I read A Movable Feast by Ernest Hemingway last week. I really dug this quote. He's sitting in a Paris cafe writing and he sees a very pretty woman come in. He glances at her occasionally as he writes, and thinks:

I've seen you, beauty, and you belong to me now, whoever you are waiting for and if I never see you again, I thought. You belong to me ( Read more... )

I just finished a staggeringly good book by Dara Horn called People Love Dead Jews. This collection of essays came out in 2021 and had its genesis in a Smithsonian article About Anne Frank that I remember reading in the magazine in 2018, here retitled as "Everyone's (Second) Favorite Dead Jew." The overall theme is an exploration not so much of ( Read more... )

I continue to read through the entire Hellblazer archive. As of today, I've finished 16 of the 26 trade paperbacks in the reissue series that started in 2011. I ran into another good memory quote. This one was written by Brian Azzarello.

Maybe yer memory? It sifts through all the garbage -- good and bad, and hangs onto the shit that could help you ( Read more... )

It's been a few years since I went through every comic in a long series. Last I did it was in 2017 with Ex Machina, unless you want to count the much shorter March in 2018. This summer, I decided it was time to finally read through all 300 issues of the original run of Hellblazer. I own a bunch of the early trades (about 2/3 of the first 80 issues ( Read more... )

I recently finished reading Midnight's Children. This is the book which catapulted Salman Rushdie to fame and remains one of the more popular Booker Prize winners of all time. To the best of my recollection I had not read anything by Rushdie previously, and I have generally enjoyed other pieces of art inspired by the partition of India and Pakistan ( Read more... )

When I finished Gilead, I noted that it was the rare book that took a long time to read because it had so much much to say that I couldn't take it all in at once. I wasn't kidding, those books are rare, but somehow I managed to pull it twice in a row because the very next book I read was A Circle of Quiet by Madeleine L'Engle, which is the first of ( Read more... )

Some books take a long time to read because they are very long.
Some books take a long time to read because they are very bad.
A few books take a long time to read because they are compelling while being read, but forgettable when sitting on the table waiting to be read again. Ok, so in my experience this is pretty much only Bleak HouseA few books ( Read more... )

There's a scene in Up in the Air where George Clooney's character is extolling the virtues of living light, a sort of Marie Kondo on steroids:
How much does your life weigh? Imagine for a second that you're carrying a backpack. I want you to feel the straps on your shoulders. Feel 'em? Now I want you to pack it with all the stuff that you have in ( Read more... )

To the extent that this journal has a theme, it's the fallibility of human memory, and my resistance to that fallibility by trying to document all sorts of things about my life. Sometimes that documentation is created shortly after the event, other times it's not until the end of the year, and quite often it's decades after the fact, but regardless ( Read more... )

Streak of not eating in a restaurant - 361 days and counting.
Streak of not getting takeout from a restaurant - 56 days and counting.
New Recipes for the Year: 18

Due to the pandemic, it's been more than one year since I ate in a restaurant, which is certainly the all-time record by a gigantic margin. The last time was in the diner at work on ( Read more... )