Week 8

This week, I worked, binged Severance, played Kingdom Hearts and enjoyed a weekend with my sisters. My sister and her husband visited, which is always fun. It meant a lot of lazing around the house on bad sofas, reading, grazing, intermittently talking between TikTok viewing. It meant eating vegan food and catching up face to face over pakoray my mother cooked. Delightful. Going back to work and using my brain at what feels like 100% capacity has also been quite fun, in a way I didn’t expect.

---

Why Fish Don’t Exist by Lulu Miller

The 2025 women’s prize for non fiction longlist came out last week, so I had to make a list of my favourtie books and read them. This was the first one.

Why Fish Don’t Exist is a book loosely about the order of things, and Chaos. It centres a lot around David Starr Jordan, a eugenicist, founding president of Stanford University and the man credited to discovering 2500 fish. But the book beautifully ties in the idea that we cannot categorise things, all we can do is accept that there is no order to the world and that Chaos will strike. It’s wonderfully optimistic, and well written. You read and read and eventually the title, and Miller’s thinking, becomes clear. Miller peppers in her own life and exactly why she’s so fascinated by David Starr Jordan, exactly what she is looking for in his work.

This didn’t blow me away as I thought it would, but I enjoyed it!

Rating: ★★★★☆