Richard Osman:

Learn to count the good days. Tuck them in your pocket and carry them around with you.

I read Blindness by José Saramago, an insightful look into human nature and what can happen when the thin veneer of civilisation slips, in this case into darkness. Some powerful moments, and don’t be put off by the weird style. 📚

I finished my first rewatch of the reimagined television sci-fi Battlestar Galactica. I enjoyed it, despite seasons three and four getting increasingly weird and the wrap up feeling sloppy and rushed. Seasons one and two are great though, and if you don’t mind darker endings the end of season two is a good place to conclude the story. And did I mention how good the soundtrack is?

Eihei Dogen:

If this one day in the lifetime of a hundred years is lost, will you ever get your hands on it again?

If contentment is a key life metric, 2025 might have been my best year yet. I’m healthier and happier than I’ve been in a long time.

I read Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy and found it much akin to his other novel The Road in that it features tortured characters roaming bleak landscapes in search of succour and punctuation and encountering grimness and violence and despair and dead babies hanging from trees all round. I know its sposed to be a great American western but danged if it wasnt tryin on the eyes and brain matter with its missing apostrophes and speech marks and commas and long strung out sentences and more than a little muddled and seemingly directionless for long bits. That said it had some jarring and monumental scenes and the judge sure is a memorable and evil character with some great and tenebrous things to say and I hear theyre making this one into a film but they shoulda given it to them Coen brothers or suchlike and not that Hillcoat fella who needs a dang good pistol whippin for what he done to The Road and I reckon even the kid would agree with me on that one. 📚