Recommendations #5
A novel for aspiring novelists, the hobby that will prove you wrong about yourself, an essay on changing your career after forty, the sugar-free sweets that rival Haribo (really) and more!
If you have the means, consider supporting an independent writer or creator with a paid subscription (me or someone whose work you consistently value, but in this economy really ideally I’d heartily suggest me).
Recommendations is a series that allows me to share things that I think are worth your time. Often, they’re what I’m currently finding interesting, beautiful or useful. Sometimes they’re old favourites that I don’t have cause to share in the weekly Peak Notions column.
This week, there’s an essay to read on starting again in your forties which will also hold immense intrigue for media wonks, a must-read novel if you’re currently wading through the glorious, soul-destroying morass that is writing a novel yourself (or if you just love great story really) and the activity that changed my life and self-image after I challenged my grinding terror to properly commit to it in 2025.
Below the paywall, there’s the portable murder mystery card game that’s ideal for an evening or weekend away with friends and the delicious sugar-free version of Haribo for all (like me) who enjoy sweets meant for kids but have a weary adult metabolism.
Something to do:
LIFT WEIGHTS
(Stop that. You can. Yes — you can. No it isn’t for other people. It isn’t. It’s for you, you feeble b*tch)
(this is a note from me to me, but maybe also you)
It’s really only in the last couple of decades that my people (Irish ones) are venturing out into the drizzle to move their stiff bodies without some lifelong sedentary elderly relative, who topples over in any light breeze and has glass bones, shrieking that lifting weights will stunt your growth and make your womb fall out onto the road.
I’ve spent much of my adult life living in a body that would fail me when I asked it to do something. Hold up its own weight. Use my core to elevate my legs. Lift a suitcase into the overhead locker. Break my own fall properly when I slipped during ice skating that time (embarrassing). Run for the bus and away from someone I went to school with twenty years ago and do not now wish to talk to.
I wrote about when I first lost a significant amount of weight back in 2022 and the unexpected challenges and thoughts that came with that. The last two years have been devoted to becoming stronger despite my dumb genetic legacy of a couple of annoying physical issues and a deep and passionate devotion to potatoes in all forms.
Like many, I’ve struggled to negotiate the frustration and self-recrimination that came with facing the limited capacity of my body. In order to change it, I had to repeatedly encounter and challenge this inability to do things, and manage the (horrible and sometimes overwhelming) emotions that came with it — shame, rage, debilitating self-consciousness and lack of self-belief. That part was far harder and more embarrassing than learning any physical skill. To try to do something you can’t do over and over again feels absolutely terrible. Until, one day, you can, and reality itself is remade.
Scared? Don’t know how to start? AI has faults but is great for this. Tell it your age, weight plus any physical, time or other limitations you have and ask it to put together a beginner’s warmup and free weights workout (because machines are scary at first) tailored to you, your goals, and all the rest. Crucially, when you do this, ask (eg Chat GPT) if there are any questions it needs to ask you in order to fully respond to your prompt. This helps minimise errors or oversights. Then, look up the exercises it has given you on Youtube or Instagram to check how to do them with proper form. If any feel too embarrassing or unreasonably difficult, ask it for a replacement until you have a routine you can tolerate. Do this until it feels easier, then go back and ask for a new routine with the challenge elevated.
Just don’t skip the warmup, especially if you’re thirty-plus - it will ensure you’re less sore after working out (you will be sore to begin with), and help prevent injuries. Take music or an audiobook that you love, and when you meet frustration and shame face to face, don’t converse with it. Do this enough times, and the voices will quiet as you prove them wrong. You’ll be opening pickle jars for envious friends.
Something to listen to:
A GENTLEMAN IN MOSCOW, by Amor Towles
I’m cheating slightly here, in that this is of course also something to read if you want to, but it’s a pleasing listen if you like an audiobook. A Gentleman in Moscow was published a decade ago and was adapted for the screen last year in a series starring Ewan McGregor. Towles’ career as a novelist started comparatively late, when he published his first novel in his mid-forties.
This book, his second, is set in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution, and follows Count Alexander Rostov, who is spared execution and banished to Moscow’s Metropol Hotel for life on the understanding that if he ever leaves, he will be shot. As some of the most dramatic events in Russian history unfold outside Rostov’s gilded prison in the ensuing decades, we experience the changing world at a remove along with him.
Any fiction writer will know the daunting task of constructing a breathing, compelling world on the page and there are few more daunting genres than historical fiction. I first read A Gentleman in Moscow in 2022 after listening to an interview with Towles on the Econ Talk podcast with Russ Roberts. In it, the writer talked about setting the novel almost entirely inside a hotel in part as a way of making the historical research necessary to the story more feasible for a non-historian. C.J. Sansom did the same in his widely loved Shardlake historical mystery series, by setting the first novel literally inside the walls of in a snowed-in monastery during a storm.
Something to Read:
THE SECOND BEGINNING, by Farrah Storr
This article was especially fascinating to me because when veteran magazine editor Farrah Storr left a prestigious twenty-two-year career to head up UK partnerships for Substack back in 2021, it was a signal that the coming reckoning for those of us in media had arrived.
Storr was at the top of the industry I too then worked in, and her choice to leave for this ‘alternative’ media site many of my colleagues either had not heard of or overtly dismissed was enough for me to move my independent work from Patreon to Substack. I guessed that Storr’s presence here meant Substack would become mainstream in the UK, and that she would start recruiting increasingly big names until being a UK writer or journalist who wasn’t on Substack would read as complacent or out of touch.
This essay, which comes four years after Storr’s jump, is an inside view on what that move felt like to make, and one person’s experience of navigating rapid change in two industries as the world shifts. What looked to me at the time like someone with nous and confidence making a smart strategic move that others would eventually realise the value of is discussed in this essay with vulnerability, humanity and doubt.
It’s a candid look at big, frightening personal change from the inside — the risk, the uncertainty, and the determination that’s required both to leave what you know (especially when it comes with status and luxury) and to start again in your forties, when the prospect of falling on your face entails a longer drop, greater injury and less sympathy or respect than it might in your twenties.