I am now a person who has read War and Peace
And I beat Snoopy by approximately 1556 years
First: my heartfelt thanks to all of you. Considering the mountains of words zinging around the internet all day long, every day, I’m honored whenever you read some of mine. I deeply appreciate all my readers. You’re who the words are for.
Special thanks for my paid subscribers. It’s a big deal that you’ve chosen to sign up, whether it’s for a month or a year or for longer than that! I don’t take it for granted, and I’m so grateful for your support.
As you know, I turned off billing for paid subscriptions several weeks ago. The pause ends on January 1st, so if you want to make changes before your monthly or annual subscription renews, now’s the time to do that.1
And now a slew of small updates
• I got some exciting book-related news this month. You’ll be hearing a lot about it in next year’s newsletters. Can’t wait! It’s been a delicious way to close out the year.
• And I’m chuffed to report that I (drumroll) finished reading War and Peace! This has been a life goal ever since I opened a Peanuts collection around age ten and Snoopy announced his plan to read it. The brilliant
’s year-long reading group maintained a completely doable pace of one chapter a day (considerably faster than Snoopy’s word-a-day plan). I looked forward to my chapter every morning.
There’s still a bit of the second epilogue to go, but we’ve said goodbye to all our beloved characters, and the narrative is (sob) complete. Will I be diving right back in with the 2025 readalong? You bet I will! War and Peace is basically a way of life now. This year I’ll be adding entries from Yiyun Li’s Tolstoy Together2 to the experience.
• Last year, I made a little reading plan for myself every week. It became a treasured ritual—and helped me stay on top of a pretty intense reading load, a combination of the books I discuss in my Brave Writer Darts, books written by guests on the Brave Writer Podcast,
Book Club selections, and the weekly War & Peace and Cromwell trilogy installments for the F&T slow reads.
I plan to continue the practice in 2025, and I’m also making more of an effort to copy quotes into my notebook—many of which I’ve been rounding up over at Bonny Glen in an effort to make commonplacing more commonplace. (Still working out the right rhythm for that part. It’s useless to try to start new habits in December. December is a black hole.)
• An update on the email doppelganger story. And this one is BIZARRE! Last week—on my birthday, in fact—I received a $100 email gift card for a dancewear shop in…Canada? There was no note saying who had sent the gift, and for a moment I was thoroughly baffled: who was sending my non-dancer self a hundred (Canadian) dollars worth of ballet shoes and leotards? I quickly realized it was yet another misdirected email. I contacted the shop, and that’s where things get strange. The shop owner was horrified by the error and did some hasty investigation, reporting back the next day:
We have investigated this and we are very perplexed as to how it ended up with you. The lady who actually came into our store was given an actual gift card so there was no need for an email at all. And we are not sure how your email ended up on this customers profile as her address is nothing even close to yours. Someone definitely made a mistake.
We have taken care of things on our end so would you mind just deleting that email. The customer has her card. My apologies for this inconvenience and thank you so much for letting us know.
Wha??? Any theories on how such a thing could happen? No harm done on my end (this email address isn’t connected to any of my banking accounts, in case your mind is leaping there, which mine certainly did for a moment), and it ended fine for the shop—and the customer—but it’s still ODD. And it’s giving me pause about ordering digital gift cards in the future. The email I received contained the redemption code, right there for the taking. Yikes.
All right, friends, that’s it for me this year. Here’s wishing you a cozy rest-of-December with some happy reading, cozy burrowing, and sweet dreams. And may all your gift cards arrive in the right hands!
Here’s a bottom-of-the-post reminder that paid subs will be unpaused on Jan. 1st. Whether you are a past, present, or future subscriber—thank you from the bottom of my heart!
Bookshop.org affiliate link. I share my current & recent reads there, along with family favorites.
Congratulations! I am thinking about doing it in 2025. But weren’t you doing the Wolfcrawl, too?
Thank you, Melissa, for trumpeting the WAR AND PEACE slow read at F&T. I have just started and gifted subscriptions to some family members, which makes it even sweeter. I’ll also read TOLSTOY TOGETHER. I’m also reading THE ILIAD and ODYSSEY with Matthew Long’s Deep Reads Book Club. The suggested translation was in my son’s pile of abandoned books and I took it as a sign. If I learned anything reading MIDDLEMARCH @ Frizzlit with you, it’s that reading slowly with equally invested readers is the only way to go. I wanted to pass on something that you might find of interest, if you don’t already know about it: the Catherine Project. The deadline for Spring 2025 has passed, but check it out. Happy 2025!