Introducing Culture Club — with A Little Night Music: Life After Life
Art filled offerings to inspire your every week
Welcome to Culture Club.
I recently promised you some new offerings that will fall somewhere between the arts and the esoteric, Culture Club will be home to everything that is arts inspired or (mostly) adjacent.
There’s tons to come but I don’t want to overwhelm you or myself so I’m going to introduce all these new offerings as slowly as I can dare, over the course of the next few weeks.
I will still be sending out my Cultural Digests, arts & culture commentary and highlights, featuring my top cultural picks but these will now go out once a month. My latest was centred around my obsession with Succession, you can check it out here.
Last week I started a weekly poetry curation for the curious and open hearted, you can read more about that here.
The newest offering that I would like to share with you today is A Little Night Music; once weekly readings on request.
I love audiobooks and I love being read to so maybe I read a book cover to cover, or a poem, or an extract from something beloved. We’ll pick the text together and I will record it — if it’s a long one I’ll break it down into chapters/ reasonable chunks so we’d spend a few months making our way through it. Think book at bedtime vibes but for grown ups. I may even start an edition of this for kids but I wanted to start here for now.
The readings will go out every Sunday.
So. Let’s start at the very beginning…
From next week onwards I would love the readings to come from your suggestions. They can be longer-form so: a novel, a short story, or shorter-form; a poem, an extract from something that inspires you, a children’s book — basically anything that you would love to hear read aloud. Please send your requests to sianclifford@substack.com. Or, as ever, jump into the comments. I would love to hear from you. Have at it!
My first reading featured below is from Life After Life by Kate Atkinson. This book is one that is very close to my heart. I appeared in the BBC adaptation of it in 2022 and working on that project was one of the greatest joys of my life so I thought that was a rather nice place to begin.
This such a lovely idea! <3
I always feel when you listen to a reading or audiobook it gives you a moment to contemplate and you lose yourself in the words.
A few possible book ideas… Small Pleasures by Clare Chambers, Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus and Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen.
Would be lovely to hear you read out the E.E Cummings poem you mentioned darling!because my blood can sing… :)
Ps. Loved Life After Life, every episode took my breath away, it was incredibly compelling but also utterly heartbreaking.