Meaning isn’t found in the shallows of life but in its depth, so here at Volumes, we go deep into books to find joy and meaning in reading. Here, you’ll read essays that wrestle with modern life by learning from literature — the classics and the contemporary. Volumes is for people who want to build a life out of reading.
Volumes publishes once a week, alternating between Features and Notes on a Reading Life. Features take a close look at a specific book (sometimes a deep-dive into a film) to see what it can tell us about how to live well. Two of my favourites are Klara and the Sun: On Friendship and Being Seen and On Collecting Books, about how we store books and the library as an anti-algorithm.
In Notes on a Reading Life, I write about what I’ve been reading in the pages of physical books and in the digital pages of Substack. Here, I’ll wax ecstatic about a new novel, gush about a rediscovered classic, or wonder about absurdity #481,516 in the growing list of strangeness that defines the modern world.
There are also occasional series on different aspects of reading, like Words of Wisdom, which zooms in on a passage of writing from a great thinker on a specific topic, and Double Take, which revisits books and films I first encountered long ago.
Who am I?
The short answer:
I’m Matthew Morgan, an omnivorous reader obsessed with books, entranced by cinema, and constantly thinking about culture.
The longer answer:
There’s a conventional route to becoming a writer that starts with an impressive university and finishes with being published by a prestigious publisher or news outlet. I took a different route.
I dropped out of college to write a terrible first novel. (I didn’t intend for it to be terrible, it just happened that way.) I worked as a carpenter, a kitchen assistant, a cleaner, and a handyman. The whole time, I read as many books as I could — everything from The Divine Comedy to The Human Stain, from Austen to Zola.
I eventually studied for a degree in English Literature while working as a bookseller. The job meant I read even more, and my studies made me a better writer. My degree was pursued in the same intellectually promiscuous manner that I’d lived my life: I studied literature and creative writing alongside evolution and astronomy. I wrote a second book, slightly less terrible though still unpublishable.
I thought about the conversations I loved having about the books I read, and I swerved again, turning my attention to writing the essays that became Volumes. Now, my writing for this ever-growing project is informed by the peripatetic defiance of boundaries that led me here.
If it’s crucial to contemporary culture, or challenging to some convention, or just plain fascinating, I’ll write about it.
My AI Policy
The landscape of Artificial Intelligence is contoured with many hills and valleys where nuances hide out from the casual observer; an informal glance leaves the impression that the land lies flat and clear. What actually constitutes AI is contested.
Some include the algorithms that suggest a video-essay that inspires something I write, or the photo-editing software I use to create the images for this website. Others specifically mean generative AI such as ChatGPT when they discuss the topic.
I do not use generative AI tools for anything I do here. Every word you read is generated by the organic, temperamental, variously successful and failing brain in my head. I spell out my feelings on AI in some detail here:
