Links from the past weeks

  • I found old notes I made, and I had copied a part of T S Eliot’s Burnt Norton on a piece of foolscap paper. I guess that was an early version of a commonplace book. I duly copied the text into my current system. And of course, I had to go read What “Into the Rose Garden” Means.


  • Reading Compass is a true exercise of the mind. I enjoy reading it but have to take breaks from it. Mathias Énard is quite an interesting character but mostly because the world he inhabits is so foreign to me. I first saw the book in the UK a few years ago, and finally got down to getting myself a copy. I contemplated reading it on the library app, but this is the kind of book that has to be read in hard copy form.


  • Six Famous Notebook Users



  • Apparently the concept of wind phones is not new, but I just read about one on Whigbey Island.

    The desire to speak to those who have departed is not an uncommon one (though I personally do not have it), and I guess there is just something about speaking into a receiver.



  • It’s cutting calories—not intermittent fasting—that drops weight, study suggests.
    But if time-restricted eating helps you to cut calories, it works!



  • I sometimes wonder if I am half a naturalist. I cannot be that much of one because I live in a concrete jungle sometimes masquerading as a garden city. But every once in a while, books on the natural world catch my eye.


  • On having no visual memory

    I do not see images in my head. And reading about it felt so gratifying. It feels like oversharing if I tell someone about it, but I have been wanting to find someone else I know who is also this way. [The story behind how the condition came to have a name is an amusing one.]


  • Behold, a commonplace book in the form of a website.