the outlier

counterculture and seed investment

hello,

Happy New Year! The 2nd January seems like an ideal date for the first Outlier of 2025 so while I wasn’t away for long, it’s good to be back.

the books📖

This year kicks off with an exciting gig right away as I’m off to narrate some audiobooks tomorrow for a fantastic children’s publisher. Fortunately I’ve thus far avoided the illness that’s striking down much of the populace and I’m hoping my luck holds long enough to read a few pages. This time I’ll turn up breakfasted – last time I worked with these guys I was force-fed bananas and croissants before holding a pillow over my stomach to dampen the rumbles in the jungle.

for your interest

counterculture and seed investment

counterculture

When my sixth form tutor asked me how I was going to spend the summer once I finished school I told her,

‘Doing weights and reading books.’

She replied, ‘You really have a split personality don’t you.’

Maybe I do but knowing what I know now, my teenage impulses were good ones. The life of the mind and the life of the body are of course, important! They are even building blocks of becoming an ideal citizen, Plato’s people of thought and of action, the scholar athletes. To me, it’s crazy this two-pronged approach is seen as strange.

I learned from Chris Gayomali’s Substack Heavies that in fact, working out is punk.

As Sami Reiss told me, “if you're punk or countercultural, you should be in shape. Like look at the Cro-Mags. They were in shape, which is good for defending yourself against police and shit.”

Gayomali’s letter is a good one, informative yet usable, and a couple of his main tips of 2024 were to eat soup (check out one someone I also discovered last year in Michelle Davenport) and to stay small and consistent.

Most people are happy with soup but hate this advice. One big effort feels more palatable to us, probably because it ends, but small and consistent is the only sustainable way to be when it comes to your health and really, to many of life’s other #goals. I’m quite good at these small consistencies when I set my mind to them, usually self-talking my stubborn self into compliance, and when I think of little initiatives to do, I keep coming back to the officialising of my teenage summer preoccupations; reading books and doing pressups.

Over the past couple of years, I’ve begun a little tradition to take down a big book right at the beginning of the year. Like making outsize effort, reading big books is an exhausting thing to keep up for 12 months across multiple weighty tomes but to do one and have that to hang your reading hat on, to read a big worthy difficult sort of book feels like handing your homework in early. If you read nothing else for the rest of the year, you can say you read one of the greats.

This year, I’m going to read The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky.

The Russians have been a black spot of mine, an oeuvre too thick and broad to countenance but over the past couple of years, I’ve taken down a couple in Anna Karenina (loved) and The Master and Margarita (was fine). I’m currently enjoying the first Boys Book Club book of 2025, Ivan Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons, but that’s a shorter read. The Brothers Karamazov is big and while I did read the TikTok sensation novella White Nights (fine) last year, I’m yet to read any of Dostoyevsky’s major work. Now’s the time.

Alongside it, I’ll commit to my pressups. I do these anyway but maybe I’ll find some way to step them up. There’s a point that rather than adding volume, it pays to alter the exercise to make it more difficult and while I’m currently at Spiderman level (see below), I’ve got scope to improve. Find a level where you can do 10 and start there.

(not me doing) Spiderman push-ups - I’d recommend looking at the ground to keep the neck in line

If you’d like to join me for Pages and Pressups then get a copy of The Brothers Karamazov and get cracking. I’ve gone with a more recent translation by Ignat Avsey (informed by this) and am aiming to finish reading by the end of February.

seed investment

One joy of gift-giving is that you’ll never know how a gift will grow. Here’s one of the greatest athletes of all time with a gift he received for Christmas.

I’m delighted with getting the slippers I wanted but I loved the video of my nephew playing with his present. He might not beat LeBron at basketball but just maybe, he’ll become an engineer.

a book

I’m enjoying Fathers and Sons. There’s a generation gap type clash as far as I can tell and it’s got me wracking my brains for my GCSE Russian history for context. If you’re yet to delve into the Russians, this seems like one of the simpler jumping off points. My edition is the Richard Freeborn translation and while I initially found it a little modern, I’m into it now. If you know the merits of the various translations or have read the book before then feel free to share in the comments!

a listen

2024 was a year of me listening to more classical music and the New Year’s Day concert by the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra was glorious.

a quote

Solemnity flows out of men naturally; but laughter is a leap. It is easy to be heavy : hard to be light. Satan fell by the force of gravity.

– G.K. Chesterton (by way of Dylan O’Sullivan)

lastly

Thanks for reading! My work is made possible by you so if you’d like to support me you can buy my books, hire me to do something or you can become a paid subscriber using the button below.

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I’ll see you next time.

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