Finished reading: My Ántonia (Great Plains Trilogy, #3) by Willa Cather 📚
A literary classic set in rural Nebraska during the 1880s. It’s a coming-of-age story of friendship, romance, and small-town values, but also a quiet meditation on place and memory. I enjoyed this one. ★★★★☆
New Blog Post: Double Vision: A Personal History robertbreen.com
Finished reading: A Marriage At Sea by Sophie Elmhirst 📚
Ordinarily, I’m a sucker for first-hand accounts of enduring the perils of the open ocean on a small boat. This wasn’t that. ★★☆☆☆
Finished reading: The Book of Alchemy by Suleika Jaouad 📚
A great book to establish or reinvigorate a journaling practice. I got a lot out of this collection of one hundred writing prompts. ★★★★☆
Finished reading: The Bazaar of Bad Dreams by Stephen King 📚
Wide range of styles, but most of these stories were just okay. My favorite was UR, a novella about a Kindle with access to the multiverse. Fun references for Dark Tower fans. ★★★☆☆
Finished reading: Raising Hare - A Memoir by Chloe Dalton 📚
Chloe Dalton rescues a baby hare and, in raising it, finds her way back to herself. Luminous, meditative nature writing. I loved this one. ★★★★★
A reminder to fully embrace life on our own terms. One of my favorite passages from an all-time favorite book. Thank you for the kick in the pants, Readwise!
The Guardian just released a list of the 100 best novels of all time. I like how they arrived at the list. It’s interesting to click through and see who voted for which book. As it turns out, I’ve read just 35 of these. I sense a shuffling of my TBR list! 📚
Finished reading: The Good Life by Jay McInerney 📚
The second book in McInerney’s Calloway saga. Not as ambitious as Brightness Falls, but moving all the same. ★★★☆☆
Writers are addicted to the particular kind of pain you feel when you’re at a loss for words, and to the relief that comes from finding them.
— Adam Mastroianni
Finished reading: The First Forty-Nine Stories by Ernest Hemingway 📚
Rereading Hemingway one story a night — pure, punchy prose with deep emotions tucked just below the surface. Favorites: The Snows of Kilimanjaro, Hills Like White Elephants, A Clean, Well-Lighted Place. ★★★★☆
Finished reading: Departure(s) by Julian Barnes 📚
This latest novel from Julian Barnes resists easy classification — memoir, literary analysis, meditation on friendship, memory, and the finality of death. Dark wit throughout, melancholy just beneath, but somehow still hopeful? Like I said, hard to pin down.
It seems to me that humans are often so busy living that they forget they are human – or at least forget what it is to be human, and what its consequences are – and therefore what it means to be dead.
Barnes says this will be his last book. I hope he’s wrong. ★★★★☆
Finished reading: Roads of Destiny by O. Henry 📚
Twenty-two stories, all good, and nearly every one ending with a trademark twist. The language is wonderfully vivid:
I never saw him looking so much like a tiger-lily. He was as beautiful and new as a trellis of sweet peas, and as rollicking as a clarinet solo.
After the first ten stories the formulaic style becomes a little tiresome, but there’s real genius here. Best dipped into when the mood strikes. ★★★☆☆
Finished reading: The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin 📚
This classic Nebula and Hugo award winner drops you in the deep end of an alien world — strange vocabulary, gender-fluid inhabitants, a perpetual chill you can almost feel. The world-building is astonishing; the writing borders on poetry.
Light is the left hand of darkness and darkness the right hand of light. Two are one, life and death, lying together like lovers in kemmer, like hands joined together, like the end and the way.
The ideas on gender and society still feel fresh and important. A good read. ★★★★☆
Day One is doubling down on AI journaling. I’ve written thousands of entries in Day One, but despite the assurances of privacy, I’m not enabling any of these features. Not yet.
AI features in Gold are entirely optional. If you don’t enable AI features or engage them, they don’t touch your entries. When you do use them, your content is processed only in that moment and is never used to train AI models. The privacy principles Day One is known for haven’t changed.
These are the Wild West days of AI. Think carefully before you turn over even more of your most private thoughts.
Finished reading: So Late in the Day by Claire Keegan 📚
One new story (and two reprints) from Claire Keegan, the master of compressing so much into so few words. Men behaving very badly ought to be the sub-title here. As with all of her stories, these will haunt you long after you finish. ★★★★☆
Finished reading: Tiny Beautiful Things by Cheryl Strayed 📚
A wonderful collection of essays written by Cheryl Strayed as part of an advice column under the pseudonym “Dear Sugar.” Terrific, heartfelt advice on just about every aspect of life. I loved it. ★★★★★
We’ve lived in Phoenix for four years now, but only recently put in a pool. It’s almost a necessity here in the summer months. The project finished just as a heat wave descended on the West Valley. What a perfect way to enjoy a slightly cooler evening with friends.
Finished reading: The Man Who Fell to Earth by Walter Tevis 💙📚
A bleak science fiction tale from one of the 20th Century’s most under-appreciated novelists. ★★★☆☆
★ ‘Your Frustration Is the Product’:
Web ads have become awful and invasive. In his commentary, John Gruber shares that he uses uBlock Origin Lite in Safari for ad blocking in Safari.
I have avoided these apps until now. But this was a no-brainer. Free. One-click install.
Join the resistance!