The Internet Personified's List of Recommended Reading

For the months of September (and maybe August? Also perhaps July?)

Going to bed after everyone’s gone home

Friend Ameya has just been and left and we partied like we were in our thirties once more. (Partying like we’re in our twenties is so beyond us that we might as well build a DeLorean—is that how you spell it? I refuse to look it up—and take the car back to the early noughties, then somehow find each other in this year and commit to partying, but wait, this version of me will still be in her forties, perhaps only watching my twenty something self get into shenanigans. Bah. Time travel is hard.)

All that partying however meant that even if I did chain myself to my laptop words would not emerge, another way I am an entirely different person now than the one I was at age 26. So, after a weekend spent watching sentimental British television (Call The Midwife, the early seasons) and American television with a laugh track (why lie to you? I’m doing a Friends rewatch again) and also reading good books on the sofa (Some books were bad, will discuss in a second) I feel ready to hit the ground running. [More excuses? Okay, I got my period, and at this stage of my ever-evolving body I seem to be producing more blood than I ever have before so it is literally impossible for me to sit up, I must just lie around and talk in a weak voice and ask people (K) to do things for me. And also: the weather has gotten cold so the windows are closed so it’s me inside trapped with all the cat fur and my magic nasal spray the allergist gave me—I have an allergist now, my only doctor in Germany—isn’t quite doing the job so I’m waiting for all the snot in my ears and the back of my nose to clear which it will eventually, but to have a lot of snot and a lot of blood at the same time might as well be my cue to give everything up and be like Cousin Helen from What Katy Did, smiling and brave and a good influence but only able to move if someone carries me from the sofa to… another sofa.]

A good author to read is Tessa Hadley. She’s the pre-Rooney Rooney, who much like Rooney dives very deep into the personal problems and relationships of people who are of a very specific social milieu living in a very specific world. I happened on two of her books in second hand shops, one in London and one here while I was birthday shopping for a friend (I got her Age of Innocence and Children of Men, which is a book by PD James and also, as you might know, a very good film based on the same.) I read the Berlin bought one first: Late In The Day, which is about a foursome of friends and what happens to them when one of them dies. Actually, I had tried Hadley before and couldn’t get into her, she’s a very stylish writer but somehow her style seems to obfuscate the actual characters. You have to also reach a book (or a poem, or a movie or a person or a dish) when you’re entirely ready for it. For instance: up until last year, I had a healthy fear and a well formed contempt for fresh tomatoes. Could not stand them. This year something flipped within me and I actually began to buy boxes of them to eat with our meals, sprinkled liberally with salt and pepper. Books are a little bit like this. No Hadley and now a yearning to read everything she’s written. I’m feeling more and more recently the need to read all of a writer’s oeuvre. It began with AS Byatt—actually, it continues with AS Byatt as I work my way through the Frederica quartet (which I mentioned in this newsletter)

I’ve also started with Ruth Rendell who you’re thinking of as a murder mystery writer but is really so much more.

After reading Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead (a good book but the character was a little anemic) a book that I purchased in Bombay, took to Delhi, forgot about, bought again, left both copies in Delhi, found in a garage sale in Berlin, bought again, decided this time I would read it and actually did, I borrowed Lila which reflects the same character from another character’s point of view. I like Lila so much better than Gilead that I now want to read Home just to finish the trilogy. These are books that make you want to tell a story yourself, or if you’re not a writer, that make you marvel at the world at all its facets and all its feelings.

A book I didn’t enjoy and so was glad was only borrowed from the library was The Pairing by Casey McQuiston. My problem with modern romance is that it has replaced chick lit, no one is writing chick lit any more. I don’t want to skip through five pages of (averagely written) sex. I want Bridget Jones in her Scary Pants, I want Becky hiding her bills under the mattress, I want story. I want feelings. I want to care about these people. Instead it’s thin hot people having thin hot sex. Where is the humour? Where is the drama? Do people really want to read about someone moaning (inevitably) into the hollow of someone else’s throat? I liked McQuiston’s first book Red White and Royal Blue, but friends, I am ready for a change in the way modern romance is written. Let’s keep that it’s gender inclusive and not entirely heteronormative and let’s make it about people who are actually human and who the writer doesn’t have to keep reminding us about how beautiful they are. Nothing bores me more than a long description of one character staring at another character and getting all choked up at how lovely the tip of their nose is and how the world knows they are exceptional blah blah blah vomit.

I also read Fleishman Is In Trouble which was fine. The TV show was better and also odd to read about people doing years abroad in Israel without thinking of what’s going on now. I don’t think we will be able to separate those two in the future either. It’s been one year with no sign of a ceasefire. May there be one soon. Where will this end?

Things I read that aren’t books

• “Tammy Hedderly, a neurologist at the Evelina London Children’s Hospital, sometimes calls her new-style tic patients “Evies.” These girls “present thumping their chest, shouting beans, and falling to their knees,” she told the virtual conference. The nickname comes from a 21-year-old British influencer named Evie Meg Field, also known as @thistrippyhippie, who has 14.2 million followers on TikTok and nearly 800,000 on Instagram. Field has published a book called My Nonidentical Twin: What I’d Like You to Know About Living With Tourette’s.” - From The Twitching Girls by Helen Lewis

• “EVERY TALK sent me down a frantic spiral of inquiry. That morning, at breakfast, I couldn't stop reading studies on nursing home robots. (In one, a group of Canadian nurses expressed concerns that robotic equipment could be used as weapons during "behavioural events.") Now that I knew about vocal biomarkers, I felt myself hurtling down a new tube slide of panic. What would the insurance companies do? Would they increase a patient's premium because their voice indicated pre-Parkinson's? What would happen when the company-wide mental health initiative required employee one-on-ones with Canary in the background? Would a sales call debrief include metrics on everyone's mood? In a society that reserves psychiatric care for only its wealthiest members, was there any reason to automate mental health assessments if not for the purpose of mass surveillance? What did it mean to have medium depression? Was I medium depressed?” - From An Age of Hyperabundance by Saree Makdisi

• “What can I tell you? I lost track of the number of times he threatened to kill me. He did it every time he felt an argument slipping away from him: I have a gun upstairs in my closet. I can go get it. That’s OK, Dad, I don’t care what we watch. One night, a few months after I stopped speaking to him, my mother told me that she had to go on a business trip, and that I needed to stay with a friend whose address Dad wouldn’t know. He’s got this plan that he’s going to come over with a gun and shoot you, then shoot himself, my mother told me.” - From Sixteen Failed Attempts to Write a Eulogy for my Father by Jude Doyle

• “That there are writers in Muzaffarnagar cannot be surprising. There are writers everywhere. What might be surprising is to know that there is a whole ecosystem in places like Muzaffarnagar—and therefore, one is sure, in most other Indian small towns too—an ecosystem that enables local writers to meet, discuss their work, and offer critical commentary to each other, and also an ecosystem that allows a playground for the showboating of book launches, shawl-on-shoulders photo-ops, and bouts of gossip and backbiting. About four years back, I began to be introduced to this world by my mother, Sunita Malik Solanki, who, riding a post-retirement surge of enthusiasm, an element she no doubt shares with a majority of her peers, became a ghazal writer in the early months of the pandemic and soon started self-publishing volumes of poetry. She has published four books by now—‘Same as you,’ she doesn’t miss to remind me—and is threatening to add two more to her bibliography before this year ends.” - From Writers and Writing in Muzaffarnagar by Tanuj Solanki

• “I know what people are going to say: not everyone drinks, not everyone parties, we have social anxiety, everything is too expensive (a future Substack is about our current Economic Crisis and the performance of poverty online). I don’t want to blame the phones, but I will say: the dating apps are in crisis. People aren’t meeting in person. There’s a singles wall in New York City, famously one of the easiest cities to be single in. People are taking up running to meet one another. We’re in a loneliness crisis. People simply aren’t connecting the way they used to, and I won’t be the bad guy for pointing out that it doesn’t surprise me that people are desperately lonely while also saying their favorite hobby is… staying home.” - From The Mainstreaming of Loserdom by Tell The Bees

• “The Delhi Gymkhana is no stranger to feuds and intrigue. For much of its history, it has been a beloved, if old-fashioned, outpost for India’s ruling classes. Bureaucrats and generals “who didn’t like losing” would play fiercely competitive tennis or squash matches here, remembers Ajai Shukla, a former army colonel, while the club’s bar was “the hotbed of gossip in the capital”, a place where the city’s elites could get sozzled out of the public glare. But the current storm has been brewing since early 2021, when an official from India’s Ministry of Corporate Affairs arrived at the Gymkhana accompanied by police, bureaucrats and media and announced that India’s government, led by the nationalist prime minister Narendra Modi, was taking over the running of the institution.” - From How Modi’s party took over one of India’s most prestigious private clubs by Benjamin Parkin Jump

• “CrimeCon, now in its eighth year, fashions itself as the singular nexus for the large and loosely defined true-crime community, aiming to summon a fandom that exists primarily online—through twisting subreddits, gumshoeing podcasts, and lengthy comment threads on the 20/20 Facebook page—into physical space. The convention drew 6,000 guests this year, an uptick from the 5,000 who attended 2023’s event in Orlando. Tickets started at $229 and are tiered between standard, gold, and “platinum” packages, with the latter offering fast-track lanes, private lounges, and exclusive memorabilia from the event’s “talent,” many of whom are the family members of murderers and murder victims alike.” - From Their Daughter’s Murder Consumed America. What They’re Expected to Do Now Is Unfathomable by Luke Winkie

Postscripts: The people who train to be rich people’s butlers. ** A really good travel blog on a place you’re unlikely to go. ** On Moleskine notebooks. ** How to stop buying badly made clothes. ** AITA for telling you I’m divorcing you on Am I The Asshole? **

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have a great week!

xx

m

Who are you? Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan, writer of internet words (and other things) author of eight books (support me by buying a book!) and general city-potter-er.

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