About a year ago I wrote about the paradox of journaling. I had read about Thoreau’s journal. One commenter pointed to a guy who’d been keeping a diary on paper for 66 years. Not long after the post, I read Walter Isaacson’s biography of Leonardo Da Vinci. There, I discovered that more than 7,000 pages…
When it comes to discussion of books the three words I most dread are, “You should read….” I have developed a process for discovering books I want to read and I put my entire trust in that process. I call it the Butterfly Effect of Reading. I believe it is a result of the freedom…
Over the last twenty five years, I have kept a journal more often than I have not. Over the last 14 I have written more than 6,000 posts on this blog. Over the last 11 years I have tweeted more than 25,000 times. There’s a lot for me to look back on if I wanted…
Over the last few years I’ve read several books that I enjoyed so much, I wanted to know more about their authors. I recently completed Dumas Malone’s 6-volume biography of Thomas Jefferson, Jefferson and His Times. It took Malone decades to complete. I was fascinated by the sheer dogged persistence of someone completing such a…
I. Learning to Read “There is no Frigate like a Book to take us Lands away.” —Emily Dickinson The importance of books My parents taught me the importance of books. They surrounded me with books, read to me, and encouraged my love of books. As a child of the 1970s, I was lucky: There were…
Write what you know! That old advice and my lack of writing on this blog might lead one to believe that I know nothing. I have neglected the blog far too long, but I was tired of the kinds of things I had been writing about. So I’ve decided to take that old advice and…
Baseball is a game of senses: the roar of the crowd. The crack of the bat. The smell of the popcorn. The feel of the worn leather mat. The green and browns of the field against a blue sky. The taste of Big League Chew, or a cold beer in the stands. Amidst the sounds…
This weekend a friend told me about the Sports Illustrated 100 Best Sports Books of All Time. I don’t think I’d known about this list before, and I was immediately intrigued. As with the Modern Library Top 100 Nonfiction Books, I immediately picked through the list to see what I had already read. Turns out…
This morning I finished my 784th book since January 1, 1996. It is a milestone. When I started keeping my list, I had a goal of reading a book a week, or 52 books a year. For the first 17 years, I never hit my goal, although I’ve come close. Then, in 2013, I read 54…
I am 550 pages into my third attempt at reading Will Durant’s Age of Faith. This time, I think I’m going to finish it. I’ve always been interested in history, largely because it teaches us that anything we are experiencing today, no matter how strange or absurd it seems, is nothing new. It’s all happened…
I do a lot of writing on paper these days, and that means carrying around pen. I am almost never without 3 Pilot G-2 pens (black, blue, and red), or a Field Notes notebook. I write a kind of journal in a large Moleskine Sketchbook. And I write my fiction these days (first drafts, anyway)…
Vermont is offering people $10,000 to move and work there. That sounds appealing to me, although I admit it would sound appealing even without the financial inducement. We spent a week in the hills above Woodstock, Vermont last summer, and the desolation, the quiet, and the slowness of life formed the perfect anodyne to my…