace curtains”. Vogue Arabia hailed 2026 as the year that romance was finally back, this time in the form of “layered lace slips over fine-knit turtlenecks, vintage florals worn with intent”. (I did start to wonder here whether my romance problem was simply that I’d been neglectful in swathing my home and self in sufficient quantities of lace — but no, we’ll soldier on past self-doubt.) Let’s turn to language.

It turns out that there are all kinds of new terms for specific romantic experiences now: situationship (intimacy without definition), the ick (sudden inexplicable revulsion), soft/hard launches (staged relationship disclosure), breadcrumbing, love bombing, benching, orbiting... Situationship even made it into Merriam-Webster properly, which is solid enough proof this isn’t just internet froth — brush up on your modern romantic terminology here, folks. We’ve never had more precise language for how to assess and discard a person, but there’s no modern equivalent for the ache itself, no modern version of carrying a torch or pining. All of this gives us words to describe and prescribe the thing while missing the point of what it is.

Let’s go deeper (by about two and a half thousand years)

Plato’s Symposium (Diotima’s speech, specifically) includes the idea that eros, or romantic love, is the feeling of desiring something you don’t have. Love, in this account, is a kind of reaching toward something not yet held. Aristophanes, a few speeches earlier, explains the same idea in the form of a myth: we were once whole, we were split in two, and love is the ache of a half looking for its other half. Romance, then, isn’t a spontaneous spark that arrives at the sight of a lace slip or a bad tattoo. You have to actually lack something first. If we follow that logic, then modern life’s romance troubles are structural.

The philosopher Byung-Chul Han has a name for this world: the Transparency Society. His argument, roughly, is that we’ve made complete visibility a requirement. Modern society demands that everything should be legible, searchable, consistent, and preferably on display. This doesn’t just change what we know about each other, it also kills desire at the root. Eros, for Han, needs a version of what Plato needed too: an other, someone outside you who is partly unknowable and resistant to clear categorisation. Total transparency reduces that person into information.

His most unnerving move is pointing the same lens inward. If sorting a person into categories is what kills the alterity that makes them worth wanting, the same must be true when you do it to yourself, and we’re told to, constantly. Pick a niche. Have one clear thing you’re known for. Put it in your bio so you’re findable in a single scroll. It’s the LinkedIn-ification of being a person, except it was never really just about LinkedIn — once you’ve learned to compress yourself into a findable one-liner for a recruiter, that’s just how you introduce yourself now: on a dating profile, in an Instagram bio, to a stranger at a party.

The advice works, in the sense that it does — niche down and you get hired faster, matched more, found more easily. But findable and wantable aren’t the same thing, and a self that’s been fully optimised and explained is a self with no gaps left in it either. Han’s phrase for the endpoint is exact: the erosion of the other is also the erosion of the self. You become as legible to yourself as a profile is to a stranger, and as uninteresting.

Fine, you might say, so we lose the ache, but we keep the ease. Isn’t that a fair trade? Wait, I’d reply, that’s not the end of it.

I’ve never managed to make much headway with Proust himself, but I did stumble upon a more approachable book analysing signs in his work by Gilles Deleuze. Deleuze makes a distinction I think is interesting here.

Friendship, he says, is contemplative. It’s two minds meeting on ground they already share, confirming each other and feeling comfortable. Romantic love, on the other hand, is interpretive. This person is partly closed to you, gives off signs that might mean one thing or its opposite, and the work of reading those signs creates jealousy and is what actually forces you to think and change. An agreeable conversation with a friend will never do that. He goes as far as calling jealousy “the truth of love”, which sounds bleak, but it’s actually just another way of saying that romantic love is a relationship built around not being sure.

Look at dating profiles. A profile has very little to interpret, it's more of a disclosure, so you've turned a stranger into a friend before you've even met them. No wonder nothing aches. People still fall in love, obviously — but they increasingly do it against the grain, in spite of the machinery rather than with its help. And once I started thinking about romance that way, as what we lose when everything is easy and clear, I couldn't stop finding more links — including, embarrassingly, in the exact thing I've spent the last few months researching for the summer edition of The Curiosity Commons. Because it isn't only private desire that needs the gap. Collective imagination needs it too, and unlike lovers, who can always delete the apps and take their chances, a culture can't log off together. As a result, we've stopped being able to make heroes.

Penelope and the Suitors, John William Waterhouse, 1912

Sure, we have celebrities, which the historian Daniel Boorstin pointed out is a different species entirely. His phrase for it was someone who is “known for his well-knownness”. A hero, he argued, is made through folklore, retellings, and the passage of time smoothing an actual person into a shadowy figure that a culture can revere. A celebrity is made instantly and in high definition, by exactly the mechanism that unmakes them just as fast. Boorstin calls it a pseudo-event, something staged for the purpose of being reported. The machine’s only loyalty is to what’s reportable right now, so today’s staged appearance easily becomes tomorrow’s scandal.

Put a celebrity next to Achilles, for instance. Achilles has a filthy temper, refuses to fight while his own side suffers, and spends much of the poem consumed by rage but none of that disqualified him from hero status. Whatever historical person may have inspired the story, what reached later generations was a figure shaped by centuries of retelling rather than endless documentation. A livestream would have made him legible as a guy having a tough decade.

That isn’t to say the ancient Greeks didn’t care about character. What made Achilles a hero wasn’t moral perfection but arete, or demonstrated excellence at something. You could be an infuriatingly difficult person and still earn the title, provided the difficulty came bundled with real, visible skill. Total visibility doesn’t only expose flaws; it also changes the kind of figure a culture is capable of producing. Desiring someone and mythologising someone both depend on having a little unlit space for imagination to fill in, and some reason to believe what’s in that space is worth the effort of imagining.

The context in which I most hear people talk about romance recently is within the trend of "romanticising your life."

I understand the impulse, and the appeal — light a candle, notice the coffee, take a bath (real examples here). But look at what the advice actually tells you to do: gratitude journalling, treat yourself by "finding magic in the mundane," to quote the same article. In my view, it's the modern spoonful of sugar — except the medicine is a ten-hour work day that barely covers rent, and the sugar is a coffee by the window. It's not romance, or even really romanticising, it's a coping mechanism. The ten-hour day isn't going anywhere and the rent isn't getting cheaper. You can't actually do much to close the gap between the life you would like to live and the one you have, so you're shown a coffee ritual instead and encouraged to see it as enough.

Automat, Edward Hopper, 1927

Real romance involves navigating a gap toward something outside you. This trend performs closing the gap between you and a life you wish you had — time to not rush, space to actually rest — without fixing anything that’s actually keeping it unobtainable. It borrows romance’s props to sell the illusion — the candle, the slowness, the perfume, the soft music — because that’s still the most convincing imagery going for “this is special”. If we were being honest, we wouldn’t call it romanticising your life. We’d call it anaesthetising your routine.

So is there anything left to say on this topic, or have I thoroughly wrung out every drop of unromantic pulp there is to squeeze? No, there is a little something more, and as a self-certified book person, the evidence for it has been screaming at me from the bestseller lists.

Romance fiction is having an extraordinary run recently.

It’s the leading growth category in print, sales have more than doubled in four years, and whole bookshops are opening that stock nothing else (source). The easy take on this might be that people are hopeless romantics after all, but I don’t think it’s that simple. A boom like that is what a culture does when it’s starved of something and finds a workaround. There’s less and less interpretive work available in actual courtship, or regular life, so people are buying it by the paperback instead.

The strange, hopeful part is that the workaround actually works. Reading fiction is the one place left where the gap is intact. A character on the page is exactly what Deleuze says a beloved is: partly closed to you, giving off signs, requiring interpretation, capable of surprising you at any moment. Keith Oatley — whose work anyone who has had a chance to wander in the Psychology Room in Edition One of The Curiosity Commons will already have met this season — argues that this is essentially what fiction is for: a simulation of another mind, run inside your own, that leaves something behind when you close the book. Reading isn’t just a nice picture demonstrating the interpretive labour that love requires. It is that labour, practised in private, with no audience and nothing performed (well, bookstagram exists… but moving on). Which is exactly why it can’t be hollowed out the way “romanticising your life” is. Nobody is watching you read.

I’d originally thought about concluding this piece with something wise about trying to create and leave gaps open on purpose etc, etc, but that feels a bit superficial, and anyway life supplied a better ending. Last week, I was twenty minutes into a session on the running machine when I was struck by inspiration for an essay for this newsletter. I thought it was an idea with real teeth and merited further consideration, so I fished out my phone from the machine’s holder and went to my notes app to write it down to remind me to follow up on it later… and found the same idea already written there.

Me, from a few weeks ago, having the identical revelation, in nearly identical words, with no memory of it whatsoever. And my honest reaction was, well, a slight worry about brain health, but also a fair amount of delight — of being surprised by a stranger, except the stranger was me. I am, it turns out, just disorganised enough to remain partially unknown to myself. In a world this determined to make everything legible, I’m choosing to call that romantic.

— Lauren x

If you enjoyed the rabbit hole this essay took you down, you’d probably enjoy The Curiosity Commons — the paid reading community attached to this newsletter. Every season we take an anchor novel and follow curated maps of related subjects, investigating and interpreting together. If that sounds like your thing, consider joining us — we’d love to have you, and it supports my work.

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Everything is now live in the Commons — the Start Here map, all four rooms, and the discussion threads. Dip in whenever you have a spare half hour.

Two small things before today’s rabbit hole.

I’ve bought a new notebook. I’m journaling my way through the edition this season (adding a slow living element into learning) and I’ll show you the set up next week when I've got into the groove a little more.

And if you’d like some company as you explore this edition, I’ll be spending July in the literature room, August in history and September in psychology. You’re very welcome to follow the same path, or wander off in an entirely different direction — that’s exactly what the Commons is designed for.

I'd love these letters to become a small Sunday ritual. Sit down with a good drink and bring one thing from your week: a fact that surprised you, a line you underlined, a rabbit hole you fell into, a film, a thought you can't shake. Leave it in the comments below, and let's make this our weekly corner of the Commons. If you're just getting started, maybe you could tell us what you're most looking forward to reading or discovering over the next few months.

Leave a comment

Anyway, enough housekeeping. Here’s the rabbit hole I’ve been thinking about this week.

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If you’re looking to shake up your summer reading, here are the books I’d hand you.

Books that tell two stories at once

Son of Nobody — Yann Martel →find a copy

Imagine reading a lost epic from ancient Greece while, in the footnotes beneath it, an Oxford academic slowly unravels his own life. At first the poem and the notes feel like separate texts, but little by little they begin speaking to one another. It’s one of the most inventive reading experiences I’ve had, and proof that footnotes can become just as compelling as the story they’re supposedly explaining.

A little note: This is also the anchor novel for Edition One of the Curiosity Commons, where we're spending the summer reading it together and following all the rabbit holes it opens up.

Pale Fire — Vladimir Nabokov → find a copy

On the surface, this is a 999-line poem published alongside commentary from the poet’s editor. Very quickly, though, the editor hijacks the book, using the notes to tell his own increasingly strange story. You’re constantly deciding who to trust and where the “real” novel actually is.

Books made from documents

The Correspondent by Virginia Evans → find a copy

This year's Women's Prize winner is told entirely through letters. Sybil, in her seventies, writes to everyone from her children to her favourite authors, her doctor, neighbours, and even the journalist investigating her past. Slowly, through all these pieces of correspondence, a portrait of her life, and one long-buried secret, begins to emerge.

World War Z by Max Brooks → find a copy

Rather than following one protagonist through the zombie apocalypse, World War Z imagines an oral history compiled after the war has ended. Each chapter is another survivor's testimony, building a picture of the catastrophe from dozens of different perspectives. It feels less like reading a novel and more like reading history.

This is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone → find a copy

Two rival agents, fighting on opposite sides of a war that stretches across time, begin leaving letters for one another. What starts as taunting slowly becomes friendship, then something much deeper. The letters are beautiful, playful, and emotional, and they're the perfect example of how an epistolary novel can create intimacy. One of my favorite books of all time.

Several People are Typing by Calvin Kasulke → find a copy

This entire novel unfolds inside a company's Slack workspace after one employee's consciousness somehow becomes trapped in the app. It's exactly as ridiculous as it sounds but also surprisingly philosophical. The chat format makes the comedy quite dry, while also saying surprisingly sharp things about work, technology, and being online all the time.

Illuminae — Amie Kaufman & Jay Kristoff → find a copy

A YA sci-fi thriller told through emails, interviews, medical reports, instant messages, surveillance files, and classified documents. Rather than just following the story, you’re piecing it together yourself from the evidence.

Stories told through the book itself

Dictionary of the Khazars — Milorad Pavić

Not a novel in the traditional sense, but a fictional dictionary about a vanished civilisation. There are two identical versions, one male and one female, except for one crucial paragraph…

Lost Love in Constantinople — Milorad Pavić

This novel comes with a pack of tarot cards, and the order they’re drawn determines the order you read the chapters so no two readings can be the same. It’s one of the most playful examples I’ve come across of a book turning its own structure into part of the story.

S. by J. J. Abrams and Doug Dorst → find a copy

A young woman picks up a book left behind by a stranger. Inside it are his margin notes, which reveal a reader entranced by the story and by its mysterious author. She responds with notes of her own, leaving the book for the stranger, and so begins an unlikely conversation that plunges them both into the unknown.

The Turnglass by Gareth Rubin → find a copy

Two mysteries, fifty years apart. In 1880s England, a young doctor arrives at an isolated house where a dying parson believes he's being poisoned. In 1930s California, a writer's apparent suicide leads his friend to uncover a decades-old family secret. The two stories mirror one another and meet in a novel you can read from either end, with each half revealing clues the other doesn't.

House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski → find a copy

Ostensibly, it's about a family who discovers their house is bigger on the inside than the outside. In reality, it's several stories nested inside one another, told through footnotes, annotations, and increasingly experimental page layouts. As the house becomes more labyrinthine, so does the book itself. Fair warning: this is probably the most challenging book on this list, I have tried and failed to finish reading it three times.

One of my favourite things about books like these is that they remind me that the novel is still such a flexible form. We often think we've seen everything a book can do, and then someone tells a story through footnotes, or Slack messages, or a fictional dictionary, or asks you to flip the whole thing upside down halfway through.

If this is your kind of rabbit hole, it's exactly the sort of thing we spend our time exploring in the Curiosity Commons, following unusual books into questions about storytelling, history, psychology, and everything else they lead us to.

Join us in The Curiosity Commons

In the meantime, I'd love to know: what's the most inventive book you've ever read? I'm always looking for more.

-Lauren, x

This post contains affiliate links to Bookshop.org. If you choose to buy a book through one of these links, I'll earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. Bookshop.org also supports independent bookshops, so it's a lovely way to support both my work and local booksellers.

Think of this page as your map. Everything for this season is here and there are links to each of the other rooms. Bookmark it if you’d like, and come back whenever you need to find your bearings.

And don’t worry if you arrive late or disappear down a rabbit hole for a while — that isn’t falling behind. It’s exactly what this place is for.

This season's question

"Who gets to tell the stories — and what happens to everyone else?"

We're exploring this question through three rooms — Literature & Myth, History, and Psychology. I've come to think of them as rooms rather than reading lists, because that's closer to how I want this to feel: somewhere to wander into and spend time, not a list of things to get through. Each room is a different way into similar themes, designed to be visited in any order. You're also welcome, and encouraged, to add to the conversation by sharing discoveries, creations, and rabbit holes in the comments for others to enjoy.

Our anchor novel is Son of Nobody by Yann Martel, author of Life of Pi. It imagines a lost epic poem told by an ordinary foot soldier rather than the traditional legendary hero. Reading it is optional, but if you do, you’ll see its ideas echoed throughout all three rooms. And, of course, through the whole edition, arriving in cinemas on 17 July: Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey. We’ll be discussing that once it’s released too.

The rooms

Each room is its own post with comments open and can function as a place to share thoughts, questions, and discoveries.

Introductions & general chat here

Start here if you’re new. Tell us who you are in three things — not your job, just three things that matter to you right now. Where are you reading from? What made you join the commons? And feel free to post here any time about anything related to the edition or more casual chat.

Son of Nobody — Yann Martel here

The anchor novel: discussion, questions, and a mix of literary prompts and ones that tie into the other chapters.

The Literature Room — From Homer to Nolan here

Every translation is an argument. Every retelling is a choice. From Homer to Nolan — who gets to tell the story?

The History Room— Unearthing Troy here

The heroes left us poems. Ordinary people left us pottery shards. What can fragments tell us about the lives history forgot?

The Psychology Room here

If you can’t narrate your own life coherently — do you still have a self? Narrative identity, narrative breakdown, and what fiction does to us.

If you take up any of the creative invitations in the chapters, it would be lovely to see them in the comments. I have a plan for member contributions — more on that below.

How it works

Every Sunday I’ll send a letter about my own reading and thinking as I work through the edition alongside you. It won’t be a summary or a guide. I've held a fair bit back while building the curriculum, so there's plenty left for me to actually discover alongside you, going through the rooms roughly in order from literature, then history, then psychology, and dipping in and out of Son of Nobody alongside all three.

Feel free to use the Sunday letters as a prompt to share where you went and what you found. You can reply to the letter directly or drop a comment in the relevant room, whichever feels right.

The rooms are all open from day one. There’s no strict schedule, so if you are worried about falling behind, don’t be. If you would like more of a regular rhythm, though, the Sunday letters are there for that.

A few things worth knowing

Upcoming Live Events

Links and schedules here.

Weekly Reading Hours

Starting in August, Reading Hour runs weekly, in two sessions so wherever you are in the world, one of them should sit at a reasonable time.

– 8am JST – Saturday 4pm US West, Saturday 7pm US East, Sunday morning for Australia.
– 7pm JST – 11am UK, 12pm central Europe, and evening for Australia.

What it actually is: an hour on video together, roughly 45-50 minutes of quiet reading, or studying whatever you’re currently in, then a few minutes to talk about it, ask questions, or just chat. No prep or pressure to have anything profound to say, just company while you read. Think of it as body-doubling, the trick of getting something done because someone else is quietly doing it alongside you.

I’ll be running this most weeks. I’m travelling in Vietnam for on the weekends of August 9th and 16th so no sessions on those weeks. Outside of that, expect it to be a steady weekly fixture.

August 23rd - Online Son of Nobody Book Discussion

A book club style discussion on Yann Martel's Son of Nobody, the novel anchoring this edition. Come with your own thoughts, or come with none and just listen in, either is welcome. There are some starter questions waiting in the room to have a think about before the event.

September 27th - Curiosity Salon

A wider conversation to close out the edition. Where the book discussion stays close to Son of Nobody itself, the Salon steps back and looks at the bigger picture, the key questions and themes running through the whole edition, Homer, heroes, and the stories we tell about ourselves, and what they've stirred up for us over the past couple of months.

Monthly curiosities.

Once a month I'll put together a round-up of some of the interesting things you've shared in the threads — finds, ideas, creativity — for our Curiosities from the Commons. I'll highlight contributions by name, but of course, if you'd rather not be included just let me know. If you'd rather share something privately, you're always welcome to email me directly.

How long does this edition run?

I'm planning this as a summer season edition (apologies to members in other hemispheres… if anyone has a better way to name the seasons, I'm all ears), running July through to September. But I'm open to following the conversation rather than the calendar. If everyone's ready to move on before then, we'll move into edition two, which I have grand plans for. Once we're past season two, I'd also like to start asking for your input on future themes in a vote.

I'm learning alongside you.

I'm not an expert in ancient Greek history and especially not in narrative psychology. I'm (it feels uncomfortable to admit one's own areas of strength, but here we are) good at reading widely, following curiosity, and designing spaces where ideas can collide in interesting ways. Everything else I'm figuring out as I go — and you'll see a lot of me in the threads, not as a guide telling you what to think, but as a fellow reader working it out in real time.

Lastly, thank you for being here. Building this kind of space has been a dream of mine for a long time and it means a great deal to have found people who want to be part of it. If you have any questions or feedback, message me in Substack Chat or by email and I’ll reply as quickly as I can around my day job.

See you in the threads.

- Lauren x

If you found your way here while wandering, there's room for you here too, whenever you're ready.

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