82. READ.LOOK.THINK.

I just realised I used to bore on at the beginning of every READ.LOOK.THINK. about my life or usually, actually, about the weather because when it’s bad it is my life. But the weather has been shockingly beautiful for months, and our perfect mild autumn is now a cold but mainly blue-skied winter, and all is right with the world. Get back to me in February when I want to top myself. Here is the last READ.LOOK.THINK. for 2013 and “HO HO HO Merry Christmas everyone” (imagine that in the voice of a muppet from A Christmas Carol, or Hobie from the audio version of The Goldfinch.)

READ: “Calling something brave is really just another way of saying, ‘What you wrote scared me.’” | ”I’m not mad because you lied to me,” I said. “I’m mad because you’re old.” The Secret Life of Grief. | A profile of Rachel Kushner (“It “never seems to bring in the grit of real existence,” she told me, trying to explain why she’d only watched a single episode of Portlandia.”) | Slouching toward neck trouble (what an amazing title) with Joan Didion and Nora Ephron. | Excited to read Samantha Ellis‘ How to be a Heroine over Christmas | One fact about me is that from the age of 15 – 18 I did not voluntarily read a novel by any man other than Evelyn Waugh, and that was only Decline and Fall because it’s funny. I combed books by women for clues on how to be and very confident I was too. It was when I started on the midcentury misogynists that all my troubles began, but who’s to say which came first, the reading or second guessing?

LOOK: Star charts. | Clive James on TV! | The first chapter of Moby Dick read by Tilda Swinton. | A day with my daughter in search of leaves.

THINK: Animal cruelty is the price we pay for cheap meat. | A good introduction and practical steps: Gender neutral parenting. | Molly Lambert on Chris Lilley: “it’s easy to imagine Ja’mie’s most horrible quotes GIF’d into contextless hatred, reinforcing the very behaviors the show means to criticize.”

LINKNESS: After three years of following the world of advertising, from management to creativity, with at times painful attention to detail, my work for STW Group on its blog Nextness comes to an end this week. Thank you to those of you who read Linkness each week and followed the Twitter account.