New Year, New Start

Hello, readers!

I am hoping that you notice very little that is new about this newsletter, but it seemed only fair to tell you that I have moved The Wingback from Substack to a platform called Ghost. The whole website is now called The Wingback Workshop, and the newsletter you've come to know is still The Wingback.

Moving to a new platform gives me a chance, or maybe just an excuse, to start working on projects I've been thinking about for a long time. The biggest is a series of reading guides in video, audio, and written formats for maximum accessibility. These guides are for any of you who want to read more carefully, more thoughtfully, less as a consumer and more as a considerer. At least in the beginning, I'll focus on older titles that are widely available as paperbacks and ebooks. These should be easy to pick up for cheap at a used book store or for free at the library, and they'll probably be books you've been meaning to read and never got around to.

First up in this series is A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf. It's a classic that almost everyone has heard of, but it is definitely one of those books that a lot of people never get around to. Or maybe it was assigned in high school, when you had better things to do, and you're curious to give it another go.

There are still reviews of brand-new books coming too. I've got two teed up for the coming weeks: a nonfiction book about staying in one place and a new novella by Amal El-Mohtar.

Another new feature will be Wingback Snacks, where I post links to articles and essays as I read them. Sometimes I read these articles the day they are published, sometimes I squirrel them away in my Pocket account for later...and read them much later. Even years later. This will be a separate newsletter that you can subscribe to, or your can bookmark the page to visit when you have a break and want something quick to read.

Or! You can use the RSS feed. Everything on the site has a feed, so you can easily get it all in your RSS reader. I like NewsBlur, but there are several others that people enjoy. RSS is the past and future of the internet. I'm sure of it. I'll try to make these feeds easy to find and use on the Wingback Workshop site.

I'm also considering posting my TBR list, which is hundreds of titles long. I'll let you know what I've picked to read, and you all can comment and tell me which of the books on the list you read and liked. A recommendation from a reader will bump a book to the top of the pile for sure.

That's all the news for now. As always, I promise not to abuse your inboxes, and there are probably typos in this post. And I really do recommend getting into (or back into) the RSS habit for online reading.

Thanks for sticking with me. Here, as always, is your dose of Mabel.