I’ve put a lot of thought into this
📚 The Belles of London series by Mimi Matthews, starting with The Siren of Sussex. I hadn’t heard of Mimi Matthews this time last month. Then I heard her as a guest on Smart Podcast, Trashy Books, with the episode title ‘Historical Romances for Horse Girls’ (obviously that was going straight to the top of my listening queue) and mentioning that the heroine of her latest book, The Lily of Ludgate Hill, was more than a little inspired by Margaret Hale in North & South by Elizabeth Gaskell. N&S is one of my favourite books of all time (I’d love to get a tattoo to represent it, to go with my Station Eleven ink…). Obviously, I went straight to the Kindle Store and bought all three volumes. And then binged them. In my white-bread-brown-bread book taxonomy (see below…), these are iced buns. The first one, in particular, is full of details about tailoring and fabric, which I adore. (Ad -book links are affiliate links)
🥣 Soup! After wanting one for ages, I got a soup maker for Christmas from my parents; it’s kind of like the love-child of a kettle and a blender. I have come to love chucking a load of veg into it, pressing a button, and letting it do its thing while I carry on working/ give the flat a blitz/ read a book. This week: butter beans, onions, leeks, and plenty of seasoning. Gorgeous.
📸 GetSorted. Inspired by Michelle Elman, I’ve started a big project of putting together photo albums of the last few years. Because I was bouncing between Android and Apple phones, I don’t have much from before the end of 2016 (might just have to download some of my old Facebook albums if they’re not on my laptop hard-drive), but from there onwards I have tonnes of photos on my iCloud. Some of them are photos I want to keep; others are screenshots of stupid memes. GetSorted (which I first found via Anna) is a photo-sorting app with a really simple user interface: it shows you photos from your camera roll, and asks you to swipe down to keep them, or up to get rid.
And now, to my bread-based book sorting system. 🥁 🥁 🥁
This came from my desperate attempt to find a phrase that wasn’t “guilty pleasure” to describe the books I had grown to love over the first half of my twenties. This isn’t an essay about all the things I hate about that phrase - it’s enough, for now, to point out that it usually only gets applied to things that are popular amongst, and marketed to, women and girls. And that’s what those books were - five or ten years before, they would’ve been sold as ‘chick lit’: they usually feature young women trying to make the best of a challenging situation, and more often than not, falling in love along the way.
Instead, I wanted to find a description that didn’t make the books I read the most sound smaller, or weaker, than their more literary shelfmates. Sure, Jenny Colgan and Mhairi McFarlane aren’t on the Booker shortlist, but that doesn’t mean they’re any less worthy of their place on the shelf or in my list of favourites. I went to a Rare Birds Books event with Mhairi McFarlane way back in 2019, and she was talking about the pigeonholing of ‘women’s fiction’ as something less-than, and how ridiculous that is, given how important it is to find someone you love, and who loves you. What could be more worthy of fiction than who you spend your life with? These things aren’t unimportant - and as I’m thinking about this, I’m reminded of this, potentially my favourite bit of Greta Gerwig’s 2019 adaptation of Little Women (for which the whole screenplay is available online!)
I eventually landed on the comparison to bread.
White bread is a staple of a British diet. Sometimes it comes in plastic bags from the supermarket, and it has the same surface texture as Premier Inn carpet, and can be squished into almost nothing, but, once toasted and liberally spread with butter (or some sort of can-believe-it-isn’t pretender), it can fix almost anything - or at least make it feel a bit better in the moment. Sometimes, it’s a farmhouse loaf from a bakery, with a thick crunchy crust - or it’s a baguette that makes you feel jaunty and flirty walking along with it sticking out of your tote bag. It’s simple, but in that simplicity there’s nowhere for it to hide.
Brown bread, on the other hand, is tougher, and often a bit more complicated in its recipe. It could be a tough German rye bread, or an Irish soda bread to spread with butter and dunk in your soup (yum!). Sometimes there are seeds, and oats, and different grains all mixed up together. It sits in your stomach longer, keeps you full for ages.
You see where I’m going with this (I hope).
The light, fluffy, fiction that I turn to in times of stress, or when I need help to get to sleep, or on any given Tuesday, is white bread. I was just listening this morning to an episode of Smart Podcast, Trashy Books in which the host, Sarah, and her guest Mimi Matthews (author of the Belles of London books I mentioned above, and many others) are talking about why so many romance writers are lawyers by training. They discuss the ‘security of the formula’ - no matter how stressful or sad your life is at the moment you open a romance book, you know it’s going to end happily. That’s part of the deal. In the same way, I know, if I’ve had a really shit day, that I can put two slices of white bread in the toaster, heat up a can of baked beans, and get some butter and cheese out of the fridge, and have the kind of dinner that makes me feel looked after, like a hug from my insides.
That doesn’t mean it’s forgettable, or not worth the time I spend reading it. I still remember the loaf of cheap-white-bread-toast a university flatmate and I devoured after we watched All Quiet On The Western Front for one of our study modules. Or, more accurately, while I don’t remember the bread, I remember how it made me feel. It’s the same with white-bread-books; while I might not remember the details of Laura Wood’s An Agency for Scandal, almost a year after I first read it, I remember how badass it made me feel, and how confidently I stepped out into the world after I finished it. (I pre-ordered the sequel, A Season for Scandal, and I’ll tell you about it soon!).
Serious, literary, fiction, meanwhile, is brown bread. That doesn’t mean it’s hard to read, necessarily - I read Hanna Jameson’s newest, Are You Happy Now, in less than 24 hours this weekend, but it left me almost stunned by its stark clarity. Jameson is London’s answer to Emily St. John Mandel, in my opinion - I’m a massive fan of her previous book, The Last, too, and I still think about it near-constantly more than 4 years after I read it. My beloved North & South is, clearly, brown bread fiction; if you’re not familiar with it, I’d describe it as Pride & Prejudice with a huge dose of social justice activism added in.
What do you think? (And in case you’re wondering, yes, I did remember that I know how to use Canva to create images for the newsletter this week!)
Speak soon,
Lily
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If you liked this, you might also like my post about my favourite books of 2023:
Or this piece from October about fiction as a means of escape:
I love that taxonomy. I’m currently on the photo sort as well, I meant to do a yearly photo book when Teddy was born and he’s now 6.5. I’ve used Slidebox for all the iPhone photos but need to figure out how to import my android photos.