Gordon MacMillan
@gordonmacmillan
Worked at Twitter. Content & social strategy. #books #writing #politics. Second novel Blind Dates. First novel Songs for your Mother. Blog:
At what point did making books harder to read become a sign of literary quality? I've been reading King Fisher & Prophet Song, & it got me thinking about literary fiction's affair with missing quotation marks and unconventional punctuation. tangledprosewritingthroughit.blogspot.com/2026/07/at-w...
The greatest writer of the American West isn't who most people think. For me, it's Annie Proulx. Here's why her Western writing is unmatched. tangledprosewritingthroughit.blogspot.com/2026/07/why-...
I've finally written about one of my all-time favourite novels. Frank Herbert's Dune isn't just a masterpiece of sci-fi. It's a novel about climate, religion, power, AI and the dangers of charismatic leaders. It's more relevant than ever. tangledprosewritingthroughit.blogspot.com/2026/06/why-...
Beautiful prose can make a worldview feel inevitable. This essay asks whether literary admiration can survive closer scrutiny. tangledprosewritingthroughit.blogspot.com/2026/06/beau...
Start with a forgotten crime writer. End up with Orwell, Cornford, the International Brigades and an entire lost literary world. That is the joy of a reading rabbit hole. tangledprosewritingthroughit.blogspot.com/2026/06/down...
One hundred years after The Murder of Roger Ackroyd was published, its most famous trick still works. Why it's always worth revisiting Agatha Christie. tangledprosewritingthroughit.blogspot.com/2026/06/read...
The difficult woman in fiction was never really unlikeable. She was inconvenient, and that is what made her interesting. tangledprosewritingthroughit.blogspot.com/2026/06/the-...
Campus novels are rarely about education. They are about ambition, reinvention, class anxiety and badly behaved clever people. tangledprosewritingthroughit.blogspot.com/2026/06/why-...
BookTok, Goodreads and Substack have made reading more visible. The question is whether visibility has made it deeper. tangledprosewritingthroughit.blogspot.com/2026/06/is-l...
Are novels really getting shorter and simpler, or is fiction adapting to a culture where attention has become harder to defend? tangledprosewritingthroughit.blogspot.com/2026/05/why-...
Writing live news can be tough, as MPs all become ministers.
Some novels comfort. Others ask to be endured. This post considers *A Little Life*, the debate around its relentless sadness, and five challenging books to read next. tangledprosewritingthroughit.blogspot.com/2026/05/when...
Why are unlikeable characters often the most compelling in fiction? From Yesteryear to Yellowface, a look at the messy, difficult people we cannot quite stop reading. tangledprosewritingthroughit.blogspot.com/2026/04/the-...
For anyone curious about where to go after Dostoevsky’s shorter works, these are for me the top five Russian novels that matter most. It is part reading list, part invitation to stop circling and dive in. tangledprosewritingthroughit.blogspot.com/2026/04/why-...
Readers are no longer just consuming book culture. They are shaping it. A new post from Tangled Prose looks at how BookTok, blogs, newsletters, and online communities influence what gets noticed, revived, and remembered. tangledprosewritingthroughit.blogspot.com/2026/04/the-...
Some Joan Didion quotes get repeated so often they start to float free of the work. But her best lines still carry an entire way of seeing inside them. tangledprosewritingthroughit.blogspot.com/2026/04/seve...
Say what you like about Iran’s hardline regime, but Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf’s summation of this make it up as you go war, is good. Although @Thetimes can’t work out which type has plane has been lost but is clear it starts with an F.
Are readers craving seriousness again? Not solemnity, just fiction with depth, patience, and the sense that something is truly at stake. I’ve been thinking about that through Claire Keegan, Paul Lynch, and Marilynne Robinson. #booksky tangledprosewritingthroughit.blogspot.com/2026/04/are-...
Some writers can be recognised within a paragraph. Occasionally, within a line. A distinctive sentence in fiction is defined by many things, from rhythm to syntax, restraint, and voice. #booksky tangledprosewritingthroughit.blogspot.com/2026/03/what...
Some rereads are cosy. Some are sharp. Either way, they tell the truth (or at least a version of it). Here’s why we reread, and what it can reveal about your season. tangledprosewritingthroughit.blogspot.com/2026/03/the-...
The disappearing literary middle - the quieter, beautifully written novels that do not always get the attention they deserve - is disappearing, and here's why readers should care. tangledprosewritingthroughit.blogspot.com/2026/03/ther...
Why are we reaching backwards in our reading lives right now? BookTok, backlist, and the pleasure of long novels that insist you slow down. Plus a mini list of books that read like trends. #booksky tangledprosewritingthroughit.blogspot.com/2026/03/the-...
If you’re in a reading slump, nothing is wrong with you. Sometimes it’s tired brains, overstimulation and too many choices. Here’s your guilt-free reset plan #Books tangledprosewritingthroughit.blogspot.com/2026/03/read...
wrote about the aftermath of finishing something incredible, and what to read next without betrayal. #Books tangledprosewritingthroughit.blogspot.com/2026/03/the-...
The setting as a character, and why the places in some novels stay with you tangledprosewritingthroughit.blogspot.com/2026/02/the-...
I keep thinking Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life and A God in Ruins should be talked about far more than they are. Not because they’re obscure, but because they’re quietly radical. Time, war, memory, the routes our lives take. #booksky tangledprosewritingthroughit.blogspot.com/2026/02/the-...
We pretend we don’t judge books by their covers. We do. We just call it intuition. What covers really do, how design trends shift, and five books I’m eyeing purely on cover energy. What was your last cover-led preorder? #booksky tangledprosewritingthroughit.blogspot.com/2026/02/what...
What do you read after Lonesome Dove? Not the sequels. Not the prequels. Cormac McCarthy’s Border Trilogy is the better answer. Three novels, one sustained reckoning with land, loss, and the end of the West. #booksky tangledprosewritingthroughit.blogspot.com/2026/02/afte...