Isak's Blog

Happy Friday,

Cue the music, brew that pot. Minnesota’s afternoon rainstorms have been perfect for reading, writing, and sitting on the couch.

Here are 10 interesting things worth sharing this week:

1. Funny how we assume the artists we look up to must be so literary, serious, and important compared to ourselves — then learn that’s exactly how they feel about who they look up to! I’m going to have to watch this entire Karl Ove Knausgård episode from BBC’s Arts in Motion.
2. Maria and I loved watching Desk Set last weekend, a 1957 rom-com about a whip-smart reference librarian and the computer engineer replacing her entire research department with a computer. Very funny, and unfortunately timely with AI!
3. I’ve been reading why people like Dante’s “Inferno” so much, so naturally I’ve been listening to Hozier’s “Unreal Unearth” album again and again.
4. “Oh Lord. I could talk about the various ways — in nature, in folklore, things like that — but honestly, the surest one? Spite.” T. Kingfisher on the surest way for him to find inspiration. This is my surest way, too! Austin Kleon recommends it, too.
5. I recently read “The Emerson Circle” and loved learning more about the Transcendentalists, but mostly Margaret Fuller, Louisa May Alcott, and Thoreau. Just in time to watch this new PBS miniseries on the Thoreau! Robert Gross’ book is up next to read.
6. “Well, I don’t have to worry about how to pay the mortgage. I get to write the stories I want to write.” Octavia Butler on the best parts about her success as a writer — the dream! I’m also an early-morning writer; by 5 p.m. my brain’s largely unhelpful and annoying.
7. I read the first Knaussgard book in 2016, and autofiction was this new, interesting genre to me. This week I revisited a LitHub article written by Robert Moor in 2024 (whose new book I’m v. excited to read) about the book “Bjarki, not Bjarki,” a great book about creativity, writing, and autojournalism.
8. Speaking of autojournalism: it’s starting to feel like summer, which means I want to float in a pool, drink gin and tonics, and read Hunter S. Thompson. Van Neistat likes him for his adventures and prose; I love him writing so politically and entertainingly.
9. Literary fly fisherman! I read “A River Runs Through It” in college in two days (molecules, molecules) and loved it. “Ninety-two in the Shade” felt like Norman Maclean meets Hunter S. Thompson. I’d add Callan Wink as a favorite modern literary fly fisherman, a form I hope continues.
10. We forget how much agency we have; you can just email people stuff. I’m not great at taking this advice often but it has worked well for me in the past.

See you on down the dusty trail,

Happy Friday,

I turned 33 years old which means I am officially of age in Hobbit years; I celebrated by staying up until 4 a.m. after saunaing with my dad — which was apparently too much fun because I’m still behind on sleep.

Here are 10 interesting things worth sharing this week:

1. I have a few print magazine subscriptions: “Adventure Journal,” an outdoorsy quarterly I signed up for when I quit my job to freelance write to get major inspiration from. And “The New Yorker,” which I bought this year to spend less time reading the news on my phone. Analog is all the rage these days, but I my favorite part is receiving something nice in the mail instead of bills. Try it!
2. If you do subscribe, “The New Yorker” fully digitized its entire back catalog. I went back and read issues from the week I was born, then my dad, then my grandpa. The fun thing about history is how all this has always been going on.
3. I may or may not have watched this video about hobby tunneling and thought to myself: how hard could it really be to dig my own tunnel from my basement to my detached garage?
4. A new Bob Dylan book is came out in January about his later career, which might inspire me to get into more of it than just “Modern Times” and, yes, “Christmas in the Heart.”
5. The internet is better with RSS, and I missed the days of Google Reader so much I got a subscription to Feed.ly (like don’t love) a few months ago. It seems there’s a bit of a resurgence lately — Austin Kleon and Cory Doctorow both blogged recently about how much it improves your web browsing. I use it for work to track clean energy/climate news plus a bunch of writers and blogs I like.
6. I got my hands on the newest edition of Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, the first update in 20 years. Cloth binding, nice pages, a thumb index — I’m in love, and it looks great next to my thesaurus and usage dictionary.
7. I’m still in a book rut (this is a recurring theme apparently) and have been daydreaming reading Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time” after loving Knaussgaard’s “My Struggle” series a while back. So while I haven’t cracked the first book yet, I did discover the Proust FM radio website that plays the entire series on a loop forever.
8. If you feel like there’s maybe not much to celebrate for the U.S.’s 250th anniversary this year, well, you’re not alone — it seems like that’s how people have felt for every major anniversary of the U.S. (And yes, I read this in print with a cup of coffee Tuesday morning instead of scrolling BlueSky.)
9. I’ve been poking around books instead of reading them all the way through this year. Last night I cracked open this beautiful edition of “The Silmarillion” and played Andy Serkis’ narration to read the Beren & Luthien chapter, and it was a WAY better night that scrolling Reddit, BlueSky, and Instagram.
10. I’ve been low-contact with podcasts since the pandemic because they just started to feel too noisy, but I might have to dive into the “Exploring the Lord of the Rings” podcast series with the Tolkien Professor based on this BlueSky thread about the Mines of Moria.

See you on down the dusty trail,