Footnotes and Tangents - An interview with Simon Haisell

A Beyond the Bookshelf Profile

Navigating the passages between books and being

Dear friends,

I first encountered

Simon Haisell

on Instagram in the early days of 2023. I was looking for other readers to share my passion with and here was a guy leading a slow read of War and Peace. At some point during the year Simon discovered the Substack platform and began moving his content to an email format rather than the doom scroll of Instagram. Shortly thereafter I followed him and the rest is history. He is the reason I created Beyond the Bookshelf and one of the bookish souls I most admire. I was delighted when he agreed to this interview.

Simon was born and raised in Sheffield in South Yorkshire, and made his way via London, Oxford, Ecuador, and New York to his current home in Newcastle, where he and his family have lived for the past seven years. He has two children, Zack and Mimi. Zack recently turned five and has started school. Mimi, at three, is still at home. Like most parents, Simon has discovered that kids take over your life, leaving him with precious little time for anything else these past few years. Simon lives vicariously through his two little ones and shares that rediscovering the world through their eyes is an education all of itself.

Simon also enjoys baking bread and even worked as a baker in Oxford for a couple of years. He also enjoys getting out for a long walk and shared that walking is an essential part of writing, so he would struggle to live anywhere where he couldn’t walk through his thoughts and ideas.

I am grateful Simon agreed to answer a few of my questions. I highly recommend checking out his publication. You will be glad you did.

Simon Haisell

• Simon, Thank you for agreeing to the interview with Beyond the Bookshelf. I have enjoyed your work for so long now and I am excited to share your thoughts with my readers. You studied social anthropology and later earned a doctorate in sociology. What first drew you to these disciplines—and how did they shape your relationship with literature?

I was always interested in history and archaeology. My parents took me to explore castles, ruins, standing stones and hill forts – history is everywhere in the UK. I grew up playing games in these spaces and imagining what ordinary life was like. I almost applied to study Ancient History, until I stumbled upon Anthropology. I was sold on its holistic approach to understanding the worldview of a culture and society.

Anthropologists talk about making the strange familiar and the familiar strange. Peculiar customs become recognisable and comprehensible, and we take a double-take at the things we take for granted. For me, this is what literature is all about: to defamiliarise our own way of seeing and gain a greater understanding of the diverse ways to be human, now and in the past.

The anthropological approach is rooted in cultural relativism and the assumption that value systems and meaning are socially produced, vary across cultures, and do not exist independently of human experience and action. This approach has influenced how I think and write about books. I am not particularly interested in literary criticism or debates over what constitutes great literature. My approach is to explore the connections within and beyond a book, not to analyse its worth as literature, but to see what the story can do and where it might lead.

• What prompted your transition from academia to leading deep‑reading communities?

Completing my PhD thesis clarified my priorities. I had enjoyed the research, and I was proud of what I had written. But the process crushed me. I picked myself up from two breakdowns to finish my dissertation, and the thought of making a career out of lecturing, writing papers and attending conferences filled me with dread. My body told me very plainly, this is not your life.

One thing stuck with me. My examiners told me that mine was the best-written thesis they had read. Perhaps not the best piece of scholarship, but good writing nonetheless. I realised that mattered to me far more than anything else, and it reminded me that reading and writing stories was my original passion.

So I set off on my own track, working on my fiction and reading widely. I did not go looking for a deep-reading community, but one found me – and grew out of my commitment to what I love most. There was no plan, no one big idea, just a series of hunches and happy accidents.

• How did growing up in Sheffield and living in Newcastle influence your worldview and writing voice?

I’m not sure. I may need to get back to you on that in another twenty, forty years!

I have lived for short periods in very remote locations, and for several years in two great metropolises – London and New York. These extremes inspire me and emerge in my writing and ideas. But to live, I need both in moderation and balance. Sheffield and Newcastle are small cities a stone’s throw from invigorating and beautiful countryside – both have a hilly, wooded topography with babbling rivers running down past old mills and Victorian terraces. They have rich histories and strong local identities. They are deep in story, although I daresay anywhere you live has tales to tell if you are ready to listen.

• What inspired you to start slow‑reading War & Peace?

This all happened by accident. In 2022, I saw someone on Instagram reading War and Peace, a chapter a day for a whole year. The book has 361 short chapters, so the format is perfect. War and Peace is one of my favourite books to re-read, but I had never read it like that, slowly and intentionally. I was feeling jaded with online reading culture: everything was about reading more books more quickly. So I put out a post asking whether anyone wanted to join me for a read-along in 2023. The response was overwhelming! And it snowballed from there. I had never done a buddy read or been in a book club. But by January 2023, I was leading a read-along of thousands of people all over the world.

• Why do you call your work Footnotes and Tangents—what’s the metaphor behind the name?

When I started writing about books online, I didn’t know how to describe what I was doing. They weren’t book reviews; it certainly wasn’t literary criticism. I would read a book and then write about the rabbit hole it sent me down. Those were the footnotes. Or something in the story might inspire a pastiche, a prose poem, or perhaps a bit of fan fiction. Those were the tangents.

I wanted to move away from the idea that discussing a book is limited to its themes, cast of characters, concerns, and stylistic choices. A book is a beginning, the seed of countless conversations and enquiries into the nature of the world and of ourselves.

So the Footnotes & Tangents logo is a book tree. Think of a book as a seed that grows into the trunk of a big, old oak. The roots are the footnotes, which ground our readings in a greater understanding of the language, context and detail of the text. The branches reach up into the sky, from which birds take flight and seeds grow to create new trees. These are the tangents.

• How did your time on Instagram help evolve your reading practices into what eventually became Footnotes and Tangents?

Instagram is the first place I encountered a reading community. It’s an odd place, beholden to a rather capricious algorithm that rewards pleasing pictures of the most popular and recognisable books. However, if you can reach past the algo, there is a dynamic and lively community of readers. I connected with others interested in historical or translated fiction. And classics.

The tricky part is getting people to read your captions. Instagram is all about the image, and the app is set up to keep you scrolling. My challenge was to hold a reader’s attention for the length of a caption – 2,200 characters or about 400 words. You can actually do quite a lot with that format, but every word must count. It was a great exercise for improving my writing.

You can’t really review a book in 400 words. You can’t do it justice. But you can explore a footnote or make a tangent. And so from the limited space of the Instagram caption, Footnotes & Tangents gradually emerged.

• What makes slow reading in a community so powerful?

On 1 January 2023, I sat down and read the first chapter of War and Peace – alone with my book and a cup of tea. But all over the world, hundreds of other readers were doing the same. In places I could not imagine, leading lives very different to my own, all these people were linked by the shared experience of this one chapter. After finishing it, we met online to chat and share our thoughts. Every day, we had this routine and a place to meet.

Books can offer us a means to escape ourselves or the stress and worry of our lives. But we also live in an age of great loneliness. We feel isolated and cut off. The slow reading community creates a refuge within the world of stories through conversation and that shared experience. Over days, weeks and months, we come to know each other and forge friendships around the book.

• How do participants typically support one another through challenging texts?

When you’re struggling on your own with a book, you might feel bored, irritated, or impatient. You might well give up or decide it isn’t for you. But with everyone on the same page, Footnotes & Tangents creates this space where you can bring that frustration and see that you’re not alone. So recognition is important here.

When someone has a question or is confused by something, others help by providing answers and clarifications. Sometimes, we just need an alternative way of seeing the story. The tone is almost always respectful and constructive – we’re not here to score points or patronise other readers. The atmosphere is one of friendly curiosity on a shared journey through the book.

• Running a group of 1,000+ readers is remarkable—what have been your biggest surprises from these large‑scale read‑alongs?

I do my best not to think about the numbers! If I do, I terrify myself and go hide under a rock.

When this all took off, my greatest fear was that trolls would sabotage our conversation or that the tone of the discussions would become unfriendly and uncivilised. I had never hosted or mediated anything like this before, and I felt a great weight of responsibility to make sure everyone felt welcome and at home in the space.

The biggest surprise was that these fears were unfounded. There’s been the odd bad egg here and there, and the occasional misunderstanding, but the remarkable thing has been how good-natured and well-meaning everyone has been. I don’t know why we’ve been so lucky, but I suspect it is one of the greatest attractions of these slow reads and such a stark contrast to much of the discourse offline and online.

• What is it about War & Peace that you find eternally captivating?

War and Peace is a nineteenth-century Russian novel about four aristocratic families living through the Napoleonic wars. You’d think we would have very little in common with these characters of a different time, culture and social class than ourselves. But what captivates me is how Leo Tolstoy writes about these people: clear-eyed but compassionate, incisive and expansive, fully articulating each person’s complex and contradictory selves. Tolstoy seems incapable of caricature and immune to cynicism. And when he writes about their hopes and fears, delusions and strivings, we see and recognise ourselves within the story. War and Peace is eternally captivating because it is a book about us.

• Readers often describe your second‑year read‑along of Tolstoy as life‑changing. Did any particular testimonial stay with you?

There was one reader who suffered from anxiety and depression and could barely leave her house. She made many changes to her life that year, so I can’t say War and Peace was the cure, but she called it the “missing piece” that turned things around. She was chatting with us every day and went travelling.

I was overwhelmed by the impact the slow read had on people. I didn’t expect it. Readers sent me handwritten letters and emails saying what a difference it had made to have this reading routine, this daily conversation and a wise book as company for a year. It was humbling to play a small part in the lives of strangers all over the world.

• You’ve led deep reads of Hilary Mantel’s Cromwell trilogy—how do you design those sessions to help readers navigate its narrative complexity?

The Cromwell trilogy was more of a challenge than Tolstoy. The historical context is complex, the chapters are long, and Mantel’s style is elliptical and idiosyncratic. And there are so many Thomases!

Each post includes a plot summary that links to individual character plot summaries. You need to get the narrative straight first before you move on to the footnotes. And then it is all about peeling off layers: the first footnote looks for a theme that holds the week’s story together. And after that, I pick out a few more details that have caught my eye.

• How do you choose which texts to slow‑read next?

This has been tricky. There is a temptation to “do the classics” or pick the books people struggle with most or have put off until now. However, that only works if the host is genuinely excited and enthusiastic about taking on these slow reads. That energy is essential. So, as a general rule, I choose books I love and want to re-read. Books I’m eager to share with others.

They may be big and complex, but similarly, they can be short and deceptively simple. However, they must include potential footnotes and tangents: details to unpack or research, and ideas to explore and discuss.

• How slow is too slow? Have you ever had to pivot your pacing strategy?

Not yet! More often, we are going too quickly. That might have been a problem at times with A Place of Greater Safety. But I’m not prescriptive about pacing. There are no rules. If someone wants to read ahead, they can, and they do. More than anything, the slow pace allows me time to research and write the posts. And I never have enough time! So, pivoting to a faster pace is very unlikely to happen.

• What is your ideal daily reading routine—do you follow any rituals?

I don’t want to disappoint anyone, but I don’t have any reading rituals, and I currently don’t have much of a routine! As a father of two little ones, I read when and wherever I can – and mostly listen to audiobooks. I’ll do my reading for the slow reads at my desk during office hours, listen to something else while I cook, clean and tidy in the evening. If I can keep my eyes open after that, I’ll open a book by my bed.

• Is there a point in a slow read where you sense transformative insight?

There isn’t just one point; there are many, and they are all over the place and mostly unexpected. It might involve re-reading a passage more closely, discovering something through research and writing, or a conversation with fellow readers. My understanding of Wolf Hall was completely transformed after I had read the final book, The Mirror and the Light. Often, it feels like every day with War and Peace brings something fresh.

• You describe your early Substack writing as “flash fiction, gentle pastiche, the odd poem.” How has that creative impulse evolved?

I miss writing those, and I wish I did more of it during the slow reads. But it often takes time for a reading to pupate into something creative. Still, I try to listen to what the book wants to be and write in the way that feels right for the story. The Wolf Crawl posts imitate Mantel’s style in the Cromwell books – this seemed inevitable to me. I don’t want to write posts that read like a study guide or have no character. The creative impulse is just permission to play with form, style and voice.

• How do you balance community guidance with your own literary voice?

I’m not sure. I hope that most of the time, they aren’t set against one another.

As host, I try to be welcoming, enthusiastic and helpful to everyone who gets involved in the slow reads. That is the part I play. However, reading is a mysterious activity that touches on the mystical and the numinous. Some of what we feel when we read cannot be explained without metaphor, analogy or tangent.

Is this good practice for a guide? I can’t answer that. Each reader will have to decide whether the host’s anecdotes and digressions make him a charming master of ceremonies or an allusive old windbag.

• What has been your writing discipline since publishing over 700 posts?

That number is deceptive! The majority of those are character summaries. That said, it has been an enormous undertaking. The weekly deadlines have kept me disciplined. I tell readers they don’t have to follow the reading schedule, but I do!

I met someone at the weekend who said they were sad when they discovered my Substack. They thought this was amazing, but this writer is clearly about to burn out. That was last year. I waivered a couple of times, but miraculously I am still here.

I work four or five days a week on Footnotes & Tangents. I give each read-along a day’s focus, and get as far as I can with it in one day. At the moment, three slow reads are running concurrently, so Thursday and Friday are for tying up loose ends. It helps enormously that I don’t need to think of topics for posts. But with so much work, there is little time for anything else.

• Tell us about your life in Newcastle—how does its energy or environment shape your work?

Well, life right now in Newcastle revolves around the kids – we have a two-year-old and a five-year-old. So when I am not working, I am with them or asleep! But we’re super fortunate to live in a leafy, vibrant neighbourhood in Newcastle, a short drive to the coast or the hills. I have lived in vast cities and some quite remote places too, and this is a happy balance of buzz and quietude. That mix helps my work, especially by having places to walk to from my doorstop – walking is essential to writing!

• You’ve mentioned creative droughts in Newcastle—what helped you find your writing rhythm again?

The big one was the Covid pandemic. The isolation affected many people, and I also struggled with how monotonous and unvaried life became. There were no surprises, no creativity, no inspiration. And afterwards, it took a long time to come back and pick up pace again. New experiences are almost always the routes out of a creative drought, followed by a daily routine with time and space to write. Footnotes & Tangents has been good for me in that respect: the reading and posting schedules have kept me writing consistently for the last three years.

• How do you juggle writing, guiding readings, and family life?

Not always successfully! I still don’t find enough time to do writing beyond the guides and read-alongs – although there is more time than there was last year. Last year was a real challenge! I was writing a lot of new material for the read-alongs and running the daily chat, with very little leeway or time off. It sucked too much time away from family life, and I knew I had to pull things back if I was to keep going.

These days, I am on a more even keel. I work regular office hours while the kids are at school, and I don’t work evenings or weekends. Next year, I hope to set aside a day or two each week to work on writing unrelated to my Substack. Fingers crossed on that!

• What impact has Substack had on your writing trajectory—and how would the journey have differed had you stayed on Instagram?

It’s hard to imagine how different things would be had I stayed! On Substack, you can build a website with long posts, visuals, links and accompanying audio. Much of the material for the War and Peace read-along originated as scribbled notes on my Instagram stories. Substack has created a space where everything can come together and find a permanent home.

There’s also the financial aspect. I was doing all this in my spare time on Instagram. In the first year, someone kindly set up a GoFundMe. Within weeks of moving to Substack, I had enough paid subscriptions to go full-time. It was an enormous validation of what I was doing, allowing me to dedicate myself to reading, research, and writing. And hopefully, the more you do it, the better you get.

• How do you keep readers engaged beyond the read‑alongs?

I have a monthly discussion post where people share the books they’ve been reading – it is always interesting to see what people are reading outside of the slow reads. And I share a few other bits of writing here and there.

But honestly, I don’t think it is my business to keep people engaged all the time! I have my hands full running the read-alongs, and readers have their own lives to lead beyond the book group. I don’t feel the pressure to stay relevant by constantly producing things and grabbing attention.

• Has Substack’s format shifted your content strategy or pacing?

It has transformed what I can do. For each read-along, I create a book guide composed of several multimedia posts that live permanently on my website. I have finished six guides and will complete another two by the end of the year. Most of these are also available as a podcast – something I would never have considered before Substack.

Substack also allows me to run several read-alongs simultaneously. Readers can sign up for the books they are interested in and will not be flooded with emails and notifications about books that don’t interest them.

• Outside Tolstoy and Mantel, which author would you love to introduce via a slow‑read?

Next year’s lineup includes Salman Rushdie, Pat Barker, William Golding, Alan Garner and AS Byatt. That’s four Booker Prize-winning authors, and one national treasure (Garner) who snuck onto the Booker shortlist with Treacle Walker in 2022. All these writers deserve and reward a slow read, and it’s going to be a fantastic year exploring their books. I’d love to introduce more readers to Ali Smith, Mervyn Peake and Susanna Clarke. I am fascinated by all of Kazuo Ishiguro’s novels, which I would love to read slowly and chronologically one year.

But I’d like to keep an open mind. Footnotes & Tangents could go anywhere and read anything. Something I read tomorrow might blow me away and end up on my list for 2027.

• What’s the most surprising insight someone brought up in a group discussion?

That some of War and Peace is a bit dull? This is probably not surprising to most people, but it was news to me! I had already read the book three times before starting the read-along, and it must never have occurred to me that Tolstoy gets bogged down in philosophical arguments in the latter stages of the book. I have a rather sympathetic and forgiving approach to reading – and reading with others helped me understand other people’s frustrations.

But most of the time, the best insights have been personal: readers who have experienced loss or struggles that allow them to identify strongly with events in the books. When readers feel able to share these connections, the reading experience is enriched and deepened for everyone.

• Have you ever abandoned a text mid‑slow‑read? What did that experience teach you?

Not yet! I’ll let you know if it happens.

• What book or genre are you most excited to explore in your next read‑along?

I read AS Byatt over the summer and picked The Children’s Book to read over the last four months of 2026. It has so many rabbit holes to explore, from theatre to pottery and puppetry, children’s literature, Fabian socialists and anarchists, suffragettes and war poets. The story begins in late Victorian Britain and concludes in the trenches of World War I, spanning a period of significant social change and upheaval. It’s going to be a fabulous slow read.

• Looking ahead, how do you envision Footnotes & Tangents evolving over the next five years?

Well, I don’t have a five-year plan. By the end of this year, I will have finished eight book guides. By next year, the Footnotes & Tangents library will have 13 guides. If we continue at that pace, there should be over 30 books by 2030. That would be magnificent. From next year, I hope to have more time to write other pieces, fiction and essays, and maybe some interviews too. But I’m in no rush. Everything good comes slowly and in its own time.

• Where can people connect with you online?

These days, on Substack mostly. I built up my online presence on Instagram initially, and you can still find me there – but I don’t check it very often.

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Here’s to the books that take us beyond the shelf and into deeper waters,

Matthew Long is a writer and retired sailor living in rural western Tennessee.

Beyond the Bookshelf is a reader-supported voyage. If these literary explorations have enriched your journey, I’d be grateful for any support you can offer. Whether it’s the price of a coffee or a book, your contribution keeps wind in our sails and ensures these navigations through literature remain free for all readers. Thank you for being part of this crew.

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