May I recommend
Keeping track of the books you read.
I started doing this a few years ago when my reading of actual books slowed (to be fair, the Internet had been invented and I had a lot of videos of ladies in athleisure wear making salads to watch). To get myself back in the game, I gave myself a challenge of reading 45 books in a year. I jotted them down when I’d finished and by December, I’d hit my target. Yay!
The next year I raised the challenge to fifty books and started giving them a star rating to remind myself if I liked them or not. This is where things got a little dicey — I realized that sometimes I was racing through books or finishing them when I didn’t want to, simply so I could “count” them in my listing. I didn’t like that. I didn’t want to gamify reading, which has been one of my life’s great pleasures.
So the next year, I recalibrated and now I keep track of the books I’m reading, but I don’t count them and I’m not trying to hit a target. I like having the list and I like my extremely basic star rating, so that I can remember what I read (How quickly I forget!) and so that I can recommend books I love to people who ask.
I know there are all sorts of apps and programs I could use to track my reading (I see you, Goodreads) but I just like jotting them down in a notebook. I don’t want other people to know what I’m reading or what I think about what I read. I know this is very odd because I am quite open about other things in my life (see chafing), but my relationship with what I read is private and I only want to share those thoughts on my terms.
Anyway, keeping track of what I read is a nice little reminder of what and where I was when I read a specific book. When I see a title, I can recall my mind-frame and my concerns while I was reading it. It’s a shortcut to my imaginative life and I love it.
Do you keep track of reading? If so, how and where?
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Secret documents and hidden treasure
Archives and lost treasure? You’d better believe I clickedy click clicked on the link. Also, this has a lot of parallels with the murder mystery I am currently writing, which will be set in the Eastern Townships and feature a lost treasure.
THE ARCHIVES OF THE OREGON HISTORICAL SOCIETY Research Library in Portland house many treasures—but only one honest-to-goodness treasure map.
“It is an odd thing,” says research services manager Scott Daniels of manuscript number 2039, a scrap of creased and stained tracing cloth kept in the library’s climate-controlled vault. Unfolded, the document is 6 inches tall and 18 inches wide, covered from edge to edge on one side with long strings of blunt capital letters written in blue pencil, and a crude map sketched in blue and yellow. On the far left, there’s a port with a building topped by a tall spire on its shore. And on the right, there is a barn and two slashes that seem to be gravestones. In black ink, someone has written “MONEY”—highlighting two separate caches of $3,000 each. In February 1862, when the map seems to indicate the treasure was buried, $6,000 would have been a fortune, several years wages for the average worker.
Vicky/Marley 4eva
Anne Heche’s Stubborn Incandescence
As a kid, I loved the soap opera, Another World. It was a world teeming with glamorous, high-haired ladies who glamorously needed to remove their enormous earrings to answer the phone and were constantly talking aloud about their schemes to win back strong-jawed men with well-groomed mullets. My favourite character on my favourite soap was Vicky/Marley (identical twins unknowingly raised separately, natch) and my favourite actress who played those twins was Anne Heche. All that to say that I loved this piece in the New Yorker about the actress.
With her cornflower-blue eyes and lanky carriage, she deftly navigated the implausibilities inherent to the soap genre (one story line involves Vicky impersonating Marley during the latter’s trial for attempted murder), and succeeded in infusing each sister with her own separate soul. The show, set in the fictional Bay City, gave Heche’s Vicky and Marley many screen partners in the form of lovers and family members, but Heche was rarely more electric than when playing against herself.
Beautiful Brutalism
I never like the architectural style of brutalism — concrete, harsh, hulking. Except…I’ve now worked at Library and Archives Canada for twenty years (gasp!) and our main headquarters (for now) are located in a brutalist building looming over the end of the parliamentary precinct.
I’ve come to love the giant, kinda ugly beast that squats over the Ottawa River. Does the heating always work? NO! Can the WiFi claw its way through the concrete walls? NOT ALWAYS! Will you be trapped in an elevator? AT SOME POINT! Still, there is something magical about that building’s cool walls, marble stairway and stunning views.
What are your architectural thoughts?
Book news
The Foulest Things is coming out on September 27th.
September 27th, 2022 - 7:00pm. Noir at the Bar - Duke of Kent pub, Younge and Roehamtpon, Toronto). A bunch of mystery novelists doing short readings from their latest works. Expect chunky eyewear and MURDER. Come and say “hi!”
September 28th, 2022 - My piece on the setting of the Eastern Townships in the novels of Louise Penny will appear in this fun newsletter devoted to all things Three Pines (subscribe today if you want your Gamache fix)
October 4, 2022 - Book launch - Perfect Books Elgin Street Ottawa. Come on out and say “hi” and get a book signed. We can talk archives. We can talk imposter syndrome! We can talk books.
October 20-24th, 2022 - Reading - Knowlton Literary Festival. Have you been to Knowlton? It’s adorable. There’s delicious food, an amazing book store and scenery that will make you want to punch yourself in the face it’s so pretty. Come to the literary festival! It’s the perfect excuse for a jaunt to the countryside!
TikTok
Math things for dummies
I love the self-hatred on this guy’s face
I’m inside one of the oil tanks
Look how even the hedges are
This has exploded on TikTok this past week
Someone made a song about it, which has over 4 million views
You are their cries in the night come true
Erv Herblinger
It’s the look back
Eek, poor Jonathan
Poor Ben, he has a tough life
Give one to Ben!
A weak little boy
The correct response to the Q-Anon/Convoy crowd
Same, friend. Same.
Freaky Friday indeed
We’re bundled up on the chesterfield
Oh my, these two fellas. Happy Sunday, guys.
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Thanks for sharing Notes from Three Pines.