Slow Reading and Substack with Simon Haisell | Before the Work Begins Podcast

I write a substack called Footnotes and Tangents, which the tagline is sort of slow reads of great books.

I run read-alongs.

So it works like a sort of a book group or a book club where I pick a book and then I set a reading schedule for it.

And it's always a gentle pace is what I call it.

There's no rush.

It's just a few pages a day.

And I then write weekly discussion pieces to accompany the reading.

And people join the conversation in the comments or in chat threads.

And that's kind of like it.

That's sort of the basic core of it.

And then people do whatever they like with that and take that wherever they want.

So the last three years, I've been doing War and Peace each year, which is the thing that kicked us all off.

It's a perfect book to do in that format.

It's got 361 chapters.

You can just read one chapter a day, very short chapters.

And it becomes part of everyone's daily life.

The philosophy behind it is... to slow down and to kind of really live inside these stories and these books.

And, you know, we're sort of always rushing around and trying to get things done and trying to finish things.

This is much less about finishing the book and more spending time in sort of good company, reading a great book.