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And now, without further ado, off we go…

Last month I owned up to what an outsized influence I seem to have on the books my library acquires. I’m afraid the same might be said of the books my book club reads. And when I say “my” book club, I just mean the Amsterdam book club I have attended for the past ten years. I am not in charge of this book club.

The book club’s methodology for choosing our next read is wholly democratic. Anyone can nominate a book. Then the moderators make up a list of four nominations, and we all vote. But, well. I happen to nominate a lot of books. There’s nothing I love more than telling people about a book I love.

I don’t make anyone vote, though. That’s on them.

The book we’re reading at book club this month is another one of mine. But it’s also kind of not my fault. We’ve got a couple of die-hard Ian McEwan fans in my book club. So much so that we agreed to do an entire voting round including only his books. So far as I recall, the only other author we’ve honoured thusly is Jane Austen.

And maybe I’m just an uncultured American, but I’d never even heard of Ian McEwan before I joined this book club. I have the impression he’s more of a household name in Britain. But everyone probably knows his most famous book, Atonement, or at least the movie with Kiera Knightley in that stunning green dress.

To be honest, I’ve only read a couple of his other books. Amsterdam, because I found it once in an AirBnB when I’d recently moved to the city; and half of Machines Like Me, which I confess to having gotten bored with and dropping halfway through. (Should I go back to it now that AI boyfriends are a thing?)

All that said, one day Ian McEwan came on as a guest on my favourite philosophy of history podcast, Past Present Future. (As far as I know, it’s the only podcast on the philosophy of history. Let me know if you’ve found another!) He was there to talk about his new book, What We Can Know.

When it turned out that the protagonist was a historian, my ears pricked up. I’m not a real historian myself, but a few years ago I went back to school to get a master’s degree in history, and had a very fine time imagining myself as one.

There are fewer books than you might think where the main character is a historian. But the few that exist are wonderful reading. To wit:

• The Historian, by Elizabeth Kostova, where the titular character delves a little too deeply into the history of Dracula.

• Rachel Kadish’s The Weight of Ink, about a cache of documents discovered in a London attic that just might change everything.

• Possession by A.S. Byatt, where the literary scholar protagonists grow enamoured of the lives of their literary subjects, and basically live in the past.

• More recently, Alix. E Harrow’s The Everlasting, a twisty time-travel fantasy where a historian becomes ever more enmeshed in his Medieval subject matter.

In fact, is that not a common characteristic of historians in fiction? Excessive enmeshment in the past? It’s a hazard of the job, almost a given. How can you love the past enough to devote your life to it without ending up more or less living there?

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Like most New Year’s resolutions, reading more books probably would improve your life. I am one hundred percent on board with everyone taking a break from what they’re doing and cracking open a book. The world would be a better place if at any given moment, that’s what we all did.

Still I’ve never personally had a reading goal.

This is not because I’ve always read a lot of books. In fact, there were a few years of my life that ended up being a kind of reading desert. During college, I don’t think I read a single book that wasn’t for a class.

Straight after that, I went on my 1.5-year Mormon mission, where we weren’t allowed to read. At least, nothing outside of Scripture and church literature. (In retrospect, anyone could have predicted me quitting that church.)

I’d been sent to Santiago Chile, and therefore dedicated myself to learning Spanish. Each day, I dutifully read from my Spanish Bible and Book of Mormon. This daily Bible study was a major language-learning tool for me. Which, to be honest, had its drawbacks. The Mormon-approved translation of the Bible was the Reina Valera, first published in 1569. Chileans found my archaic Spanish hilarious. It was like preaching the gospel in Shakespearean English. (We were also forbidden from using “tu” with anyone but God, so my rusty Spanish still leans formal.)

I married the Bookish Husband as soon as I got back, and spending every moment together continued to distract me from reading. My daughter came along a year later, which is when I started going back to the library to take her to story time. Which brought me to books again. I reverted to the childhood habit—instilled early by my mother—of the weekly library trip.

I brought home board books for my daughter, then picture books. And I started bringing home books for myself too. Before I knew it, I was back in full reading mode. And yes, I started buying the odd book too, mostly at library book sales.

This system worked beautifully when I was in the United States. But our frequent moves abroad threw a wrench in my reading life. English-language books were hard to come by in Italy a decade and a half ago. So I dragged a lot of books from country to country by suitcase.

In one of our failed moves to Italy, we ended up in a tiny apartment in Florence, where I immediately unpacked the Chronicles of Narnia, the entire set of Little House on the Prairie books, the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and a couple of Jane Austen novels, in addition to various Italian language books, and two full-size sets of Mormon scriptures (Bible, Book of Mormon, Doctrine and Covenants, and Pearl of Great Price).

Most of the books I’d brought were read-alouds for the kids, so even with that suitcase full, I was struggling until we ended up in Ireland for a few months, where I began haunting the book sections of charity shops. I built up a quite respectable home library, which I packed along back to Italy a few months later.

When that next time in Italy lasted only a few months, I was forced to leave all my new books behind. We moved to Tunisia the week after the revolution, in January of 2011 (a fun story for another day).

English-language books were even scarcer on the ground in our little beach town in Tunisia than in Italy. That’s when I finally broke down, gave up my prejudices, and got a Kindle. Or rather, my mother-in-law gifted me one, and a kind friend carted it over the Atlantic Ocean.

My Kindle became instantly indispensable. I was mostly reading classics at the time, so it was easy to download all the books I wanted from gutenberg.org or manybooks.net, and side-load them onto my Kindle. Shortly thereafter, I joined Overdrive (and then Libby), which connected my Kindle to the library in my hometown. Books galore, as many as I could read. I was in heaven.

And thus began my chronically online era (books edition). Since I’d already joined the digital dark side, why not open a Goodreads account? I started keeping track of all my books. I even went back and tried to remember every book I’d ever read, so I could put them all in Goodreads. Heady times.

Fast forward to now. I’ve been using Goodreads for sixteen years, and (according to Goodreads) 1200 books. And mostly, it’s been great. Or at least it was for the first few years.

But lately I’ve been feeling a little disenchanted.

Goodreads wants to quantify your reading life. Goodreads wants you to make a yearly goal. Goodreads wants to tell you how many pages you read last year, the longest book, the shortest book, which of the books you liked are popular with other people. Goodreads wants you to rate every book on a scale of one to five.

And Goodreads has started getting on my nerves. For me, reading is qualitative, not quantitative. No number of stars can capture the way I feel immersing myself in the page. I’ve become allergic to the Goodreads way of reading.

That’s why last year I started a Commonplace book, an infinitely more satisfying way to record my reading life.

Nevertheless, at some point, my Kindle account got plugged into Goodreads, so it goes on mindlessly keeping track of everything. And though Goodreads relentlessly keeps at it, I long since turned off notifications. I refuse to play the game.

But when I was thinking about writing this post, I popped in there purely for research purposes. And of course Goodreads immediately insisted on summing up my reading life. How many books did I read last year? I’m not even going to report the number. Like every year, it was more than fifty, fewer than a hundred. Never enough to read all the books I’d like to before I die.

Haruki Murakami’s latest, The City and its Uncertain Walls, was the longest—over seven hundred pages, according to Goodreads. Which surprised me, because when I was reading, it didn’t feel long at all. The Wood at Midwinter by Susanna Clarke was the shortest, and indeed felt much too short, probably because I’ll forever be pining over the thousand gloriously footnoted pages of Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell.

Then Goodreads tried to get me to set a reading goal for 2026, and I got exasperated and closed the app. It reminded me of the other day, when someone posted a photo on Substack of a stack of books, and said these were all the books she planned to read in 2026.

Which, good for her, but it kind of blew my mind. I can’t even fathom that level of planning when it comes to reading. My TBR is not a tidy pile. It’s an ever-expanding whirlpool where I flail about, snatching at every shiny title that floats past.

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I kind of feel like I should write those titles down somewhere. I have various little lists in apps on my phone or random notebook pages. But mostly, I keep my TBR in Libby, the app for checking books out from the library.

The moment I hear about a book I might like to read, I open Libby and immediately check it out. If it’s not available, I put it on hold. If my library doesn’t own a copy, I click on the “notify me” button.

When I first started doing this, I was floored at how often my library bought books I had requested. Either I wield a shocking amount of power, or I share literary tastes with a lot of other people (or at least librarians. Speaking of power! I’m friends with a librarian, and every time I mention a book and she says, “ooh, I’m going to order that for the library,” I get goosebumps and a little envious rush.)

When my holds get maxed out, I’ve made myself a custom tag in Libby called “to borrow.” I keep a running list there too, and whenever I have hold space, I go back and request some of those. I have a couple of library cards, so the result of this chaotic system is that I have a constant stream of wonderful books being lobbed at me by libraries. Often, I’ve completely forgotten about the existence of a book by the time Libby tells me my hold is ready. So I get a lot of random gifts from the universe.

At any given time, there are somewhere between 6 and 10 books on my Kindle, and I pick up whichever one I feel like reading at the moment. (Pro tip: if you keep your Kindle in airplane mode, books you’ve checked out won’t go back to the library before you’re ready. Of course, you also won’t be able to download new books that have become available in the meantime, so it’s a constant tightrope walk.)

Opening my Kindle feels a bit like wandering desultorily through my own personalised library. I’ll read 10-50 pages, and then decide whether to go on. Which is why Goodreads has dutifully put sixty-eight books on my “currently reading” shelf. A more accurate title might be my “never going to finish” shelf. Though sometimes I surprise myself and come back to a book, and then end up loving it. I’m looking at you, Arcadia by Lauren Groff.

And then there are audiobooks. Last year I wrote a totally unironic post on all the news podcasts I was listening to. Which led to me staging an intervention with myself, because that much news was making me anxious and depressed. But I needed something in my ears while walking the dog or making dinner or folding laundry. So I switched to audiobooks. It made my life a million times better to pare it down to one news podcast per day.

And I really enjoy audiobooks now. Yesterday at the gym I finished a fabulous Duke Classics production of Dracula that I thoroughly enjoyed. And the other day I remembered I’d forgotten to re-read Persuasion and it was three days before book club, so I popped into Librivox to find a recording and managed to finish just in time. (Version 4, read by Karen Savage. Highly recommend.)

In the ultimate extremity, when there’s a book I really want and the library doesn’t end up buying it, what do I do? Well, sometimes I break down and buy it myself. Even though this adds to the growing collection of books that don’t fit in my Amsterdam house and will eventually end up in the bookshop I’m starting in Italy. On its way to me by post at this very moment is a copy of The Master and Margarita, which I intend to read this year with Cams Campbell’s read-along. I failed miserably at a similar read-along of Dante’s Divine Comedy last year, so wish me luck.

I’ve gotten so used to reading on Kindle and audiobook that sitting down with a paperback (or even a luxurious hardback) feels like a treat. When I have a free half hour with nothing else to do, I love to sit on the chaise longue with a real book and a cappuccino or cup of tea. But how often does that really happen? Not nearly often enough. I’m perpetually halfway through a beautiful illustrated 50th edition of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities. In between, I rely a lot on reading methods that work while I’m doing something else.

My Kindle Paperwhite has its own light, so I don’t need to sit where there’s good lighting. I don’t need to sit at all. It doesn’t require two hands, or even really one, except once in awhile to turn the page. I read while I’m getting dressed in the morning, set it on the edge of the sink while I brush my teeth, pull it out whenever I’m waiting for anything, take it to bed and don’t worry about a reading light. It’s also waterproof, and therefore ideal for my best indulgent ritual: reading in the bath.

I live in a house full of books, but sometimes I even check out books I already own, because reading them on Kindle just fits better. I have an inkling I would read much less without my endless stream of Kindle library books.

I could be wrong. Maybe I’d rearrange my life in a way that would leave me time to take books down from the shelf and read them the old-fashioned way. After all, it’s what I used to do. That’s food for thought.

OK, enough about me. What’s your reading style? Chaotic? Planner? Borrower? Buyer? Powerful librarian? And how do you like best to read? Hardback? Paperback? Kindle? Audiobook? Do you record your reading somewhere? Goodreads? Pagebound? StoryGraph? Commonplace book? Tell me everything.

If you’re craving more, here’s a deep dive into my commonplace book:

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And now, without further ado, off we go…

Welcome to the very first instalment of this new series where you get to peek over my shoulder while I page through my commonplace book and share the wonderful things I’ve been reading lately.

My commonplace book is a kind of reading notebook, where I write down all my favourite quotes from the books I love. This month, I’m starting with one that was such a treat to read: Amal el-Mohtar’s new novella, The River Has Roots.

I have been a devoted fan of el-Mohtar ever since I read her marvellous novella, This is How You Lose the Time War, co-written with Max Gladstone. Time War came out in 2019, and since then I’ve been subsisting on the occasional short story, and el-Mohtar’s reviews of science fiction and fantasy for the NYT books section. So I could not have been more excited when I learned she had a new book coming out.1

El-Mohtar is first and foremost a poet, and it shows. The River Has Roots is a book that is in love with language, so it’s a fitting start for a series where what I’m thinking about is how beautiful words can be. And that’s especially true in the hands of an author whose prose leans toward poetry.

A note before we start: I’m strongly against spoilers, so you won’t find any below. The following is safe to read even if you haven’t (yet) read the book. That said, if you’re like me, and prefer to go in knowing nothing, feel free to bookmark and come back once you’ve spent some time being swept away by Amal el-Mohtar’s distinctive brand of enchantment.

The River has Roots by Amal el-Mohtar

Speculative fiction is one of those ridiculously broad categories that’s been forced into service to describe everyone from Emily St. John Mandel to George R.R. Martin. In the case of The River Has Roots, it denotes a kind of haunting fairytale. And this is a fairytale that will resonate whether you’re a hard-core fantasy fan or haven’t given fairytales a thought since age 11, when the Beauty and the Beast library became a core memory.

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When I was a teenager, someone bought me a little blue box and a stack of 3 x 5-inch index cards to feed my quotation-collecting habit. These were the kind of cards that mirrored a sheet of lined paper: one thicker red line at the top for a title, and then blue lines the rest of the way down, to describe whatever it was you were indexing.

To wit:

I immediately plastered the box with horse stickers. Because I was a full-on nineties horse girl. If by that you mean I’d never ridden a horse, yet owned dozens of books about horses, had checked out the entire Black Stallion series (on interlibrary loan where necessary), and filled a notebook with detailed diagrams of my future horse farm.

This notebook included a daily schedule with items like “muck out the barn” and “exercise colts and fillies,” and a financial plan with a detailed breakdown of costs like feed and tack. Yet there was no inkling of positive cash flow, or who was going to buy me all these beautiful Arabian horses in the first place.

Horses were my dream, even if they remained in the realm of the mythical. In fact, the mythical kind of suited me. I was devoted to My Little Ponies and Lisa Frank.

The ultimate horse for me was the pegasus unicorn. I don’t recall ever seeing such a thing in a book or film. But it was the logical conclusion. A unicorn was magical, and so was a horse with wings. So the most magical thing must be a unicorn with wings. And that was the horse I really wanted.

Due to factors beyond my control, I never acquired a pegasus unicorn. By now, I guess I’ve pretty much given up on that dream of my youth. Though, who knows? I’m starting a bookshop in Italy, which is a similar kind of magical dream. So maybe the future holds more wonders than my grown-up mind can comprehend.

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Anyway, as a teenager, I used that box with the horse stickers to collect favourite quotes from books I’d read. I was particularly fond of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, which—like any self-respecting nerd-child of the time—I spent a lot of time reading, along with the encyclopaedia, the dictionary, and a Reader’s Digest-produced thesaurus called The Family Word Finder.

My horse-sticker box was made of hard plastic, and eventually broke down from too much opening and closing. But I still have the cards, and they’re an interesting window into my teenaged self.

To wit:

This was a time when library card catalogs were still a thing. It was an age of recipe boxes (I got one at my bridal shower; along with recipes, it was filled with tips on how to make a marriage work). People still kept Rolodexes on their office desks. When you went to a networking event, you collected business cards, and you couldn’t lose them, because that was your only link to the people you’d met.

And speaking of losing, I had a planner at university I was always losing—one of those mini 3-ring binder ones. Fortunately, this was Brigham Young University, and for all its faults, there was a culture of Leave-it-to-Beaver-level honesty. I was on first-name terms with the people who worked in the campus lost and found, and my planner turned up there every time, intact—right down to whatever cash I’d inadvisedly left inside. I think I kept my check book in there too.

I also kept an address book with phone numbers, at least the ones I hadn’t yet memorised; we used to memorise phone numbers back then. In fact, my roommate and I were engaged in a semester-long mapping of the phone numbers of all the courtesy phones on campus, so we could surprise call the other person as she was walking out of class.

It was 1997, and this was the type of stuff we did for fun. The idea of constant connection was a novelty to us, and our conceptual models of it mostly involved telepathy. Cell phones were something a few people’s cutting-edge parents had, and they were connected to a “car kit.” The only thing that really made those phones mobile was the fact that they rode around with you in the car, instead of being stuck to the wall at home by a tangled spiral cord.

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I’ve heard several pronouncements that 2026 will be the year of analog. Gen Z, it seems, is sick of being constantly online. They want to touch grass, journal, birdwatch, knit. And I’m so on board with that!

I spent the first twenty years or so of my adulthood moving my life incrementally online. Email, Facebook, Blogger, Google Calendar, Notes, Dropbox, Canva, Trello, Instagram, the list goes on. These apps didn’t make life simpler, or me more organised. They did tether me to a screen.

For the past six years, I’ve been intentionally bringing back more analog into my daily life. In 2020, I bought my first planner in many years. This planner was one of the fancy kind, with a vision board, daily rituals, affirmations, passions, habit tracking, and more. I tried all those things, and dropped most of them. I’m a pretty scattered, chaotic soul. I’d love to be one of those people who has shelves full of notebooks neatly labeled with each year of their life. I’m just not.

My life is what it looks like: a pile of notebooks in different sizes and colours and bindings, and various others on shelves around the house, or in storage, or even the ones from my early twenties that I went so far as to donate to an archive when I was trying to disentangle myself from my childhood religion. At least I didn’t go back to losing planners, though I did leave one for months in the phone book drawer of my telephone chair in Italy.

It turns out I have kept up with a few things that turned out to be useful. A loose, daily schedule I’ve written down in the back of my latest planner. The habit of starting each week as a fresh planner page, and writing down all the little to-dos that are bopping around in my head and stressing me out.

In 2021, a friend convinced me to do The Artist’s Way with a small group she was leading. That’s when I learned about morning pages, the stream-of-consciousness journaling you do at the beginning of the day, while your inner critic is still asleep. Several years later, I still write morning pages, though not religiously every day. And I’m still using the various other notebooks I talked about in this post at the beginning of the year. Which I’d say is evidence that they’re working out for me.

The one notebook that wasn’t working was my reading journal. Like so many things that don’t end up working for me, I’d set it up with an overabundance of ambition. I’d envisioned it aiding me in my writing practice, so I was keeping track of way too many things about the books I read. Point of view, tense, structure, setting, agent and publisher, and a whole host of other trivia. Along with my own analysis and notes.

It was all great in theory, but unsustainable. (For me! Someone actually organised might find this kind of system useful.) After a few months, I stopped doing it. Then made myself start again. And then immediately stopped once more. Turns out—no surprise—I am just not that person I was trying to be.

And anyway, what I really care about when I’m reading are the golden sentences. The words that sing in my soul, and lodge in my heart long after I close the book. In an ideal world, perhaps I’d memorise them all. But that’s another ambitious plan I could see myself dropping on the spot. The perfect is the enemy of the good, the best system is the one you really use, etc., etc.

So I simplified. I bought my favourite Rhodia notebook: basic black with a dot grid on creamy Clairefontaine paper. And I started writing down all my favourite lines from the books I read. That’s it. The quote, along with the name of the author and book, and the page number.

This is a variation on an old tradition: the commonplace book. It’s an expansive term that can encompass anything from a loose collection of thoughts, notes, poems, recipes, etc., to a highly formalised record of one’s intellectual development. The ancient Greeks started keeping books like this, and it’s been more or less an unbroken tradition through the Middle Ages, Renaissance, Enlightenment, and beyond.

Famous people who kept commonplace books include Virginia Woolf, Sir Isaac Newton, E.M. Forster, John Milton, H.P Lovecraft, Ben Johnson, and Robert Burns. Among many others.

I was aiming in the direction of a commonplace book when I started my reading notebook. I think it arose out of a desire to hold onto the experience of reading. I wanted to remember passages from the books I read, because they made me feel seen. Known. Not alone.

My reading notebook became a record of how literature speaks to me. It’s a reminder of every time I found my own thoughts and fears and insecurities right there on the page. And not only that. Sometimes a feeling is indistinct, formless, something I can’t quite grasp. And it’s not till an author gives me the perfect words that I understand what’s been going on inside my head.

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Which brings me to what I want to share with you. For a long time, I’ve been wanting to offer my paid subscribers something more than my undying gratitude; something special and personal to me. Something irrepressibly bookish. Something with analog roots in the things that really matter: the life of the mind and heart, the shared and yet infinitely personal place we go when we read a book.

And I finally know what it is I want to share: my reading notebook. Starting next year, paid subscribers will get an extra email once a month where you get to peek over my bookish shoulder. I’ll share what I’ve been reading lately, the passages that made me gasp aloud (or even cry), and what these books mean to me.

Even better, with your help, this can become a conversation—a place where we can share our reading lives, compare notes, and find new books to love. My favourite place to go for book recommendations is other readers—the ones whose tastes I trust, who love the things I love in books. I’m hoping this peek into my reading notebook will become the start of something like that for all of us.

One of my favourite things to do when I’m browsing in a bookshop is to read the placards with staff picks. They’re like little love letters to books, and to potential readers—a way to celebrate meaningful experiences and share them with a stranger who might well turn out to be a kindred spirit.

Someday, when my bookshop in Italy is open, I’ll make handwritten placards to put on the shelves with recommendations for all my favourite books. In the meantime, I think of this project as something similar. Every month I’ll give you a peek into my reading notebook, like a postcard from my library to yours.

I’ll start with a page (or two or three) from my reading notebook, a page like this. Then I’ll talk about the books, my reading thoughts, what I loved, what I learned, what I thought might have missed the mark. I’ll follow up with related reading, next books on my docket, and links to the best bookish posts I’ve run across lately on the internet.

Want to join the fun? You know what to do:

If now isn’t good timing for a paid subscription, don’t worry; free subscribers will continue to receive all the regular posts I write: posts about my future bookshop in Italy, my life in Amsterdam, and all those other good, bookish things. And my archives of all that will stay open for your reading pleasure.

For all my readers: whether this is the first or fiftieth email you’ve read from me, thank you so much for being here. Sharing this space with you, my bookish kindred spirits, has become such a special part of my reading and writing life. Thanks for your comments, for clicking that little heart, for sharing these emails with friends.

Someday we’ll all meet in person—or at least in spirit—in a tiny bookshop in Umbria. Until then, I’ll be here writing, spinning dreams, giving us all something hopeful to believe in even during the darkest days.

In the meantime, I wish you cosy socks and a mug of something warm (or a picnic blanket in the shade if you hail from the sunny south). May your days be merry and bright, and may all your holidays end in bed with a book.

I am not typically a person for resolutions, words of the year, or really anything that starts in January. Midwinter is hibernation time. I much prefer to start my year sometime in autumn—late September or October, say, when the kids are back at school but things have not yet become hectic for the holidays.

So it was with great optimism that a few months ago I bought myself a lovely, undated planner, pulled out my markers and stickers and embellishments, and set it all up for an organised September and beyond.

This was a big step for me. It had been years since I needed a planner. Since 2020, I have been fortunate—thanks to luck and hypochondria—to never come down with covid. But paradoxically, it has taken me a long time to recover from the pandemic.

I got way too comfortable living at the end of the world.

I’m one of those introverts who revelled in all the cancelled plans. I didn’t want to leave the house anyway. In one fell swoop, my antisocial tendencies became a virtuous contribution to the survival of the human race. And I was so there for it.

I basically became a hermit.

Then time started back up again. Kind of. But it was easy not to notice, or pretend not to. The whimpering end of the pandemic felt nothing like the big bang of the beginning. As the months went by, it remained possible to convince myself it was still “pandemic times.”

The kids went back to school, but my husband kept working from home in the office we carved out from our little apartment during the pandemic. And so did I. If by “working” you mean spending all day writing novels that have yet to see the light of day.

And I stayed a hermit. I didn’t need a planner to keep track of my one recurring social engagement: book club every six weeks or so. Thank god for book club, or I’d certainly have lost whatever social skills I had left. As it is, at least I can still talk about a book.

Over the past year, the realisation has dawned on me that I miss spending time with people. Maybe it’s a midlife epiphany: I have only so many hours, days, weeks left in my life. I want to spend them in ways that feel meaningful, that feed the soul. Rich conversations. Writing letters. Less doom. More hope.

In some ways, I’m well on my way to living the life I crave. I have a robust love-hate relationship with my creative practice. My husband and I were lucky enough to celebrate our twenty-first anniversary last week, and look forward to many more to come. I have two precious, beautiful children who light up my life in so many ways.

I wrote perhaps a dozen letters last year—real letters with paper and stamps and envelopes. Which is a dozen more than the year before, or any other year in at least a decade. I’ve made some baby steps towards spending more time and effort on my friends. But I’d like to do better.

I think time with friends is the real reason I bought a planner. Kind of like a promise to myself. A place to write down each coffee date, each small venture into a more tangible, relationship-focused world.

I was all ready for a slower, more intentional approach to life.

And then we bought a house in Italy.

Suddenly, my planner was overtaken by the minutiae of Italian bureaucracy and upkeep on a Medieval tower and little stone house that had stood uninhabited for years.

I took my planner with me to Narni, and filled every page with appointments for turning on water, gas, electricity, internet, which day the washing machine would be delivered, when we were meeting new friends for coffee.

After two weeks running madcap from one bureaucratic situation to another, I’d pretty much accomplished everything. My reward: next time we visit our little house it will feel less like camping out and more like a real, cosy home.

With a smug sense that I had life in two countries under control, I shrouded the couch in sheets and stacked my thrift shop china in my thrift shop china cabinet. Then I went through all the drawers in the house to make sure I wasn’t leaving anything behind.

Well, almost all the drawers.

See that little drawer in the telephone chair, underneath the antique telephone? The one that kind of looks ornamental; the one where you might keep your phone book, back when such a thing existed? The one that I somehow didn’t think of opening as I packed for my return to Amsterdam?

Well, that is where my new planner is now. In Italy without me.

A minor setback, no? I could buy a new planner, I thought, or white knuckle it for the next two months till we returned to Italy in December.

Then, two weeks after I came back to Amsterdam, all hell broke loose. October was a blur of trips back and forth from the hospital. In the months since my son came home it’s been full-time caregiving. My most important schedule now is the one my husband and I made so we can trade off shifts helping my bed-bound son with the very most basic chores of living.

My son is recovering in literal baby steps. He is relearning how to walk. And he remains by far my overarching focus. But as he improves, there’s starting to be a little room in my mind for other things.

There are the big things, like hoping my son’s recovery goes smoothly and helping him figure out a plan he feels happy with for the extra year it will take him now to finish high school. My husband and I will not be moving to Italy in 2025 like we planned, and my son’s state is still so fragile, it feels too soon to make any new plans in that area.

So I’m focusing on more immediate things.

For instance, this delightful little planner from the Bodleian Libraries. Yes, why not cave and just start my year in January like a normal person. Since it happens to be January, and now is the time I’m feeling ready to start again.

The upside of starting at the beginning of the year is that you don’t have to write in all the dates yourself. Which, let’s be honest, ups the chances I’ll follow through.

This cute little planner with a snappy magnetic closure is even better in person, because each little book on the cover is embossed, so you can run your fingers over them and feel the print on the titles. They’re all real children’s books from the Bodleian’s collection. I smile every time I see it.

Along with my son’s physical therapy and other appointments, I’ve already written in a lunch date with a friend, a meet-up with some other Substack writers in Amsterdam, and (of course) book club.

In January my book club is reading Love in the Time of Cholera, so it should be a great start to the year. And we’re also going to have a separate movie night to watch the 2007 film adaptation. I’ve checked out the book from my library in both Spanish (ambitious) and English (fallback), so we’ll see how it goes.

And then there’s this:

My therapist is a great believer in writing down one’s dreams. I go through phases where I agree with her, and others where I don’t, but in general, I think it does help. Dreams are the great catharsis, and writing them down is like a bonus catharsis on top.

I’m always more likely to write in a pretty notebook, so I decorated this one back in September, when I was in new beginnings mode. Yesterday I opened it for the first time since then. I was momentarily surprised to find it completely blank. But, yeah. That’s the kind of month or two or three or four it’s been.

Undaunted, I wrote down my dream of the night before, and then today I recorded last night’s dream as well. I’m 100% for the year so far. My therapist will be proud.

Along with my planner and several notebooks, I managed to leave behind my beloved Lamy Safari fountain pen in Italy. Which felt tragic for about five minutes, until I realised it meant I had an excuse to buy a second Lamy fountain pen. This is the Lamy Al-Star, which is similar to the Safari, but instead of sturdy plastic it is shiny stainless steel.

Have you fallen down the fountain pen rabbit hole yet? And if not, why not? Neither of the pens I mentioned are expensive (they’re both under €20), but they will make your life infinitely better. If you’re into that sort of thing, of course. If you’ve always longed for a fountain pen, let this be the year you treat yourself.

I’ve always loved the idea of fountain pens, but didn’t get into them until a few years ago. I’d given up on writing by hand for years, because I have weak wrists that can barely handle typing, let alone a death-grip on a pen.

In 2021, I really wanted to try The Artist’s Way, but thought I couldn’t physically manage hand-writing three pages every day. Then I read that fountain pens can help people with wrist issues, because the ink flows so freely you barely have to use any pressure on the page. It was the perfect excuse to indulge. And I made the most of it.

Sex is great, and so is chocolate, but have you ever felt the effortless slide of a fountain pen on creamy Clairefontaine paper?

Oh, yes. You can’t fall in love with fountain pens and not become a connoisseur of paper. Without paper thick and luxurious enough for proper ink, even the nicest notebook is just a pretty face.

Last year I found myself notebookless with an idea far too many times, so I’ve promised myself to carry around a little pocket-sized Rhodia notebook, along with a pen, of course. That way I’ll be prepared for all the brilliant, lightning-bolt ideas destined to come my way in 2025.

I also have a notebook for morning pages, which I no longer do every morning, just when I get the urge. And last year I designated yet another notebook a “reading journal,” and spent half the year taking notes on every book I read. It so enriched my reading experience. But somehow I gave it up halfway through the year, more or less when everything else fell apart.

I kept reading, of course, at roughly the same rate, because reading is basically like breathing. But I didn’t make the effort to open a notebook and write down my thoughts on what I’d read. I’m going to recommit myself to doing that this year, and fill up that reading journal. Because reading a novel is a lot like dreaming, and benefits just as much from some reflection at the end.

And then there’s my final set of notebooks.

These are the four novels I’ve been in the process of writing for the past few years. And I’m not talking about a four-book series. I mean four separate complex worlds taking up space in my head. They’re in various stages of completion, from just a few chapters to multiple completed drafts.

I’ve discovered a great way of procrastinating on one project is working on another instead. In theory, this will eventually lead to finishing everything. Follow me for more bad writing advice.

These notebooks contain jotted ideas, maps, genealogies, photographs, character sketches; everything I need to fall back into these worlds. Which for better or worse is probably why I’ve been bopping back and forth from manuscript to manuscript for years.

None of them have been opened since my son was injured in October. Now that I’m starting to have a little time again, I’m trying to choose which one to take back up. They’re all clamouring for my attention.

I haven’t yet decided which manuscript will start 2025 as the favoured one, and I’m not ready for any heavy-hitting goals. But I want to spend some quality time with my writing and let things unfold. Some seasons of life are for being gentle with yourself, and grateful for any progress you might make.

And how about you? Do you buy a new notebook or two or ten at the beginning of the year? Or keep writing in the same old comfortable well-worn ones? And what are your hopes and dreams for the year ahead?