Introducing: The Cairn
A Substack for book lovers by book lovers.
Hello!
Welcome to The Cairn, a newsletter dedicated to books, reading, and authors we love.
We are Meghan and Courtney, and while we are not professional book reviewers, we are enthusiastic book recommenders. We are lifelong book nerds and library enthusiasts (some might call it literary disassociating!) who forged a friendship by swapping book recommendations and realizing we have similar tastes with enough differences in opinion and preferences to keep things interesting.
We started The Cairn to create a fun and creative space to share our passion for books and reading, and hopefully connect with other book lovers just like you.
Why The Cairn?
A cairn [/kern/] is a stack of rocks or stones signifying something of significance—a landmark, a burial site, a memorial. Sometimes they’re artfully balanced stones, placed one on top of the other. Other times they are a massive mound of rocks thrown together in a huge heap.
Cairns are said to symbolize the ancient Celtic people’s reverence for their ancestors, their spiritual practices and the connection between the divine and the natural world. For hikers and outdoorsy folks, they’re landmarks, guideposts symbolizing a path worth exploring, or a direction worth turning towards.
Here at The Cairn, our goal is to share books we love, relevant media that are in conversation with those books, and connect with other book lovers like you. Each stack of recommendations (or cairns) is intended to serve as a monument to our ideas, a way to make sense of our experiences, and be a companion for the stories we’re seeking to share to build connection.
How Do You Talk About Books?
When we recommend books, we consider three main pillars:
Plot
Character development
Writing style
In our experience, a book requires two of these three elements to be compelling and worth finishing. For example, a novel may have an interesting plot and digestible writing style but lackluster character development. Or perhaps there’s an engaging plot and excellent character development but the writing style leaves much to be desired. A 5+ star book is a read that impressively accomplishes all three things.
We realize that star reviews do not truly provide the nuance necessary to offer a robust recommendation. We also know that a 2 star book to one person is a 5 star book to someone else. “Good” and “bad”, after all, are completely subjective. Our goal is less to say “this book is good and you should read it” and more “this book is [insert descriptive terms here] and you might like if you liked [stuff this book reminds us of].” Our goal is to provide our recommendations in a thoughtful but easily consumable way.
What Should We Expect?
The Cairn is a living, breathing, organic space that is likely to change and fluctuate over time as it takes shape. But right now you’ll find four kinds of posts here:
Longform essays. A personal essay accompanied by a cairn of books that ties into the overall theme of the essay.
Short form essays. A quick read inspired by a random thought or current event that reminds us of a relevant read or two.
Listicles. Books we want to talk about that have a shared theme.
Interviews. We haven’t really figured this one out yet, but we’re excited about it!
How Will I Know if The Cairn is Right for Me?
Here at The Cairn you may see pictures of books with library barcodes, cracked spines and glossy plastic covers. That is not only because we love our public libraries, but because we firmly believe that books should be accessible to everyone not just those who can afford to buy books.
We care deeply about reading and bolstering a wide range of voices: immigrant voices, queer voices, marginalized voices, disabled voices, and all combinations thereof.
For now, we mostly focus on Literary Fiction with some non-fiction (and children’s books!) thrown in for good measure. Over time, we hope to bring in contributors with differing tastes that can speak to a wider range of book genres.
While we are excited about new releases and staying on top of highly anticipated book releases, we love a good re-read, a beloved older book, a dip into the archives. Shiny new things are fun, of course, but so are trusty old well-worn broads. (Are we still talking about books?)
We don’t want to inundate you with endless book suggestions to the point where you’re adding to your TBR pile but aren’t actually reading anything. Maybe one month has a taller cairn than the next. Maybe one or two books show up in multiple stacks. We want to share a love of reading, not create any kind of urgency or stress around reading as many books as possible just to consume.
As two neurodivergent women, The Cairn seeks to be a neuro-affirming space. Accordingly, we will do our best to include audio versions of all long form essays, and tl;dr (too long; didn’t read) bullet lists or recaps where appropriate. We want everyone to be able to enjoy this site, whether they’re listening to it, reading it, or getting the general gist.
We firmly believe that Audiobooks count as reading and will bare-knuckle box anyone who says otherwise.
We won’t always agree on everything! (With you or even each other). But hopefully we can all agree that the best books are the books you’ll read.
Join Our Community
Be part of a community of people who share your love of reading. Participate in the comments section, or support this work with a subscription. You can also find us on Instagram at @readthecairn.