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Lucinda Chambers shares her picks for January. (Maybe 2026 will be the year I learn to understand hair products.)
I adore travel recommendations, particularly local ones. The Email of Paris Recommendations I Send to Everyone
Free courses to follow in 2026.
Would you like to learn French? Free Courses to Learn French in 2026: Your Complete (Broke-Friendly) Roadmap.
I came across this website for poetry in the public domain.
How to Spot AI Hallucinations Like a Reference Librarian: this I think is going to be an essential skill, in work and in anything else affected by the internet (everything?).
How to Be Organised in 2026. I get on pretty well with just a paper diary (days on the left, notes on the right) but there are a lot of potentially useful suggestions here.
The Complete English Literature Reading List: a list of the works that were most taught during the “golden age” of the English major (1960-1980). Pair it with this essay on The Death of English Literature to further prompt you into a deeper embrace of the literary, analogue life (rage, rage against the dying of the light).
Another reading guide: this time on Victorian literature. (I love Victorian literature: far from its image of stuffiness, I find it a burst of life, a shout, a blazing light, the beginning of the era of the Novel. Some of it good, some of it bad, but intensely packed with ideas. There is sentimentality and moralism sometimes, but I like its fearlessness and wholeheartedness.) This guide gives you “novels, poetry, annotation systems, critical reading syllabus, research material, etc”.
This is a fascinating piece on Anthony Bourdain, the forthcoming biopic, figure-worship, and image curation.
I enjoyed A. N. Wilson not enjoying the new adaptation of Hamnet. (As a secret contrarian, I will only engage with media when nobody is talking about it and so have no dog in this fight, but I am always firmly on the side of “say it with your whole chest” on subjects of love and/or hate. Occasionally I find myself down a rabbithole of different critics disagreeing with one another and enjoy that too.) Then I read Hamnet is a masterpiece — with a huge blind spot, which is overall more positive (as you would guess) but agrees with Wilson about some of the dissonance.
I love reading Rachel Seville Tashjian on fashion. This is her guide to shopping in Milan. I also like her philosophy on packing for fashion shows.
I read an article on offline hobby recommendations, which in principle I agree with but this particular article annoyed me so maybe I should write my own.
Albert Raphael, Earthology (1901)
( Thoughts on Substack, generally )
I adore travel recommendations, particularly local ones. The Email of Paris Recommendations I Send to Everyone
Free courses to follow in 2026.
Would you like to learn French? Free Courses to Learn French in 2026: Your Complete (Broke-Friendly) Roadmap.
I came across this website for poetry in the public domain.
How to Spot AI Hallucinations Like a Reference Librarian: this I think is going to be an essential skill, in work and in anything else affected by the internet (everything?).
How to Be Organised in 2026. I get on pretty well with just a paper diary (days on the left, notes on the right) but there are a lot of potentially useful suggestions here.
The Complete English Literature Reading List: a list of the works that were most taught during the “golden age” of the English major (1960-1980). Pair it with this essay on The Death of English Literature to further prompt you into a deeper embrace of the literary, analogue life (rage, rage against the dying of the light).
Another reading guide: this time on Victorian literature. (I love Victorian literature: far from its image of stuffiness, I find it a burst of life, a shout, a blazing light, the beginning of the era of the Novel. Some of it good, some of it bad, but intensely packed with ideas. There is sentimentality and moralism sometimes, but I like its fearlessness and wholeheartedness.) This guide gives you “novels, poetry, annotation systems, critical reading syllabus, research material, etc”.
This is a fascinating piece on Anthony Bourdain, the forthcoming biopic, figure-worship, and image curation.
I enjoyed A. N. Wilson not enjoying the new adaptation of Hamnet. (As a secret contrarian, I will only engage with media when nobody is talking about it and so have no dog in this fight, but I am always firmly on the side of “say it with your whole chest” on subjects of love and/or hate. Occasionally I find myself down a rabbithole of different critics disagreeing with one another and enjoy that too.) Then I read Hamnet is a masterpiece — with a huge blind spot, which is overall more positive (as you would guess) but agrees with Wilson about some of the dissonance.
I love reading Rachel Seville Tashjian on fashion. This is her guide to shopping in Milan. I also like her philosophy on packing for fashion shows.
I read an article on offline hobby recommendations, which in principle I agree with but this particular article annoyed me so maybe I should write my own.
Albert Raphael, Earthology (1901)
( Thoughts on Substack, generally )
