vol 8 issue 0.5

Hello fellow reader, and welcome to the Sipped Ink summer read-along. In case we’ve not met before, my name is Adam Wood, and this newsletter is pretty much the only thing I do with a Masters in English & American Literature. This is the 8th instalment of the read-along, and whether you’ve been with us since the beginning — Infinite Jest in 2014 — or you’re just joining us this year, I’d like to take the opportunity right here at the very start to say thank you for being here. There are more of us this time around than in any previous year, and the overwhelming majority of people who have participated before, have come back. Both of these things mean a lot to me, and I’ll do my best over the next six weeks to make it worth your time and attention.

One thing I am confident of, is that we have a wonderful novel to enjoy this year. That hasn’t always been the case, but — rest assured — even if my newsletters this time were just low effort cat GIFs, the worst that can happen is that you read a really special book. So, without further ado, let’s get on with the heart of this introductory issue: some background detail, and then the reading schedule.

Maggie Shipstead → Great Circle

Californian novelist Maggie Shipstead debuted in 2012 with Seating Arrangements, a comedy of manners set in New England, about a family celebration gradually giving way to simmering discontent and long-suppressed grievances. I have not read it, but it must be pretty good, as it won the Dylan Thomas Prize. She followed that novel up two years later, with a second: Astonish Me (2014). Set in the world of ballet, and featuring complex family dynamics against the background of Cold War defection, I liked (but did not love) it when I caught up with it a few weeks ago.

Great Circle (2021) represented a significant step forward. Not only did it take the best part of seven years to appear, it exceeds the combined page counts of her two previous novels, and is also a work of greater ambition in terms of both its epic scope and thematic interests. Shipstead, a keen traveller, saw the book as a platform for exploring more of the world, and — as you’ll see — this is a novel that ranges widely, both geographically and temporally. It’s also a book of incident and spectacle, which nevertheless manages to retain its human heart.

Great Circle was nominated, and subsequently shortlisted, for the 2021 Booker Prize. I read all 13 titles on the longlist last year, and can say with some confidence that Shipstead’s novel was among the very best of them. The novel is also currently shortlisted for this year’s Women’s Prize for Fiction; put 15 Jun in your diary, and we’ll find out together whether Maggie wins the whole thing.

Shipstead has an active Instagram account, which I recommend if you like travel photos and pictures of cool dogs! (And, if you don’t, why not? Dogs are awesome.) I’ll also likely link to some of her non-fiction writing, and interviews with her as we move along, all whilst maintaining a GCHQ-level of paranoid hyper-awareness around potential spoilers.

I hope your appetite is sufficiently whetted, but if you need a further nudge, there’s one at the very end of this email, so stick around. First, however, let’s cover the ins & outs of how this thing works.

Schedule & Discussion

OK, a little housekeeping. First of all, and most important, here’s the schedule for this year:

As you can see, there’s only one week that doesn’t fall neatly, and that’s the second week of reading, which ends mid-page. That feels like a good reason to stress that the schedule is, of course, not policed: I simply do not have the budget to assign people to watch each of you, at all times. In truth, there’s only one rule of the Sipped Ink summer read-along: please don’t openly discuss the novel beyond the current milestone. It’s OK to fall behind and save the emails for later. It’s even OK to read extra pages if you want. But please don’t mar the experience for others by talking about what lies beyond each week’s page marker.

Please absolutely do discuss the novel up to the point we’ve all read, however. You can use the hashtag #sippedink on social networks to find one another, and you can always email me directly at mail@sipped.ink — I often include a few notes from fellow readers in each weekly newsletter.

That’s all from me for this introduction. I will write to you again next Sunday, to discuss the first 107 pages of the novel! By that time, my prediction is that you will already be pretty spellbound by this wonderful book. I’ll leave you with this short video by Maggie Shipstead herself — enjoy the week’s reading.

✌🏻

— Adam