Notes

Short entries, newest first. Each one is a quotation and a comment.

On re-reading instead of finishing

I used to treat a half-read book as a debt. This year I started keeping a short stack by the window of books I only ever re-read the middle of, and the guilt went away. Coverage was never the point.

Field guides as a genre

A good field guide assumes you are standing outside, a little cold, holding the book in one hand. The prose is shaped by that posture: short keys, no throat-clearing, everything indexed by what you can actually see.

Two paragraphs on tides

The part that stays with me is that the bulge of water follows the moon but also lags it, so the highest tide arrives a day or two after the full moon, not on it. A system with memory.