I thought having dogs in Manhattan would be problematic. We purposefully chose an apartment near Central Park for easy access to the trails and green spaces. We’ve been here for six weeks now, and let me assure you: there are plenty of dogs in the city. Thousands of dogs roam the park on any given day, many of them off-leash.
Our two fellas have never been the most cordial during interactions with other dogs. I recall a few instances of canine bedlam when meeting other dogs walking down a crowded dock from our boat. Yet here, the dogs we meet must give off a calming vibe. Our dogs rarely react to the most aggressive sniffing. It’s like they’re different dogs.
We often visit the same quiet section of the Park for our last walk in the evening. Except for the muffled sound of traffic, we might think we’re back on rural Vashon Island. Until we come around a bend and the sky opens up.
My breath usually catches at the sight, which feels like it must be computer-generated from some science fiction movie. A photo doesn’t capture it.
While the dogs pursue all the intricate scents on the ground, I am looking up and out. We are all living our best lives. What a city.
I’ve returned to the comfortable folds of Micro.blog after an eight-week hiatus. I’m calling my time away a sabbatical, and like all such experiences, I learned two important things about myself in the process.
First, I thought I could wean myself from using social media. That was impossible. Spending time on Bluesky taught me why the core values of Micro.blog work so well. On Bluesky, I felt obligated to “follow back” those who followed me, and even without ads or algorithms, memes and inane reposts flooded my timeline.
After two years of mild annoyance at Micro.blog for not showing me my followers, it finally clicked with me on why this is so essential. Here, you follow only those you find interesting. There’s no compunction to do otherwise. Unfollowing someone as your interests change doesn’t represent a moral quandary. My timeline here is much more engaging and relevant.
Second, and more importantly, I learned how special this community is to me. I’ve made friends here. I’ve commiserated and celebrated with so many here. And I’ve watched events unfold that tested our collective mettle.
Recently, I witnessed personal attacks from outside of Micro.blog on Manton Reece for his alleged fascist and exclusionary views. I can think of many politicians who deserve this vitriol, but Manton Reece? Are you kidding me? Manton walks a tightrope of being both the owner of Micro.blog and frequent blogger. In such a divided world, I’ve wondered whether this is wise or even possible. It can’t be easy. Yet, he pulls it off, again and again, with principles and respect.
While you can never win an argument with a troll, you can still make a difference. For me, that was returning and resubscribing to Micro.blog.
McInerney’s great American novel: flawed characters grappling with timeless themes, set in what is arguably the greatest city on earth. I loved it. ★★★★★
Finished: Nightmares and Dreamscapes by Stephen King 💙📚
★★★★☆ Not King’s best short story collection. I think that award goes to You Like It Darker from last year. But any collection of stories by this generation’s master storyteller is still pretty great.
I passed the four-year mark of quitting alcohol today. Where I once struggled with days or weeks, now the years are piling up. As I shared on my third anniversary, the key for me was ruling out any thoughts of future moderation. It took many failed attempts before I accepted this simple truth.
We are walking through Central Park on a beautiful May morning, two lovebirds, married these many years. It’s our third day in Manhattan, and it feels as though the city has opened its arms wide and hugged us. Everywhere we look is green and lush. We pass a bakery nestled deep inside the park and decide to return tomorrow for a coffee and treats.
We emerge from the meadows and winding paths to the thrum and bustle of the Upper West Side. We walk up Broadway looking for a stationery store that sells my kind of notebooks and the art supplies she needs for an upcoming drawing class. The store is nearby, and I’m scanning both the businesses along the street and the map on my phone.
Without warning, Lisa stops. She points to a store sign and speaks a series of numbers. A SEPHORA sign comes out as 8-4-3-5. The neon TD Bank sign is another string of numbers. I look at her closely to see if she’s joking. She's not.
My heart begins to thump in my chest. We find a bench on a traffic island in the middle of Broadway. I ask her to read an advertisement on the bus, and she rattles off more numbers. Her tone becomes emphatic, as if it’s me who’s confused. I ask her to tell me her name. She doesn’t know it.
I wrap my arms around her and tell her to take deep breaths. In a few minutes, we hear the siren of a distant ambulance. “That’s for us,” I say. There are people everywhere, but I feel utterly alone. My mind goes quiet. I know what this is.
Twenty days earlier, during a quiet morning at home in Phoenix, Lisa discovers she can no longer read the text on her phone. Moments later, she can’t recall my name or our daughter’s name. We drive to the emergency room, and she is whisked into a triage room where doctors assess her. They say it’s a stroke and administer a powerful blood thinner. In two hours, her memory comes back. CT Scans, MRI Scans, blood tests, and physical evaluations follow. The doctors say we were lucky to have come to the hospital so quickly. The scans reveal no permanent damage. After three days in the hospital, I bring her home, counting blessings.
This is good because in a week, we will drive to New York with a carload of stuff and two dogs to start a big adventure: five months of city life in a furnished Manhattan apartment. We talk about canceling the trip. The odds of a second stroke are high in the first weeks. What if this happens again in New Mexico? Or along the highway in some desolate part of Missouri? She won't hear of it. She feels fine, and we decide to go, but I am nervous.
We follow a northeastern course of freeways over six long days, stopping only for fast food and pet-friendly hotels. Our route changes daily as we dodge weather systems that, a week later, will turn deadly for these midwestern states.
We finally creep through the Lincoln Tunnel and emerge into the chaos of NYC traffic. We feel relieved and lucky to have arrived in one piece, safe and sound, in our Upper East Side apartment.
I move through the following days in a panicked blur. The ambulance ride, the stroke team at Mount Sinai, the urgent questions about medications, allergies, and medical history. The doctors believe it’s a seizure, not a stroke. She has no physical stroke symptoms, and she is healthy. And having such a drastic memory lapse twice in three weeks almost surely rules out a stroke. Yet there is no definitive proof. I begin to understand that modern medicine is still more art than science.
More tests and scans eventually lead to a conclusion. Lisa has a benign brain tumor, a meningioma, pressing on her brain’s language and memory center, which caused the seizures. We’ve known about this tumor for a year, and she had radiation therapy five months ago to treat it, which these doctors say was a grave mistake. An emergency surgery to remove the tumor is scheduled in two days.
I feel pressure in my chest as I work through what this means. We are thousands of miles from home in a new city without friends or family. Our two dogs are alone in the apartment, and I run back through the Park to walk and feed them, then run back to the hospital. Lisa’s amnesia lingers, and I cannot be away from her side for long. When I return, she is confused and crying.
Our daughter, Mallory, flies in from California. I start to get a hold of myself. I make a rough plan to get us back to Arizona, where we have friends and insurance, and Lisa can more easily recover from surgery. We tag-team hospital visits and dog walking.
We meet Lisa’s doctor, one of the country’s best neurosurgeons, who happens to work out of the very hospital the ambulance driver chose out of a half dozen possibilities. The doctor explains that surgery is necessary to prevent her from having more seizures. There are risks, but these are manageable. This cannot wait. He can do it. He will do it. Now.
I sit with Lisa on the morning of the surgery. She is quiet. She knows she might not wake up from this. My vision narrows as I watch a nurse wheel her away to the operating room. I walk slowly back to the apartment to wait.
The surgery is a success. The surgeon removes the tumor without damaging an encroaching blood vessel or causing a seizure. She wakes up in pain, but herself. She loses the ability to read again, which scares her, but she remembers our names. I sit at the foot of her bed in the ICU wing while doctors and nurses poke and prod her. Her head is wrapped in bandages and gauze. The pain is intense, but they can give her nothing but Tylenol. I send Mallory back to the apartment. She shouldn’t see her mom like this. Six hours later, I walk home in darkness and pouring rain.
The next morning, I join the queue of people at the hospital’s entrance as visiting hours begin — the line snakes around the cavernous lobby. The woman ahead of me asks who I am visiting. I tell her in broad strokes what happened.
“Oh my gosh, I have chills” she says. “Imagine if she had the seizure on your road trip? Or if you had been walking in a different part of the city? To wind up here of all places? You have a guardian angel, my friend,” she says.
When I enter Lisa’s room, I see the spark has returned to her eyes. The pain has subsided. She feels better. She shows me how she can read some of the medical notices on the wall. She asks for coffee.
As I enter the bakery across the street from the hospital, the smell of freshly brewed coffee and pastries rouses me. The light of the world grows a little brighter. She’s going to be all right. She is going to be all right. My throat closes up. I study the menu for a long time before I place my order.
Lisa had her surgery six days ago. She was discharged from the hospital the next day. Her memory is intact. She can read. Each day, she is a little stronger, though the recovery from the operation will take weeks or maybe months. We both feel blessed to have come through this, here in the city of new beginnings.
Finished: London Rules by Mick Kerron 💙📚
★★★★☆ Another brilliant volume in the wonderful Slow Horses saga. Jackson Lamb is as disgusting and brilliant as ever, with his Slow Horses saving the day yet again from ineptitude of the intelligence service bosses. These are comfort books to savor.
We’re in the middle of a cross-country car trip from Phoenix to New York City. We’re traveling with two dogs, which has put a serious crimp in our sightseeing options. We are living on truck stop coffee, fast food, and DoorDash in dog-friendly hotel rooms.
As we near Louisville, I know we have to visit the final resting place of Muhammad Ali in Cave Hill Cemetery. I met Ali when I was an aspiring teenage boxer and he was the heavyweight champion of the world. I’ll never forget that handshake and that famous smile. Or the courage he had to stand up for what he believed was right, no matter the personal cost.
The cemetery is beautiful. Lush, green, and quiet. The only sound is birdsong and the dripping of water from an earlier rain. It feels peaceful here. There are two benches for visitors to sit and reflect. His tombstone reads:
Service to others is the rent you pay for your room in heaven.
Rest in peace, Muhammad. You really were the Greatest.
We arrive in New York City in less than a week for our five-month adventure. Normally, we would fly from Phoenix, but because of the dogs, we must make the cross-country drive.
The idea behind this trip has been percolating for decades. When I retired, I wanted to travel and see the world, but not in a conventional way. I didn’t want to see ten countries in two weeks. That’s an exhausting vacation, not travel, and definitely not a pilgrimage. No. I wanted to immerse myself in a place as a local. Rent a furnished flat in Madrid for three months with just a Kindle, a traveler’s notebook, and a good pair of walking shoes.
The problem started with the Ford Expedition I rented for the drive. I chose a large vehicle because I wanted room for the dogs and anything we might bring. But now, as I survey the suitcases and eight loaded boxes of clothing and gear, I know I have forgotten my ideal of traveling light.
The boxes include a blender, two gaming consoles, a box of dog food, treats and toys, thirteen pairs of shoes, a super automatic coffee machine, a fancy electronic scale, fifty pounds of dumbbells, heavy coats, makeup, blankets, vitamins, rain shells, and a box of just computer gear.
Yet, I can’t name a single thing we should remove.
There's a psychological term for this. Stuff expands to the space allowed.
Next time, I’ll rent a Ford Fiesta.
P.S. - Follow my micro blog for more frequent updates on our adventures!
As we get set to start a new adventure in New York City, we’ve closed the chapter of our short RV life. We bought this Winnebago EKKO new and owned it for just under two years.
We explored some amazing places in the Southwest and beyond in its diminutive 23 feet. We visited many National Parks, including an unbelievable week at the Grand Canyon.
With the sale finalized, I ran the numbers that no boat or RV owner ever wants to see. We spent a total of 102 nights on this coach. Let’s just say we could have spent those nights at the nicest suite in the Seattle Four Seasons and still had money left over for breakfast.
But the experiences? Priceless.
Winnebago EKKO
Bear is a fantastic notes app if you're on Mac and iOS. I use it for my reading notes, commonplace book and linked backup of my Day One journal. I wrote a post about Bear last year, but this video does a great job of showcasing its features if you're curious.
One of the things I love about keeping a journal is how a past entry can transport me so completely back in time to that moment. Here’s a passage from my journal on this day eight years ago:
I try to soak this in - the goldfinches perched on the feeders, fluttering and pestering one another for the best feeding spot, Puget Sound so blue and ruffled, distorted by the heat of the fire, the sight and smell of fresh cut grass, so green and healthy, the sounds of birds in every direction announcing their delight that spring has sprung. Ah yes.
Reading this, I am back on the porch of our old house, basking in the newfound sun after a long Pacific Northwest winter. I hear the birdsong. I see the ruffled waves on the blue water.
My life is so different now. I am worlds away from where I was back then. But in the space of a paragraph, I am transported.
Savor the moments. Write what you feel and see in a journal. Write something every day if you can. Practice time travel.
So much of my work in strategy revolved around the achievement of goals: quarterly goals, annual goals, and five-year goals. All of these were tied to a specific metric, which often produced an unintended counter-result. Focus on the inputs that will make you smarter and stronger. Do the workouts, practice your craft. Be one percent better every day. Play the long game.
After poking and prodding the capabilities of Micro.blog for the past 18 months, I have decided to consolidate my online writing on Wordpress where I’ve kept a blog for more than a decade.
This wasn’t an easy decision. Micro.blog is an innovative, capable, affordable service run by a smart, conscientious entrepreneur. It balances simplicity and power like no other blogging platform.
I’m always curious about why a blogger leaves a certain platform and moves to another. In case this is helpful to others, I’m sharing why I am making this change.
The main reason centers around reading tools. Almost 90% of what I posted on Micro.blog relates to books. Micro.blog has some good reading support, but can’t display thumbnail images of covers within posts or allow links from the bookshelf back to the post about the book. I tried many workarounds, but I could never find a solution that made sense. Wordpress, with all its complexity, made this pretty easy. Here’s a link to my bookshelf with the functionality in Wordpress I wasn’t able to implement in Micro.blog.
Further, I’m feeling less and less inclined to share or participate in social platforms of any kind. I am weaning myself off of anything with a time-sensitive feed, including even wholesome ones like Micro.blog. I prefer the more timeless approach of blogs, where the reader and the writer meet only when the time is right — through a fortuitous web search, a Sunday afternoon RSS digest, or a friendship forged in the ether through common interests.
Finally, I have a long history of writing and interacting with readers on Wordpress. Consolidating everything to Micro.blog would mean losing hundreds of comments over the years. For me, this felt like too great of a loss.
A quick word about how long posts and short posts coexist on Wordpress. I worried that a consolidated blog would see my longer essays overwhelmed by the avalanche of short posts. I solved this by creating a subdomain for shorter posts (blog.robertbreen.com), while continuing to publish essays and longer posts at robertbreen.com. This keeps the two types of posts segregated, yet still allowing seamless navigation for the reader. I like how it all came together.
While I won’t post here again, I will keep tabs on the many bloggers I met on Micro.blog through my RSS reader — please keep writing! And I tip my cap to Manton Reece, whose brilliance and heroics have provided an incredible voice and platform for so many.
Finished: A Short Stay in Hell by Steven Peck 💙📚
★★★★☆ A genre-bending novella with a mix of fantasy, horror and magical realism that pushes the ‘library as heaven’ story by Borges to its logical conclusion.
★★★☆☆ Stephen King must have felt he needed a challenge when he started this one. How about a horror novel with just one character handcuffed to a bed with the only way to move the story along is through inner dialogue. Oh, and let that character be a woman, and let that woman be sexually abused by her father as a child. Yep, that would be a challenge.
One of the easiest ways to get more out of the books you read is to keep a journal. When you take notes, you’re not just passively reading; you’re reshaping the material in your own words, deepening your comprehension and the connections in your brain. These notes become a record you can revisit to refresh your memory and make recall easier.
I’ve used Day One as my journal for years, but I only recently discovered how well it works to keep my notes and favorite passages from my reading.
Day One is a leading journaling app for the Mac, iPad, iPhone, Android, and most recently for Windows. Journals are protected from prying eyes using secure end-to-end encryption. Prompts and suggestions help remove writer’s block about what to share. The app makes it simple to create an entry from a photo, from your Apple Watch, from a location you visited, and many other ways that remove the friction from keeping a journal. I liked Day One so much that I transcribed a dozen old paper journals to have a complete digital record of my life in the app.
Day One requires an annual subscription for its premium-level service, but a free version is available that works for many users.
In this post, I’ll share the benefits of keeping a book journal and a link to an Apple Shortcut that automates a big part of tracking your reading in Day One.
Why a Reading Journal
The practice of keeping a reading journal dates back centuries. Known as commonplace books, scholars filled notebooks with anecdotes, favorite passages, and bits of wisdom from their reading and study. Napoleon and Thomas Jefferson kept one. Marcus Aurelius wrote his Meditations as a quasi-commonplace book. Ralph Waldo Emerson filled over 180 notebooks with his reading notes and reflections.
For modern-day bookworms, Day One is the perfect tool for this, especially if you already use it for personal journaling.
The journal timeline of your reading history serves as a visual reminder of the books you’ve read and makes it simple to scroll through the list and review your notes and favorite quotes.
Intertwining your reading and personal journal provides a unique opportunity to revisit and remember the past. Seeing a book you read three years ago in the “On This Day” view of Day One will remind you not only of the book but also what else you were doing or thinking when you read it. Likewise, a journal is the ideal place to meditate on what you’ve learned and how you might apply it to your life. Reading and journaling are natural bedfellows.
Elements of the Book Journal
The book journal in Day One creates a separate entry for each book using the date you finished the book as the journal entry date.
For each book, it records the title and author, your rating on a five-star scale, the genre and reading format, and whether you owned or borrowed the book from the library. This information is presented as a summary line at the top of the entry that is easy to scan from the sidebar timeline.
I chose not to record the publisher, page count, year written, or other book data points. Instead, I insert a Goodreads link to the book, which has all that information just a click away.
There is space to record your thoughts and a section for highlights you marked in the book. Finally, the entry includes an image of the book cover that shows up nicely in the sidebar.
Here’s a view of this journal in Day One on my iPad:
Day One Reading Journal on iPad
… and examples of book entries on my iPhone:
Book Journal Entries on iPhone
... and two views from Day One on the Mac, showing the journal calendar and media to provide an idea of how book covers are used to remind you of your reading visually:
Book Journal Calendar and Media Views on Mac
A Private Alternative to Goodreads
Many avid readers use Goodreads to track the books they read. Consider this book journal as a private alternative or addition to Goodreads. One that you don’t have to worry about privacy, or how followers or others might react to your reading notes.
Goodreads is Amazon-owned, and while you can export basic reading data, it’s harder to get detailed notes or highlights out in a structured way. In contrast, Day One entries can easily be exported elsewhere. The Bear app has a built-in Day One importer; Bear can also export to many formats, including plain text. This Obsidian plug-in converts Day One entries into Markdown text that Obsidian can read or any app that supports plain text. This portability gives me peace of mind that the contents of my journal in Day One are truly future-proof.
Using free online services always brings a risk of continuity and profit motives. I still use Goodreads, but I like having a place where I can write with complete privacy about what I’m reading.
The Book Journal Shortcut
When I understood how great it would be to have my book journal in Day One, I wrote a program with Keyboard Maestro to copy over the 400 book notes I kept in Bear. It took a couple of hours to write the macro and copy the book notes, but when I finished, I had eight years of reading history in Day One.
Keyboard Maestro isn’t available on the iPad, where I do most of my writing, so if I wanted to create new Book Journal entries on the iPad, I would have to figure out how to do it in Apple Shortcuts, the only automation tool that works on all Apple devices.
It took much more time to accomplish this in Shortcuts, partly because I have less experience with it and also because it’s not nearly as powerful. The trickiest part was pinging the Google Books database for book covers, but I eventually figured it out.
Here’s the link to the Book Journal Apple Shortcut:
Clicking the link will prompt you to download and install the shortcut on your system. You should only need to do this once, so long as your devices are all on the same iCloud account.
In the shortcut setup, you’ll need to specify which journal in Day One you want to use for your book entries. It defaults to Journal, but I recommend you create a new journal for your books and update the shortcut to save your entries there.
When you run the shortcut the first time, you’ll be prompted for permission to access Google’s API service, Google Books, and to save entries to Day One.
You’ll be asked for the book’s title and author for each book. Enter these carefully, as whatever you type will be used to search Google and Goodreads and will become the basis for your book note. Next, you’ll click through standardized prompts for book genre, reading format, ownership, rating, and a calendar to select the date you finished the book. Finally, you’ll be presented with a selection of book covers from the Google Books API service. From there, the shortcut finalizes the book note and creates it in Day One.
You’ll need to revise the genre categories to fit your reading preferences. You won’t need any shortcut programming knowledge to edit these. Right-click the shortcut on Mac or tap the three dots in the upper right corner of the shortcut on your iPhone or iPad, and look for this list:
Editing Book Genres in the Shortcut
The Shortcut applies a reading and rating tag to each book in Day One. This lets you quickly filter your entries to books you loved (or hated). You can change or eliminate this tagging system by editing the final action in the shortcut.
Shortcut Limitations
There are a few limitations with the shortcut. First, Goodreads discontinued its API access to their books database, so the link takes you to a search page where your book should be near the top of the list. It’s a two-click process to access the Goodreads page for your book note entry. You can edit the Goodreads link with the actual website URL after the fact if desired.
I did not include links to StoryGraph or Readwise as these are less common reading applications. If you use these or others, you can follow the logic in the shortcut to add these services.
Covers aren’t available for every book using the Google Books API. If the shortcut doesn’t provide the correct cover, you can add it manually by dragging it into Day One from Goodreads. Further, Day One doesn’t support image resizing, so the book cover can’t be reduced to the typical thumbnail size you’d expect. I’ve inserted the book cover at the end of the note to avoid overwhelming the entry. This approach yields a nice thumbnail view in the timeline and media views.
This shortcut creates a book journal in Day One. If you use a different journaling or notes app that supports Apple Shortcuts (like Apple Notes or Bear), you could replace the last action in the shortcut with the destination app of your choice.
Feel free to customize the shortcut as needed. If something isn’t working as you expected, leave me a note in the comment section, and I’ll have a look.
Final Thoughts
I’ve been a reader all my life, but it’s only been the last eight years that I’ve taken the time to track the books I’ve read. This started as a simple list in a notebook to track my reading against a goal. Eventually, it grew to a full-on reading system in Bear, which involves linking and back-linking my notes and quotes to central themes and other related books.
Taking these extra steps to process what I’ve read has dramatically impacted my reading retention. The books I read before this feel shadowy, almost non-existent; the books since feel alive and connected. Could simply writing stuff down make such a difference? Oh yes.
I wish I could go back in time and tell my 20-something self to take those 20 minutes after finishing a book to capture my thoughts. Fancy note-taking technology didn’t exist then, but it wouldn’t have mattered. I’ve always kept a journal, and it would have been a simple thing to write a paragraph or two about each book.
When I look critically at how elaborate my reading system has become, I know I’m overdoing things. There’s Readwise for highlights, Obsidian to download those highlights, Bear for my linked and tagged reading notes, and Day One for my reading journal. I spend a fair amount of time keeping these systems in check.
If I were to pare this down to the barest of essentials, I would use just Day One. If I could add just one more complication, it would be Readwise. A reading journal in Day One and a commonplace book in Readwise represent the two main pillars of scholarly reading that has spanned many centuries, albeit with recent technological improvements.
One example is the ability to “chat” with your highlights in Readwise using AI. These interactions have revealed connections and insights I had never considered, drawn instantly from the thousands of collected highlights in my system. The results are astonishingly personal and … brilliant.
Chatting with Your Highlights in Readwise
This technology feels much closer to the “second brain” promises of connected notes apps. Why spend so much effort linking notes in Bear when Readwise reveals connections I wouldn’t have made on my own, all without any extra effort?
While I can’t go back in time to urge my younger self to keep a reading journal, I can pass this advice on to you. Track the books you read in a journal. Use Day One and this shortcut. Save passages in books that speak to you. Revisit and review these reading notes and quotes. Let this wisdom grow like interest on an investment. Your future self will thank you.
★★★★☆ Another great Malcolm Gladwell read. I think I’ve read all his books now and even took his Masterclass on writing. I listened to the audiobook, which was the perfect format for this one. Gladwell has an engaging reading voice and employed his podcast artistry by including recordings of his interviewees in the audiobook. I love how we weaves together diverse topics into a central theme.
★★★★★ Rereading a book you haven’t read in 40 years is an interesting experience. I remembered only the bleakness but little of the story itself. I enjoyed most of the book, though all the decades of Hemingway parodies and copycats stole some of its luster. Still, it is a timeless classic that reinvented the novel. Makes me want to go back and read all those books I read when I was young. If this one is any guide, it will be like reading them again for the first time.
If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills.
