On Keeping a Commonplace Book
For centuries, writers and thinkers kept personal archives of passages that moved them. I've been doing the same, and it has quietly changed how I read.
A personal journal
Writing slowly,
reading carefully.
This is where I think out loud — about books that won't leave me alone, the craft of putting sentences together, places I keep returning to, and the slow discipline of paying close attention.
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"A writer only begins a book. A reader finishes it."— Samuel Johnson
Selected writing
Recent essays
The Long View in Short Sentences
There's a kind of compression possible in very short prose that no other form can quite match. A few notes on the strange power of brevity.
Seven Winters in Oslo
Each January I return to the same city, the same grey light over the fjord. By now I know it well enough to stop pretending I'm just a visitor.
The writer
Writing as a way of thinking.
I'm a writer and reader based somewhere with too many unread books and not enough time. This site is an ongoing practice — a place to work through ideas slowly, to trace the line between what I've read and what I've thought.
The name The Commonplace comes from the old tradition of keeping a commonplace book: a personal anthology of passages, observations, and borrowed thoughts.
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