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Reading

Dungeon Crawler Carl
by Matt Dinniman

book notes »

Started Sep 24, 2024
Finished Oct 4, 2024

Fall Reads: The Fellowship of the Ring

The first volume of The Lord of the Rings is one of those books I associate with Fall, going all the way back to the first time I read it in middle school. Rather than writing a review of a book everyone’s already familiar with, today I decided to write up my memories of those Fall evenings spent exploring Middle Earth.

“In the Fall, I absolutely crave adventure, and there are few tales of adventure as good as this introduction to The Lord of the Rings. When the leaves are dropping, I know I can crack a window, make a mug of tea, and set off on a journey through Middle Earth the same way I did all those years ago.”

Golden Days

Here are a handful of photos from the past couple weeks, mostly from my morning hikes in a local park.

I take so many photos and I never share them with anyone. I rarely even look at them again, although it makes me happy when I do. For me, most of the joy comes from the routine: noticing something, quickly framing the subject, then snapping the photo and moving on. It’s a spontaneous pursuit, and one of the few things I can reliably do without over-thinking.

I think it might be good for me to share more of my photos. I’ll get to see them again, and so will you.

Fall Feels 2024

Every year, there’s a day in August when the weather is a bit cooler, the birds and cicadas are unexpectedly quiet, and the sunlight feels slightly less direct. Maybe a prematurely fallen leaf crunches underfoot, and the sound and smell of it remind me that Fall is coming. From that point on, something inside me starts to shift and adjust.

For some reason I just can’t help but anticipate the changing of the seasons. It’s not just Fall, either: I eagerly await the first snowflakes that melt as soon as they touch the ground, the first bright green tips of crocus leaves emerging from the soil, and the first lightning bugs blinking at dusk. I know I’m not alone in marking the changing seasons in this way, but sometimes I forget how important this cycle is to me. I’m an anxious person, but there is something very reassuring about the relentless rolling of the wheel of the year. Hope springs, hope falls. There is hope in every season, and the opportunity to reflect and prepare for what’s to come.

This year as I welcome the transition to Fall and everything that entails, I’d like to be a little more deliberate, and try harder to notice and appreciate all the little ways this season changes me. The transformation is so thorough, I can only describe it as magic. The food I crave, the activities I do, the books and music and movies I seek out — everything is changed for the better.

So this year, I’m going to do my best to document that transformation here, on my website. I’ll share some of the books I am drawn to re-read each Fall, the albums I return to, and the movies that give me that magical feeling. I’ll post some of the photos I take habitually as the light changes and the leaves fall.

I’m calling this thing I’m doing Fall Feels 2024. It will be a lot of work, but my hope is that it will deepen my appreciation for all the ways this magical time of year affects me. In that sense, I’m thinking of it as a kind of long-running ritual observance, a psychological spell that will multiply the power this season already holds over me. I’m not sure what it will look like when all is said and done, but I hope you enjoy coming along for the ride.

Playing

Guacamelee! 2
Nintendo Switch

Played for 14+ hours (as of Sep 9, 2024)

The New Routine

Wake early, break the stillness inside. Let autopilot guide me through the motions of rinsing the pourover, filtering water, brewing, stirring, brewing. Have a bowl of Life and caffeinate. Step outside and take in the vapors. Settle in, list ten-too-many things to do today. Try to journal while a cat paces back and forth across my lap. Maneuver my bike out the door and down the stairs. Pedal, despite my uncertainty, despite the strength that’s missing. Pedal before the asphalt starts to radiate heat, before the morning traffic picks up. Don’t push too hard, save it for the climbs. Check in. Can I go a little farther? Look over my shoulder. Take the lane. Keep moving.

Focus Mode

I’m in the midst of a productive two weeks trying hard to avoid the little distractions that can drain my attention and energy. Looking at you, Youtube.

But one consequence is that I’m reading more — much more — and am trying hard to keep up with my practice of writing “book notes”: part review, part synopsis, and (sometimes) part personal essay.

Here are some recent ones, and you can find the rest linked from the Reading page:

Hyper

I wrote about having ADHD.

GameBoy

I haven’t been reading much here at the tail end of 2021. I just don’t have the spoons. Instead, my spare time has mostly been spent playing video games, so I thought I’d start tracking them here and on the new Playing page, starting with some notes on The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.

Summer Rain

I often feel like there’s just not enough time for everything. The pressing responsibilities of various aspects of my life — work, parenting, creative projects — all weigh on me, and fully attending to any one of them feels like neglecting the others.

Then I’m given an opportunity to slow down. Right now it’s an unexpected summer storm pouring down around me. I’m on the porch of a home I love, at the tail end of a busy weekend, and there is a dome of rain and white noise and o-zone around me. Something about it brings me back to the present. My regrets about the past and worries about the future are paused, and I am calm. Finally.

I had a similar experience this winter when we were late leaving for a long weekend at a cabin due to last-minute issues with a work project. When we finally got on the road, I was stressed, disappointed, and worried, and the weather was beginning to turn. The drive was only about two hours, but the snow was coming down quickly. When we got off the highway, the roads were covered, and anyone with any sense was not driving around. We pushed on, forced to go slowly, following tracks made by cars that had gone before. When we finally pulled up to the little cabin we had rented in the forest, there were three or four inches of snow on the ground. I lit the wood stove, heard the fire pop and crackle, and looked out at the fresh snow. We were here, miles from anything, and could hunker down for a few days of peace and quiet. The tension melted away.

These sorts of nature-induced therapeutic moments always surprise me when they happen. Rain and snow seem to trigger my brain to calm down, and put a little distance between me and my concerns. But maybe I can create that distance in other ways: a walk in the woods, a quiet morning on the porch, a cup of tea while listening to a record.

Summer ’21

I haven’t been reading or thinking much this summer. I’ve mostly been doing. We just returned from a great vacation to Vermont, where I celebrated my 37th birthday on an island in Lake Champlain, at the camp I’ve been visiting since I was a kid.

Today I took some time to make an Iceland page. Right now it has some background on my interest in Iceland, a handful of resources I have found fun or useful, and a list of all the Iceland-adjacent books I’ve read in the past year or so. Later, I’d like to write up a day-by-day travelogue of our 2019 trip to Iceland, with photos, but that is a bigger project.

There are things I could complain about, but I won’t. Life is pretty good, really, and I am feeling more confident I can make some changes that will make it even better.

Diversions

Recently I’ve become a bit obsessed with rock climbing. Just learning about it, but not doing it (yet). It started with a video that popped up on YouTube of professional climber Adam Ondra teaching a newbie version of himself, via split screen, the basics of climbing. Ondra has dozens of videos, mostly him “sending” extremely technical routes, including the preceding attempts and failures. I appreciate how earnest and enthusiastic he is about climbing, even if he is also clearly very serious and driven to excel. (Turns out he is almost certainly the best in the world at the type of climbing he does.)

After that introduction, I was reminded of the movie Free Solo about climber Alex Honnold’s rope-free ascent of El Capitan in Yosemite. I knew about the movie but hadn’t seen it, so I watched it one Saturday morning a few weeks ago. It was as much about Honnold the person as it was about the actual climb — his determination, the years of planning and preparation, the strain on his personal relationships, even the dynamic of being filmed by friends who might have to watch him fall to his death. It was a great film about an interesting person and an absolutely legendary feat. The movie itself felt quite similar to Man on Wire, which is about Philippe Petit’s high-wire walk between the Twin Towers in 1974. That stunt remains completely gob-smacking to this day, but Honnold’s achievement is on another level. Whereas Man on Wire had elements of a heist movie — how will they pull this off without getting caught? — Free Solo is really about one person’s mastery of his chosen field.

In interviews, Honnold likes to talk about risk versus consequence. Free solo climbing is obviously very high consequence, especially on a big wall like El Capitan: If you fall, you die. But the high risk can be mitigated somewhat through planning, conditioning, practice, patience, and so on. Many people have climbed the route Honnold chose, and their goal typically is to prove they are capable of doing all the component parts. Honnold knew he could do the parts. His quest instead was for mastery: to put in the work necessary to do it all perfectly, then prove it to himself by executing when only perfection would do.

Soon after seeing Free Solo, I watched The Dawn Wall, a movie about a pair of climbers doing the first free ascent (with ropes and safety gear but without other climbing aids) of a different part of El Capitan. The two movies came out around the same time, and while they are ostensibly about similar topics, they are very different. The Dawn Wall was about Tommy Caldwell’s decade-long obsession with piecing together a route over the blank face of El Cap, finding a climbing partner in Kevin Jorgensen, then training together for several years before completing their 19-day first free ascent. In contrast to Free Solo, which was about individual mastery and life-or-death consequences, this story was about obsession, perseverance, and friendship. Another excellent film; I’m really not sure which one I preferred.

Since then I’ve continued my diversion into climbing. I’m excited about it for now. If that continues, I may eventually break out of my comfort zone to take a beginner class at a climbing gym.