Sorry I didn’t come up with anything more clever for the name of this substack. I was going to call it “McPhee’s Miscellany” but then I started worrying people would think I was selling rubber chickens and horse head masks.
A few weeks ago I fell asleep while reading outside. I was asleep but I could still hear the magpies in a neighbour’s yard cawing to each other, and I dreamt that they were commenting on the book I was reading, Tom Shippey’s The Road to Middle-Earth.
When I woke up I started thinking about how one of my favourite writers, John Dolan (aka the War Nerd), has a line somewhere about how Frank Herbert and Philip K Dick and Jack Vance and all the great science fiction writers were able to read like magpies—they could pick out all the shiny bits.
That’s what I want this newsletter to be, a place to share the fun shiny bits I come across in my reading. My plan is for each newsletter to be something more than a tweet, but less than a full essay.
Aside from that, this newsletter is going to be free and I’m not going to clog your inbox with it. I’m going to put my first full post out over the weekend and then after that the plan is to do a post once every two weeks. I have posts planned on Samuel Pepys, prehistoric mammals, that Tolkien book, and maybe those Roman sewer crabs.
In the meantime, you can still find me on X (née Twitter), Bluesky, Goodreads, etc.