Dan Holloway

it really is fabulously soft!

An absolute pleasure to look back over the past year in the book world with @leanpub.bsky.social's Len Epp
#BookSky

Finally back for 2025. While away, I'm grateful I discovered for the 1st time:
1. fresh bergamots
2. behind the neck split jerk presses (thank you Chloe Brennan)
3. Stranger Things
4. Gary's Economics
5. the softness of bamboo base layers

Reading Notes: Ways of Being Alone Getting back to my occasional set of notes on "insights from reading 2 books together" with my first two reads of 2025, "Just a Little Run Around the World" by Rosie Swale Pope (the tale of one woman'...

Huge thanks to @eileen901.bsky.social for recommending Rosie Swale Pope's fabulous book Just a Little Run Around the world.
Highly recommended.
Just finished reading it alongside Amy Odell's biog of Anna Wintour. Some thoughts on reading both together
www.linkedin.com/pulse/readin...

And the real thing is that things don't get stale, and it's fun! (I even wrote a book about this kind of way of weaving strands together to make life richer - www.amazon.co.uk/Living-Longh...)

I'm not particularly good at any of those things, but as the generalist saying goes, for someone with that kind of lift my endurance is fairly good, for someone who can run 100km I can lift OK, & for a 52 year-old whose mind is in goodish shape I'm fairly fit

a screen capture of a successful memorisation of a deck of cards in 1 minute 48.45 seconds

On the subject of living with a really atypical skills profile & the constitutional inability to zero in on one thing (hello ADHD) but also just finding that fascinating, the past few days I set a PR memorising cards, deadlifted 1.5 times bodyweight & started this month's ultra endurance challenge

The cover of the book How to be Everything by Emilie Wapnick, with a grey background and a bursting cartoonish yellow cloud around the word "everything"

20 books that influenced me
number 8 (I think)
How to be Everything by Emilie Wapnick
continuing the discovery from reading Hank Pfeffer's article Danger: High Voltage about living with a vast array of life goals and activities (& affirming that's OK)
#20DayBookChallenge
#BookSky

Had a lovely time here today (my stall of creative toys and tools caught here by happy accident). Always great to talk to people about creativity and see minds come alive.

great event - and thanks for the great shot of my stall in the foreground 😊

a plainly designed book cover for Fear and Trembling by Soren Kierkegaard with a line drawn portrait of the author

20 books that stayed with me
Day 7
Fear and Trembling

because not every lasting influence is positive. One of the first texts I encountered as a Theology & Philosophy undergrad. Led me into internal rabbit holes that emerged into very dark places

#20DayBookChallenge
#BookSky

A graphic which says The 2024 Whatever Holiday Gift Guide, and has some red ornaments

Every year on my site I do a week-long event where authors/other creators can promote the work they have to sell to my site's readers for the holidays. That starts Monday; today I have a post on which things to promote on which days, so all y'all can prepare:

whatever.scalzi.com/2024/11/29/t...

Cards from a Mycelium playing deck, asking the question "After the zombie apocalypse you can choose to save a glacier or a violin. Explain your choice"

a deck of illustrated Mycelium playing cards fanned out on a table

On Sunday I'll be at the Oxford Green Fair in Oxford Town Hall with a wonderful group of ethical creators selling Christmas gifts.

I'll have decks of the beautifully illustrated creative thinking card game Mycelium. And creativity posters and books.

www.oxfordtownhall.co.uk/whats-on/upc...

My first thought was if he were Boswell that would be like Boswell's Life of Johnson, then I realised it was the John Bothwell I knew more than 25 years ago when he was at Merton at the same time as my then girlfriend. He was a thoroughly sound chap then. Great to see time hasn't diminished that!

The cover of Ministry of Pain by Dubravka Ugresic: mostly black with 2 very stylised figures: one red, one crimson

20 books that stayed with/influenced me

Day 6

Ministry of Pain by Dubravka Ugresic
A foundation novel for the "literature of the ruins" after Europe's wars of the late 90s. Utterly devastating. The closing incantation is remarkable

#20DayBookChallenge
#BookSky

Fantastic!

and of course there's

accessibility
cassowaries
performing poetry
book, books, more books, libraries, more books
mountains
detective TV shows
sitting on pavements writing in notebooks
coffee
dark corners of quiet libraries
indoor rowing

Get to know your mutuals: in no particular order post 10 things you like.

Cutting it down is great editing practice!

1. seagrass
2. mind sports
3. modern art
4. fountain pens
5. rats
6. playing cards
7. very long very slow runs
8. 1990s French cinema
9. luxury flooring
10. lifting heavy things

A LOT of artists are doing Black Friday sales this year. Like, way more than I've seen in years past. That tells me that SO many of us need people buying our art. Please please please buy from artists in the coming weeks and consider us throughout the year when purchasing gifts.

That's Mike Hartley, Damo and John (l-r)

(and I had to nip over to my amazon library to check the year was 2020 on Totally FKT - the best bit of which was your description of John's nutrition as (something like) "any form of complex carbohydrate as a base for carrying sugar")

Absolutely agree. & fancy running into someone from Rodborough on here: the bridge club was my stomping ground for many years. Also, so thrilled my old home town taking the lead on UBI (still fondly remember/tell people about growing up in a town that had the LETS barter based currency!)

...
- impact (inability to change the world)
- curiosity (not looking for any/all of the above)
- communication (not telling people about your ideas)
-listening (not recognizing ideas that are already there)

Creativity answers the question "what's going wrong right now?" whatever the "what" is

A failure of:
- invention (not enough original ideas)
- imagination (lack of empathy/perspective)
- innovation (not enough relevant ideas)
- implementation (inability to convert ideas to actions)

...

the cover of "To Reach The Clouds" by Philippe Petit, with a photograph of a wire walker high above the ground walking between two high buildings

20 books that stayed with or influenced me

Day 5
To Reach the Clouds by Philippe Petit

in many ways a similar meditation to Lizzy Hawker's Runner on the limits of human performance, the mindfulness of those endeavours, & spirituality at the edge of achievement
#20DayBookChallenge
#BookSky

This is one of many reasons I have supported a Universal Basic Income for many years (& given many talks on the connection between creativity & #UBI) UBI is a key part of a truly meaningful "open access" environment

btw follow Scott if you aren't already & have any interest in UBI!

cover of Strangers Drowning by Larissa MacFarquhar shows a stone bridge over a misty river in muted blue tones

Books that have stayed with or influenced me
Day 4
Strangers Drowning by Larissa MacFarquhar

I'm not sure I like it, and have many issues with many of the ideas highlighted but it asks such vital questions that it's the book I recommend more than any other

#20DayBookChallenge
#BookSky

I remember finding some of the first half heartbreakingl moving in the bets possible way

I think it helped that I was a 2nd year undergraduate discovering my inner Romantic and so very susceptible to the mix of literary theory, mystery, and dusty archives

Clive Barker's book Imajica, with a receipt as bookmark

duly fetched - you can see the receipt bookmark where I left off!

ooooooh, I bought this many years ago, and started reading it about 3 years ago. I got half way through and absolutely adored it. I have no idea why I didn't finish it but will pull it down from the shelf and reinstate it.