Conversations about ideas we encounter through books and films, and where they lead us.
| Platform |  | Pricing | Freemium | Publishes | Weekly |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Issues | 224 | Founded | 3 years ago | Last Issue | 4 days ago |
| Active | |||||
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Why I abandoned my reading projects
I like reading and I like having projects. So marrying the two, I thought, would be a perfect union. Alas, it wasn’t so. And I had to rethink the whole thing!
Illustration by Yana Kravchuk
I first learned of the phrase “reading project” f...
How do we imagine the places we’ve never seen? (The Engine House)
A good book transports us to different worlds, takes us to places we may have never been or might otherwise never see.
Certainly Tolkien wonderfully wove words into Middle-earth and we saw the world take shape in our minds. Although I do w...
What Stayed With Me #3
notebook entries, September 2026
Dear friends,
The Mondays We’ve Got Left (You Only Die Once)
I’ve been revisiting some older pieces to see which still feel at home in Shaping Life. I first published this one a couple of years ago, inspired by an idea I encountered in Jodi Wellman’s book You Only Die Once and her TEDx talk. It’s an...
Why Jean never left the hotel (The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel)
“Why don’t you ever go out?”, asks Graham Dashwood in the 2011 John Madden film, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel.
He asks this of Jean Ainslee, who along with her husband and other British retirees, moved to Jaipur, India, lured by the prom...
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Authors
The writers behind this newsletter.
I read loads, watch films, and write about the ones that get stuck in my head. \ud83d\udcda✍\ud83c\udffc
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