Finished reading: Bag of Bones by Stephen King 📚
A reread of a classic ghost story set on a remote lake in western Maine. Like most King novels, the true horrors are all too human. ★★★★☆
Microposts
Finished reading: Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner 📚
I’ve read four Stegner novels, saving this one, his Pulitzer, for the last. I thought Crossing to Safety was his best, and Big Rock Candy Mountain absolutely gutted me. Still, this one will stick with me for a long time. ★★★★☆
Finished reading: On Boxing by Joyce Carol Oates 📚
Joyce Carol Oates might be the least likely person ever to write a book about boxing. And yet she did. Like me, she developed a lifelong appreciation for the sport, ultimately growing to love it, by watching fights with her father as a child. But it’s clear that she feels a natural disquiet with her own fascination with the sport, and the essays in this book circle and dance around that central premise: why, in our modern, civilized society, is boxing still a thing? ★★★☆☆
Finished reading: Self-Reliance and Other Essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson 📚
What a treasure. I’ve read most of these essays before, but never so deeply or with such illumination. Emerson’s wisdom is simple to understand, yet difficult to practice in a world of popular opinion and distracted thinking. Trust in your own thoughts; be yourself; don’t try to impress or copy others; cherish your friends. Most of all: be present, here and now. ★★★★★
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.