If you want to write, practice writing. Practice it for hours a day, not to come up with a story you can publish, but because you long to learn how to write well, because there is something that you alone can say.
— Ann Patchett, This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage
Finished reading: We Live Here Now by Sarah Pinborough 💙📚
The premise and setting had terrific potential, but one-dimensional characters, plot holes, and poor editing hobbled the story. It felt like a book written under the pressure of an unrealistic deadline. ★★★☆☆
Thursday, September 25, 2025 →
We talk of choosing our friends, but friends are self-elected. Reverence is a great part of it. Treat your friend as a spectacle.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
Wednesday, September 17, 2025 →
This is the way.
There is nothing so often condemned, and so deeply loved, as the past.
— Will Durant
Finished reading: The Best American Essays 2024 💙📚
I’m on an essay kick, and the latest “Best American” series provided a wide range of thought-provoking takes and introduced me to some new voices. I share my five favorite essays in the full review. ★★★☆☆
Rats are invading strollers in and around Central Park:
They’re bold. You can stomp your foot all you want, but they’re New York City rats. They are not afraid.
Those many years on an island in Washington state taught me all about rats. But here in NYC? They really are something else.
Wednesday, September 3, 2025 →
What absurd victims of contrary desires we are! If a man is settled in one place he yearns to wander; when he wanders he yearns to have a home. And yet how bestial is content — all the great things in life are done by discontented people.
Christopher Morley
Nancy Pearl’s Revised ‘Rule of 50’:
When you are 51 years of age or older, subtract your age from 100, and the resulting number is the pages you should read before you can guiltlessly give up on a book … When you turn 100, you are authorized (by the Rule of 50) to judge a book by its cover.
💙📚
I’m late to the discovery of @annahavron’s wonderful Analog Office blog. Her Lumpers vs Splitters post on whether to keep one notebook for everything or many specialized notebooks is pure gold. Anna could write about staplers, and I would read it. Full disclosure: I am and forever will be a lumper.
The Kobo-Instapaper integration has officially launched, replacing the now defunct Pocket app for reading articles on the ereader. I’m curious to know if highlights made on Kobo sync back to Instapaper (and thus to Readwise). If so, this could be the tipping point for this long-time Kindle owner.
To see a thousand objects for the first and for the last time, what can be deeper and more melancholy? To travel is to be born and to die at every instant.
— Victor Hugo from Les Misérables
Finished reading: On the Calculation of Volume (Book I) by Solvej Balle 💙📚
It’s Groundhog’s Day but with an existential slant on the meaning of self, time, mortality, sustainability, and the inevitable progression of love and marriage. ★★★★☆
You would think after three months, I would be tired of all the crowds, noise, and concrete. But I couldn’t shake the feeling during a walk through the East Village last night that I was on an elaborate movie set or maybe the holodeck on a starship. NYC might really be the center of the universe.
If you only wished to be happy, this could be easily accomplished; but we wish to be happier than other people, and this is always difficult, for we believe others to be happier than they are.
— Montesquieu
I look forward to these Sunday morning walks in Manhattan. The city empties out over summer weekends. Fewer people out walking, even fewer cars. An hour’s walk along these streets and avenues is therapeutic for the body and soul.
Finished reading: On Tyranny by Timothy Snyder 💙📚
A concise summary of the tactics used by totalitarian governments to suppress freedom and democracy. Clear examples from twentieth-century despots support each of the twenty lessons. ★★★★☆
Finished reading: The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany by William L. Shirer 💙📚
I’m glad I read this hefty tome. I can put current events and government decisions into the context of what happened in Nazi Germany. I know better what to look for. ★★★★☆
Finished reading: Maximum Bob by Elmore Leonard 💙📚
A recent New Yorker article by Anthony Lane prompted me to read this one, my first Elmore Leonard book. I enjoyed the pacing and dialogue and colorful cast of characters, all set in languid south Florida.
★★★★☆
America has been a terrific country for investors. All they have needed to do is sit quietly, listening to no one.
— Warren Buffett, 2023 Berkshire Hathaway Shareholder Letter
Take gratefully any pleasures the world provides, but don’t curse God when they fail. Nobody in the universe ever promised you anything. Most things break, including hearts. The lessons of a life amount not to wisdom but to scar tissue and callus.
Wallace Stegner, The Spectator Bird
Good news for Kobo readers or those looking to escape the Amazon ecosystem: Instapaper Read-It-Later comes to Kobo e-Readers later this summer.
David Barber returns to Evernote after a dalliance with Bear:
When I’m using Evernote, it becomes my central repository for receipts, travel plans, info that came to me via email, desk scraps, web-clips, and quick thoughts. I don’t even have to think about it.
I used Evernote from 2008 to 2016, but the data lock-in, ads, feature bloat, and outrageous price hikes eventually pushed me to DevonThink. Since its acquisition by Bending Spoons, it has improved significantly. People like David are choosing it over excellent alternatives. This is an amazing and unexpected turnaround.
@amylouise on Madame Bovary:
I hope that when you pay attention to the world, see every flower on every oat-stalk and every bumbling country doctor, you find that you can look them into loveliness. I hope that even being bound to a dull community of foolish people could bring unexpected graces. I hope that reality has a richer romance than fantasy.
I loved every word of this review. 💙📚
Finished reading: The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald 💙📚
See my review for notes and favorite highlights. Still and always ★★★★★.
Irreverent take on why the internet hates ‘performative reading’:
We’re told by college professors that students can’t read entire books any more, that gen Z parents don’t like reading to their kids, that smartphones ruined our ability to focus on anything longer than 30 seconds, that AI slop will take over publishing. Don’t be a chump. Read everywhere, and read often.
I walk through Central Park every day and see lots of young people reading books. I’m always peeking at covers. I don’t think this is performative. The pure joy of reading seems very much alive and well.
The Rose Reading Room at the New York Public Library. It’s just a few subway stops from our apartment, so I’m able to spend time here often. What an inspiring place for a reader or writer!
Finished reading: Brightness Falls by Jay McInerney 💙📚
McInerney’s great American novel: flawed characters grappling with timeless themes, set in what is arguably the greatest city on earth. I loved it. ★★★★★
See my full review for notes and favorite highlights.
Tuesday, May 13, 2025 • 1 min read
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.
Wednesday, May 7, 2025 • 1 min read
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.
