I don’t know about you, but I’ve always been fascinated by the strange routines writers employ to get their work done.

Hence I have made a new video covering some of my favourites.

From Murakami's 4am marathon regime to Franzen's sensory-deprivation office, Steinbeck's pencil rituals, and Kerouac's amphetamine-fuelled scroll, I'm ranking the most fascinating, eccentric, and downright bizarre writing routines in literary history.

Check out the video below.

Cheers,
Nick

Hello,

I have just posted a new video on the Nick Reads YouTube channel, discussing Don DeLillo’s White Noise with comedian and reader of great literature, .

We discuss the postmodern themes explored by DeLillo (especially the work of Jean Baudrillard), the prophetic aspects of the novel, its underrated humour, and much more.

You can click below to watch the video, or subscribers of this Substack page can listen in the audio player above.

If you didn’t like the book, it is not necessary to comment, as plenty of people have offered this fascinating opinion on my YouTube channel already.

Best,
Nick

Following my last reading update, I finished my reread of Don DeLillo’s White Noise, and made a video on it. I also finished rereading Ian McEwan’s The Child in Time, and then I reread Enduring Love (I read both of these at school, and for some reason wanted to return to them now).

It’s easy to dismiss McEwan as a kind of broadsheet darling. He is a safe choice for just about any literary prize, and in many ways represents a now-collapsing liberal order.

For one, he comes from the time when white male authors ruled, before they were almost completely frozen out of the world of literary fiction. Though as in so many industries, the old guard remained, while the new blood was barred (which is why McEwan is still around and has a massive house).

He also represents the old order in his worldview, which appears to be broadly the school of liberal New Atheism. He was, of course, friends with the late Christopher Hitchens, and at the end of Enduring Love he cites Steven Pinker. One of his novels has been described as a ‘boomer parable’, and McEwan does seem in many ways to be the archetypal liberal boomer.

He has a tendency to show off his reading in the field of science, and one senses a reverence for the sciences that perhaps even, like the protagonist of Enduring Love, extends to mild embarrassment at not being among their number himself.

Then we have the typical McEwan milieu. His characters are invariably poshos who enjoy picnics, drink expensive wines, and complain about expensive problems.

All this would make him too irritating to read, if he didn’t happen to be such a good writer. He is at his best when exploring the complex mesh of affections and resentments between couples, as well as the bonds of family and the mysteries of friendship.

He is also a master of storytelling and suspense. If you find yourself reading a McEwan alongside less tightly plotted fiction, you will end up finishing the McEwan first due to the sheer narrative drag.

However, rereading these books decades later, it is not the plots that stayed with me. Indeed, I had forgotten the ending to The Child in Time and the entire denouement of Enduring Love. What I retained instead were certain scenes and even specific sentences. This may be partly a reflection of my indifference to plot, or the way we remember novels in general, but it is probably also a result of the richness of McEwan’s characters, and the dynamism of his prose.

Enduring Love has some extraordinary set pieces and impressive changes of voice, though The Child in Time remains the superior book by some margin. It is less aggressively plotted, but is more rewarding in all other regards. Its depiction of reserved English parents alone, a relatively minor part of the book, is wonderfully accurate. And the disturbing nature of Charles Darke’s regression to childhood has stayed with me for decades.

There is no accurate gauge for these things, but it seems to me that McEwan is seen as the favoured choice of the highbrow housewife, rather than as a true literary great. To some degree I now think this is unfair, and probably something to do with his being English. To risk a football analogy, it is much like the way that, say, Paul Scholes for years was not recognised as a genius on the level of his European counterparts. McEwan rose to fame in the twentieth century, which, in the literary world, largely belonged to the Americans.

I enjoyed these books as a school student, then went through a long period where I would have pretentiously denounced them, and have finally returned to them more able to fully appreciate their nuances, now that I, like McEwan’s characters, am a flawed adult.

I still don’t have the bank account to appear as a character in a McEwan novel, and if I did I would probably be the irrational antagonist, questioning the boomer wisdom of the hero and his materialist outlook. So I’ll just have to stick to reading them with much appreciation and only occasional moments of mild disapproval.

Hello,

I have a new video out on the Nick Reads YouTube channel.

It is a piece on J.M. Coetzee’s masterpiece, Disgrace, which, as well as dealing with violence and tension in South Africa, also arguably predicted the MeToo movement.

It concerns a professor who has an affair with a student, but refuses to abase himself at an academic struggle session, instead claiming ‘I became a servant of Eros.’

When he leaves the university and heads to the Eastern Cape to live with his daughter, violence and violation soon ensue.

The novel raises uncomfortable questions about race, sex, and power, with Coetzee refusing to offer easy answers. This is no doubt why the book was condemned by the ANC, and Coetzee left South Africa for Australia not long after.

Here I delve into the complex ambiguities of this extraordinary novel. Please give it a watch below.

Thanks,
Nick

What if there was a novel that predicted Chernobyl, Covid, 9/11, and the hyperreal world we now inhabit?

Well, arguably there is, and it is Don DeLillo’s White Noise.

Some of you may have seen my recent list of the top ten postwar American novels. I put White Noise at number one, so thought I’d better reread it and check if I was right.

Spoiler alert: I was.

Hence in this new video, I explain why this dark, funny novel is so prophetic, and how it explores postmodern theory in a way that is profound but also accessible for the average reader.

Hopefully you will enjoy this whether you have read the book or not, so check it out below.

Thanks,
Nick

The publishing world has gone completely insane.

That in itself is probably not news. But I came across a ‘wishlist’ from an agent in New York that was even more bizarre than I was expecting.

She asks that authors do not send ‘Books with eating disorders, unchallenged fatphobia, or unchallenged diet culture’, or stories that feature the police or military.

Instead she wants ‘fat main characters’, and requires that the ‘love interest seems morally gray but is actually a marshmallow with heart of gold underneath the hard shell exterior.’

These deranged and highly specific criteria, which amount to a form of censorship, are merely an extreme version of the ideological capture we now see throughout publishing, which is one of the main reasons for the decline of literature.

Watch my video on all this below. It is a mixture of appalling and funny, as the above examples merely scratch the surface.

Cheers,
Nick

The moment I heard Dua Lipa was curating a list of ‘banned’ books, the first thing I knew for certain was that these books would definitely not be, in fact, banned.

For a start it’s a tautology to point out that if they were banned she couldn’t easily get hold of them and display them in a famous bookshop (Livraria Lello in Porto).

Secondly, there’s zero chance a famous mainstream pop star would decide to obliterate her career with anything genuinely controversial. ‘The Dua Lipa David Irving Collection’ would make a funny meme—as when dense and edgy political viewpoints are jokingly attributed online to Sydney Sweeney or Lana Del Rey—but it would likely not be much of a career boost.

And thirdly, I am dimly aware of similarly-named sections in high street bookshops, which invariably contain the least banned books on the planet.

Hence I was able to guess much of Lipa’s list without even seeing it (A Clockwork Orange, 1984 etc), yet it turned out to be even more mainstream than I imagined. These are books I studied at school (The Handmaid’s Tale) and university (Invisible Man, Things Fall Apart).

Which doesn’t mean they’re all bad, nor do I really mind that they weren’t all literally banned. As Vogue Adria explains: ‘The collection also includes books that may never have been formally banned but have nevertheless questioned existing structures of power or the suppression of individual and collective voices’.

What I do mind is that the list borrows the cachet of works that are bold artistic achievements, some published in genuinely hostile circumstances, and segues into books that uphold the current ideological orthodoxy.

This is most notable in the ‘Voice’ section, which, we’re told, ‘amplifies voices that have historically or systematically been marginalised, excluded or underrepresented’.

Here we have Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, but also works like Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe, and Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You, by Jason Reynolds and Ibram X. Kendi. Thus Lipa, or whoever has helped her come up with this list, attempts a sleight of hand. The implication is that the liberal era of individual genius and freedom of expression leads naturally to the Woke era of radical leftism, aggressive conformity, and cancel culture.

Of course there are postliberal thinkers who would agree with this, but they would mean it in the negative sense that liberalism’s inherent logic guaranteed its own demise in the form of Woke. Others, like Andrew Doyle, believe Woke is a hard break with liberalism—a hostile force attacking it from the outside.

Lipa’s list falls within the first camp, with the key distinction that she is implicitly claiming this progression into Woke is a good thing. Just as few Woke ideologues even now will admit to being against free speech, Lipa knows that there is something good and important about the literary achievements of the past, and tries to harness that energy to bolster the oppressive contemporary ideology her list ultimately advocates.

We can see this hypocrisy in, for example, the fact that publishers have relentlessly weeded out the Salingers of today. Catcher would be instantly dismissed as the narcissistic ramblings of a privileged white male, and would not have a hope of being published. In that sense it really is ‘banned’ in spirit, but that is certainly not what Lipa means by the term.

William Burroughs also features, yet he would definitely be cancelled today, and probably in jail (the latter perhaps a reasonable outcome from shooting your wife in the head). Burroughs’s Naked Lunch is in the ‘Control’ section, along with Kafka’s The Trial. These are apparently works that ‘explore the mechanisms of control, both visible and invisible, including surveillance, propaganda, technological influence and ideological conditioning.’

It’s hard not to laugh at the last part, in a list stuffed with works on decolonisation, ‘antiracism’, and gender ideology. But there is also little evidence the Woke authors on this list offer a real critique of bureaucracy or technocracy, and typically the Woke were the most fierce enforcers of state tyranny during the Covid era (along with Piers Morgan).

The Handmaid’s Tale also appears in this section, and is the perfect representative of the whole list. It imagines an oppressive Christian patriarchy which in many ways resembles the real Islamic patriarchies that are in operation in parts of the world right now. As with Lipa’s list, it is far safer to create a straw man opponent and pretend you’re ‘banned’.

This is why the one genuinely brave choice on the list is Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses. One key distinction between the liberal and Woke eras has been the latter’s tendency to ignore Islamic oppression in favour of viewing all Muslims as victims of the West. Rushdie exists on the faultline between these two worldviews, and it would have been typical for a list like this to duck controversy by not including him. This almost makes me think he is there by mistake, or perhaps it’s because Lipa’s library is in Portugal, where they may not have got the latest Woke memo, much in the way that Michel Houellebecq is still allowed to be a literary star in France.

Rushdie’s horrific stabbing in 2022 proves that this book is still highly dangerous. The rest are largely classics that are no longer considered controversial, or, to the extent that they are, it is at the hands of the kinds of people behind the more recent works on the list. It is they who love to tear apart the canon and let loose ‘sensitivity readers’ upon the very giants on display here.

Lipa doesn’t look like she eats a great deal of cake, and that is to her credit, but here she is trying to have her cake and eat it. You either celebrate beauty, individual expression, and artistic risk, or ‘identity’, ideological conformity, and activism posing as art. You can’t have both.

Some of you may have seen my top ten postwar American novels video. Well, this being the internet, the video was deemed incredibly controversial by some.

Hence I have made this follow up to address the ten books I possibly should have included on my first list. Some I thought of later and regretted not including, others were books that kept coming up in the comments and I felt I should acknowledge.

Watch below and see if you agree with my choices. But also watch the first one in case I already mentioned your favourite!

Have a good weekend,
Nick

Welcome to Nick Reads everyone. As promised, one of the things I’ll be putting exclusively on this page is notes on what I’m currently reading.

Well, following a recent video where I claimed Don DeLillo’s White Noise is the best postwar American novel, I thought I’d better reread it to check. I first read it more than twenty years ago, when I was a student, much like those the book opens with, with their entire lives stuffed into their parents’ cars on the first day of college.

Reading it again now, I am closer in age to the protagonist, Jack Gladney, and can empathise more keenly with his fears and distractions. The book is just as prescient as I remembered. In fact it looks even more prophetic now. I’m yet to get to the part where DeLillo casually predicts 9/11, but the odd detachment from death in a technocratic world, and the unsettling nature of a state-managed crisis (the ‘Airborne Toxic Event’) feel even more pertinent post-Covid.

It is also every bit as funny as I recalled, with a strangely poetic narrative voice, and so far I feel I was right to put it number one on my postwar American list.

For reasons less clear to me, I have also started rereading Ian McEwan’s The Child in Time. This is a novel we read at school, for A-level English.

I have no idea where my school copy got to, so I’ve had to buy it again. Probably for the best, as we were allowed to take books into exams, and I remember I had a very complex series of notes inside the front and back covers. By the time of the exam I didn’t even need to refer to them, as my famously sharp memory was even sharper in those days. Naturally I got an A, though I always resented my English teacher refusing to predict that I’d get an A, which hampered my chances of getting into top universities. This despite also achieving the third-highest grade in the country on my History syllabus, but let’s not get into that old story again.

I enjoyed the book as a sixth-former, though would have disavowed it by the time I was a university student on grounds of it being ‘middlebrow’. Of course, now I see it is not middlebrow at all, but very impressive writing. I can appreciate the observations on intimate adult relationships, something that school Nick knew nothing about, and the depiction of the political milieu, which I’ve also had a glimpse of now.

McEwan’s meditations on marriage and family life actually have some crossover with DeLillo’s, so it is interesting to be reading both. The Child in Time is also set during a heatwave in London, something else I can painfully relate to at present.

The theme of trauma involving children is something shared by Dennis Lehane’s Mystic River. I have been known to describe crime novels as ‘slop’, though unless you count the hardboiled works of James M. Cain, I have barely read any. After speaking to a working crime writer recently, I decided I should probably rectify my snobbery. The other motivation was my love of the film The Drop, based on Lehane’s short story, ‘Animal Rescue’. The story is frankly excellent, so I thought I’d check out one of his novels.

Lehane is known as a master of story, but there is some striking prose too. I particularly liked:

Sean got that lurching sensation again, this time accompanied by the taste of dirty pennies in his mouth. His stomach felt as if a spoon had hollowed it out.

Lehane is no punk, as a Lehane character might say.

The fourth book I’m reading (yes I know, insane system) is Ben Lerner’s Transcription.

The theme throughout this post has been overcoming various reading prejudices of mine. There’s been ‘Middlebrow’, and crime, and now we can add contemporary novels, which I tend to expect will be terrible. Transcription is from 2026, so about as contemporary as it gets. I kept hearing about it, so decided to give it an honest try.

So far I hate it. I hate the protagonist, and all the other characters, and I suspect I hate the author too. I certainly don’t require ‘likeable’ characters in fiction—Bret Easton Ellis is one of my favourite writers. But where Ellis treats his characters with the appropriate mix of irony, scorn and affection, I suspect Lerner doesn’t know how annoying his cast of somewhat wimpy and self-important intellectuals really are.

But then, as we’ve learned, I could be wrong.

This four-book system is something I am just trying, applying all the usual techniques I shared with everyone in my video on how to read more.

I am not as far on into the Lehane as the others, and in this system you have to go back and catch up if you’re lagging behind on one of the books. It’s a maverick strategy that risks not finishing anything, but my belief is I will finish all four in succession in a blaze of glory.

There is a certain impatience in the rereads when one comes to an action sequence, if such a term can be used for literary fiction. I know what is going to happen in DeLillo’s ‘Airborne Toxic Event’, for instance. But then one is not reading these for plot anyway. If you want that, you can read crime. Which I also am, of course, with Lehane.

Anyway it’s a good thing I have now started this page, so all this counts as work.

Feel free to add your views. As this is a new venture I have made commenting free (speaking of risky strategies).

If you want to get any of the books, you can use the links in this article. I get some tiny amount of money if you do.

Thanks for subscribing to Nick Reads!
Nick

Publishing was supposed to protect the novel. Instead, it became one of the main reasons literary fiction is dying. In this video, I go through five structural failures of the modern publishing industry:

-Ideological conformity and the rise of sensitivity readers
-Risk aversion—chasing safe bets over bold work
-Declining editorial competence
-The collapse of male readership
-The death of the monoculture

Check it out below.

Thanks!
Nick

You want to read more. You keep telling yourself you will. But your attention gets taken up by texting, doomscrolling, and asking AI pointless questions.

We all struggle with these things, but here I give five simple tips that have worked for me to get a lot more quality reading done, even in this world of distraction.

This is extremely wholesome content, and my only goal is to help. That’s just the kind of guy I am.

Check it out below.

Thanks!
Nick

One of the most insightful literary YouTube and Substack accounts is Pens and Poison AKA Liza Libes.

For my first interview on Nick Reads, I spoke to Liza about:

-Why academia has contempt for literature
-‘Sensitivity readers’, and the general state of publishing
-Whether more traditionally-minded people have done enough to defend literature
-Why publishers don’t want writers using metaphors anymore (yes this is real)
-The bizarre word limit for individual sentences imposed by publishers
-What contemporary writers have to do to get their work read
-Whether Substack is the antidote to the malaise of modern publishing
And loads more that is too intricate to list here!

I am sure everyone here will enjoy this conversation, so check it out below.

Thanks!
Nick

Thomas Bernhard might be the greatest writer you've never read.

The Austrian novelist spent most of his adult life seriously ill, and his work shows it. Existential, pessimistic, darkly funny, and built almost entirely on relentless internal monologue, Bernhard sits in a tradition running from Dostoevsky and Knut Hamsun through to Beckett and Kafka.

This is an introduction to his life, his key books, and why The Loser—his fictional account of Glenn Gould's genius destroying everyone around him—might be one of the finest novels of the twentieth century.

Watch my video on this grossly underrated writer below.

I decided to rank what I consider the ten greatest American novels of the postwar era.

This is a very specific, though hugely rich, period of literary history. It is the era of the Beats, but also of giants like Roth and Bellow, and goes all the way up to the advent of postmodernism in fiction.

These days no one really talks about the Great American Novel, or the novel much at all. But there was a time when it mattered. And these are the authors and books I think mattered most.

Watch below to see if you agree with my choices, and my reasoning for each.

Thanks,
Nick

C.S. Lewis finished That Hideous Strength in 1945. He called it a modern fairy tale for grown-ups, yet it's one of the most accurate descriptions of where the modern West was heading that anyone has ever written.

If you want to understand our current political predicament, this is a good place to start. The bureaucratic double-speak, the progressive organisation that can't tell you what it actually does, the propaganda machine, the inner ring of people too eager to please to ever ask what they're complicit in—it's all in this book.

In this essay, I unpack this third novel in Lewis's Ransom Trilogy, including the NICE (the National Institute of Coordinated Experiments), the Head, the Objective Room, and the novel's central argument—that when you strip out God, beauty, and objective morality, you don't get freedom, you get a nightmare.

Also: why the crucifix scene is one of the most important passages Lewis ever wrote, what The Abolition of Man has to do with it, and why Lewis's warning about posthumanism feels more urgent now than at any point since 1945.

Watch below.

Of the three books in C.S. Lewis's Ransom Trilogy, Perelandra is the one most people haven't read, yet it might be the best of them. Tolkien thought so. He called it his favourite of the trilogy.

Perelandra is Lewis's answer to a simple question: what if you could go back to the Garden of Eden and stop the Fall?

Not literally — the novel is set on the planet Perelandra, a kind of unfallen paradise. But that's the idea driving it: a conceptual reimagining of Genesis, written at a time when the literary establishment was obsessing over Joyce and Beckett. Lewis ignored all of that and wrote something stranger, older, and far more relevant.

In this video, I unpack the novel's central conflict—Ransom versus the Unman, good versus evil for the soul of an entire world—and explores why Lewis's incredibly sophisticated treatment of free will, vanity, and temptation.

Watch the video below.

C.S. Lewis published Out of the Silent Planet in 1938—five years before The Abolition of Man—and it contains almost exactly the same warning.

Here I unpack this first book in Lewis's Ransom Trilogy.

I discuss the clash between Ransom's Christian worldview and Weston's scientistic materialism, why Lewis thought the drive to colonise and conquer was spiritually bankrupt, and how the book's central dialogue anticipates The Abolition of Man almost word for word.

Also: why Tolkien couldn't put the manuscript down, the concept of the Tao, what Lewis's three alien species tell us about prelapsarian life, and why the villain Weston sounds a lot like a certain modern tech billionaire.

If you enjoyed That Hideous Strength or The Abolition of Man, this is where Lewis's great argument begins.

Watch the video below.

People are reading less fiction, especially men. Thus I decided to draw on all my years of studying and reading fiction and condense it down to five reasons you should read fiction.

Someone in my comments recently asked me ‘What is literature for?’ and hopefully this answers it.

Check out the video below.

Thanks!
Nick

This thing which I have called for convenience the Tao, and which others may call Natural Law or Traditional Morality or the First Principles of Practical Reason or the First Platitudes, is not one among a series of possible systems of value. It is the sole source of all value judgments. If it is rejected, all value is rejected. If any value is retained, it is retained. The effort to refute it and raise a new system of value in its place is self-contradictory. There has never been, and never will be, a radically new judgment of value in the history of the world. What purport to be new systems or (as they now call them) ‘ideologies’, all consist of fragments from the Tao itself, arbitrarily wrenched from their context in the whole and then swollen to madness in their isolation, yet still owing to the Tao and to it alone such validity as they posses…The rebellion of new ideologies against the Tao is a rebellion of the branches against the tree: if the rebels could succeed they would find that they had destroyed themselves.
— C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man

In 1943, C.S. Lewis wrote a short book that most people have never heard of. It wasn’t Narnia. It wasn’t Mere Christianity. It was The Abolition of Man, and it predicted almost everything happening right now with more precision than anything written since.

Lewis saw it coming: the dismantling of objective values, the rise of technocratic control, the conditioning of human beings into something less than human. He called it eighty years ago. We’re living it now.

This is why you should read it. And why you should watch my video on it below.

Thanks,
Nick

Michel Houellebecq's novel Submission was published on 7th January 2015, the same morning as the Charlie Hebdo massacre.

It imagined France electing an Islamic president by 2022. That didn't happen. But the questions it raises feel less like fiction every year.

In this video I go through what Houellebecq actually wrote — not what his critics claim he wrote.

Submission isn't ultimately about Islam. It's about the West's willingness to surrender — culturally, intellectually, and spiritually — without a shot being fired. And in a way, that's more disturbing.

I have now read the book four times, and I condensed my findings into a five minute essay. Have a watch below if you have five minutes.

Many thanks,
Nick