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Reflections · reading · arguing with the page

notes from the margins, kept in public

“

Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life.

”

— Fernando Pessoa

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A black square background with a blue flower in the center and four orange dots in each corner.

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A simple graphic of a flower with a red center and four green petals on a black background, with a teal border and four red dots in each corner.

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A note before we begin

I read to argue with my own thinking
— and to lose.

I have been a reader longer than I have been almost anything else. English literature was my degree, but more truthfully it was the first country I lived in — crowded, foreign, occasionally violent, always more honest than the place I was actually from.

What you'll find here are notes from the margins: books I keep returning to, sentences I cannot stop thinking about, and the occasional small argument with a writer who has been dead for two hundred years. I do not write reviews. I write the conversation a book starts, and where it leaves me.

A book that doesn't change you a little

isn't a book you actually read.

It is, at best, a pleasant hour.

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A four-pointed compass star symbol in dark teal color.

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A blue four-petaled flower with a yellow center, on a black background with a blue border and four orange dots at each corner.

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Latest · still thinking about it

the most recent margin note.

Journal

The margins are where the thinking happens

In college, I copied lectures by hand while my classmates filmed the professor on cassette recorders. I'm sixty-two now, learning Spanish, and still filling notebooks. On why handwriting is the one method that works for me — and what Pushkin and Coleridge knew about writing in the margins of books.