Last weekend, I bought a new notebook from Leuchtturm 1917: A5, dotted pages, hardcover, in beautiful Forest Green. I bought it with the intention of using it as a commonplace book, something I’d heard about only recently. A commonplace book is used to collect and record the thoughts of others, as opposed to writing and…

Fiction: Auster to Herbert My bookshelf, at a glance, can tell you a lot about me. In the most literal sense, you can see the books I’ve read, am reading, and will read. More abstractly, my shelves are a reflection of myself—fragments of my past self in the form of well-read books, unread and recently…

2022 was an excellent year of reading—a year of spontaneity, of curiosity, and of exploring new subjects. I went into 2022 with a list of “10 Books I Want to Read This Year” and read almost none of them. Most everything on my TO-READ list is older fiction titles; almost everything I read in 2022…

Today’s bit of flow comes from David Foster Wallace’s first essay collection, A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, in a piece called “Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley.” The essay follows a young DFW as he navigates his adolescence on the tennis courts of Philo, Illinois. In his early teens, Wallace was a robotically…

One of the many joys of reading is the feeling you get when an author puts into words something you have thought or experienced—even if it’s the faintest subconscious itch—that you have struggled to articulate yourself. Sometimes it’s as simple as explaining a concept that you couldn’t wrap your head around before, such as in…

Whenever I get the opportunity to talk about books that I’m passionate about, I tend to soapbox. Books are an incredibly personal thing, so being able to share them with other people (and hopefully convince them to read too) is part of the fun. I’ve always wanted to have an platform to ramble about the…

If you’ve ever felt a bit of panic when you don’t have your phone, if you feel guilty for spending so much time on social media, or if you feel like you aren’t spending your time how you want to, then set aside an afternoon to read what Johann Hari has to say. Stolen Focus…