To escape the heat, I dragged a reluctant Montainge downstairs, where it was cooler, and collapsed into a comfortable chair beneath the breath of an air conditioner vent. Montainge was going on about sadness, but I muted him beneath the book cover and sat listening to my youngest daughter sing in the shower in the…
The best part of my early morning walks in summer is pausing under this goldenrain tree. If I am listening to a book or music, I pause the audio and stand still, listening. The tree hums. The bees pollinating the flowers in the crown seem to harmonize so that the tree sounds like some kind…
My grandfather got me my well-worn edition of Our Oriental Heritage back in April 1999, from a used bookstore in Nyack, New York. Our Oriental Heritage was the first volume in what historian Will Durant thought would be a 5-volume survey of civilization called THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION. It was published in 1935. I first…
If one were to peruse the list of books I have read since 1996, the first item of note might be the book that started it all, #1 on the list: From Earth to Heaven by Isaac Asimov. Why this book? Why the list? Why now? In other words, how did it all start? In…
I’m not normally one for prompts, but I saw prompt the other day asking about something the writer learned in high school. I found myself thinking about it throughout the day, and jotting notes to myself about things I’d learned in high school. Here are ten of them.
I am on a long-weekend getaway with the family after a very busy week. I got this week’s Shelf-Life post partially written, and then was up early this morning working on it some more by the fireplace in the resort lobby. But I felt like I was rushing things when I should be taking my…
Even as I scramble my way through books, and write posts on productivity, life continues, a river wholly unconcerned with my mundane thoughts and opinions. There is no PAUSE button to keep the kids from growing up while I’m engaged in these activities. Remember the Little Man? He has grown into a strapping teenager, taller…
April 6 marks a special anniversary for me. On April 6, 1996, I began to keep the diary which I still maintain today. Four years earlier, on April 6, 1992, Isaac Asimov died. The two events are most definitely related, as we shall see. Sometime in the early spring of 1994, while wandering through a…
What is the first book you remember? Pressed to answer this question, eyes traversing the tall silhouettes, pillars of the shelves in my office, thoughts spelunking into the increasingly shadowy regions of my early memory, I’d have to say that the first book I remember is Dr. Seuss’s Did I Ever Tell You How Lucky You…
While reading an article on “The Wonder of Insight” by John Kounios and Yvette Koumios in the March 2025 issue of Scientific American, I came across the following passage: In the 2010s Brian Erickson, then a doctoral student in John’s laboratory at Drexel University, and his colleagues demonstrated that people’s tendency toward insightful or analytical thinking…