The History and Uncertain Future of Handwriting by Anne Trubek, r. Jan. 2026

p. 60 Handwriting, [Trithemius] said, was a spiritual act, a form of religious devotion that putting blocks into a press could never be.

p. 95 The media and public were fascinated by the spectacle of typing contests. Going fast was becoming a cultural phenomenon in an increasing industrialized America, and typing speed contests fit perfectly into this general speedup.

p. 97 Only once typing became the de facto method to conduct business correspondence and keep records did handwriting assume the associations we have with it today: a way to express one's uniqueness and personality. It is only in the twentieth century that handwriting becomes evidence of – and a way to analyze – the individual psyche.

p. 105 "This philosophy of the manifestation of the soul through graphic signs is based on the intimate connection which exists between each sign... which emanates from the human personality, and the soul, which is the substance of that personality. Who can doubt that every word is as spontaneous and immediate a translation of thought as speech? All handwriting, like all language, is the immediate manifestation of the intimate, intellectual and moral being." –Michon

Cleopatra by Stacy Schiff, r. Dec. 2025

p. ?? Even before she graduated to sentences, even before she learned to read, the love affair with Homer began. "Homer was not a man, but a god," figured among the early penmanship lessons, as did the first cantos of the Iliad. No text more thoroughly penetrated Cleopatra's world. In an age infatuated with history and calibrated in glory, Homer's work was the Bible of the day. He was the "prince of literature"; his 15,693 lines provided the moral, political, historical, and religious context, the great deeds and the ruling principles, the intellectual atlas and moral compass. The educated man cited him, paraphrased him, alluded to him. It was entirely fair to say that children like Cleopatra were —as a near contemporary had it— "nursed in their learning by Homer, and swaddled in his verses." Alexander the Great was believed to have slept always with a copy of Homer under his pillow; any cultivated Greek, Cleopatra included, could recite some part of the Iliad and the Odyssey by heart. The former was more popular in Cleopatra's Egypt —it may have seemed a more pertinent tale for a turbulent time —but from an early age she would have known literarily what she at twenty-one discovered empirically: there were days you felt like waging war, and days when you just needed to go home.

p. 37 It was in Alexandria that the circumference of the earth was first measured, the sun fixed at the center of the solar system, the workings of the brain and the pulse illuminated, the foundations of anatomy and physiology established, the definitive editions of Homer produced. It was in Alexandria that Euclid had codified geometry. If all the wisdoms of the ancient world could be said to have been collected in one place, that place was Alexandria. Cleopatra was its direct beneficiary. She knew that the moon had an effect on tides, that the Earth was spherical and revolved around the sun. She knew of the existence of the equator, the value of pi, the latitude of Marseilles, the behavior of linear perspective, the utility of a lightning conductor. She knew that one could sail from Spain to India, a voyage that was not to be made for another 1,500 years, though she herself would consider making it, in reverse.

p. 73 Both Cleopatra and Caesar manifested the intellectual curiosity that was the trademark of their age, a lightheartedness and a humor that set them apart from their peers, insofar as either had peers. Such an unsociable, solitary thing is power, notes Plutarch; generally those around Caesar and Cleopatra could be relied upon to fawn or plot. Both knew, as Caesar put it, that success came at a price, that "everything that lifts people above their fellows arouses jealousy." Theirs was an exclusive brand of social isolation.

p. 113 [Cleopatra] lived these months in Latin; whatever her proficiency in that language, she discovered that certain concepts did not translate. Even the ironic sense of humor was different, broad and salty in Rome where it was ironic and allusive in Alexandria. Literal-minded, the Romans took themselves seriously. Alexandrian irreverence and exuberance were in scant supply.

p. 142 It is notable that when she is not condemned for being too bold and masculine, Cleopatra is taken to task for being unduly frail and feminine.

p. 286 "The truth of the matter," Plutarch announces, to centuries of deaf ears, "no one knows."

p. 296 [Octavian] had too cause to note "that no high position is ever free from envy or treachery, and least of all a monarchy." The enemies were bad but the friends arguably worse. The office, he concluded, was utterly dreadful.

Working by Studs Terkel and adapted by Harvey Pekar, r. Dec. 2025

 p. xxi Nora Watson may have said it most succinctly. "I think most of us are looking for a calling, not a job. Most of us, like the assembly-line worker, have jobs that are too small for our spirit. Jobs are not big enough for people."

p. 99 "I get up about noon. I would only consider myself outside the norm because of the way other people live. They're constantly reminding me I'm abnormal. I could never bear to live the dull lives that most people live, locked up in offices. I live in absolute freedom. I do what I do because I want to do it. What's wrong with making a living doing something interesting?" (jazz musician)

p. 101 "Hundreds of times I've gone to work thinking, oh my God, I hate to think of playing tonight. It's going to be awful. But something on that given night takes place and I'm excited before it's over. Does that make sense? If you have that kind of night, you're not aware of the time, because of this thing that hits you." (jazz musician)

p. 104 "Real talent takes a long time to mature, to learn how to bring what character you have into sound, into your playing, not the instrument, but the style of music you're trying to create should be an extension of you. And this takes a whole life." (jazz musician)

p. 160 "Peace and quiet and privacy have meant a great deal to me since I made my escape. Of course I'm a has-been. Radio itself is a has-been. But the quiz kids achieved history and I'm proud to have been part of it. ...The reason I like this job is that my mind is at ease all day long..." (greenhouse worker and former child genius)

p. 162 He dropped out of high school. "It's a good way to go. Take what you can stand and don't take any more than that. It's what God put the tongue in your mouth for. If it don't taste right, you spit it out." (carpenter)

p. 163 "Any work, you kneel down – it's a kind of worship. It's part of the holiness of things, work, yes. Just like drawing breath is. It's necessary. If you don't breathe, you're dead. It's kind of a sacrament, too." (carpenter)

When We Were Young by Daryl Gregory, r. Oct. 2025

 p. 32 Do any of them have a thought in their heads, or are they all just bots, following a dialogue tree like some Elder Scrolls shopkeeper?

p. 37 One of the underappreciated pleasures of a long friendship is this constant tilling of familiar fields. Occasionally they turn over a new rock. But mostly they forbear and forgive each other's reputations.

p. 50 Who the hell would design a system like this, in which some teenage boy's digital goop could wiggle inside her and start coding up an entire other creature – a creature who'd grow to the size of a bowling ball while inside her?

p. 64 He's trim and handsome, and there's something sad about him. She approves of that. She doesn't trust happy people.

p. 106 Deb keeps her disapproval at a constant simmer. Their dearly departed mother was the same way. The Marks women, Dulin thinks, are emotional Crock-Pots.

p. 144 He's joking, of course. No one believes in bots. At least, no one JP knows or follows on media. The affiliation bubble that he's a part of – middle-left "reasonables," the NPR-listening, cabernet-drinking, mostly white folks who practice meatless Mondays – have agreed that the belief that some people (almost always people in other countries) are not conscious is not just solipsism, but a form of racism.

p. 157 It's like we've all become right-wing evangelicals longing for Armageddon. Even the worst problems are just part of God's plan. We've abandoned all sense of stewardship.

p. 200 Even though they live in a simulation, even though they are made up of ones and zeros, they are lucky, unbelievably so, to be these two arrangements of bits, in this particular moment.

p. 249 "There's only one problem if you find out you're inside a simulation. How to get the fuck out."

p. 250 If her poor, overworked brain could only get free of the body, it could finally get some work done, like a poet longing to be free of her family for an afternoon.

p. 266 "Rabbi. You lead a church." "Yes, well, I don't so much lead the synagogue as study the map and point out available routes."

p. 303 "Oh yeah. I drove up right away. And once the treatments started, I just sort of moved in. I was glad to do it. It was the first time in a long time I'd been useful. It was a terrible time, but..." He shakes his head. "This is embarrassing, but I was so grateful. Just happy to know what my job was. I haven't had that for a long time. Not since Marion was little."

p. 311 His pale feet, strapped into their Teva sandals, rest without effort on the wet floor of the raft. Such idiots, these appendages. He admires their ignorance.

p. 313 [After jumping into the calm, cold, canyon river water] JP can feel his blood whooshing around, worriedly trying to keep his organs at operational temperature.

p. 317 The sim undermined his certainty. An afterlife was now technologically possible, even plausible. He believed in backups; he believed in restoring from disk. Resurrection had become rational. There was no reason that the Simmers couldn't reinitialize him after his death.

p. 347 Both those things, and suffering was worse. Pain was just nerves firing, he said, the body firing off warning signals according to the rules of the simulation. Suffering was the awareness of that moment of pain – and the awareness that more of those moments were on the way. Suffering could occur even when you were feeling no physical pain. Suffering stretched into the past, all you pain remembered, and reached into the future to take in all the agony that lay ahead. 

p. 381 [The nun, in older age] alternated between fury and acceptance and boredom and back to fury. The seasons came and went in her heart. But gradually, very gradually, a kind of climate change occurred. She was now warming but cooling down. She decided, at last, to become something different than the old Sister Janet. In her head, and in her heart, she would become a tree.

p. 383 "Oh, Zev," she says. He doesn't understand how precious he is to her. No clue to his worth, always chastising himself for being an indecisive man, a waffler, a thinker with no strong opinions of his own, and therefore no bedrock of faith. He mistook his openness for emptiness.

p. 433 The Engineer adjusts his glasses. "It's odd, isn't it? Putting a solid object in front of your eyes so you can see another world." "Like a book," the father says.

The Splendid and the Vile by Erik Larson, r. Oct. 2025

p. 109 During one such pause, Churchill likened a man's life to a walk down a passage lined with closed windows. "As you reach each window, an unknown hand opens it and the light it lets in only increases by contrast the darkness of the end of the passage." He danced on.

p. 180 When John Colville read the initial draft, he realized he had heard bits of it before, as Churchill tested ideas and phrases in the course of ordinary conversation. The prime minister also kept snippets of poems and biblical passages in a special "Keep Handy" file. "It is curious," Colville wrote, "to see how, as it were, he fertilizes a phrase or a line of poetry for weeks and then gives birth to it in speech."

p. 192 Churchill slept well, not even waking when the all clear sounded at three forty-five A.M. He always slept well. His ability to sleep anywhere, anytime, was his particular gift. Wrote Pug Ismay, "His capacity for dropping off into a sound sleep the moment his head touched the pillow had to be seen to be believed."

p. 230 [Winston Churchill's 18-year-old daughter, Mary] exulted in her life. "What a wonderful year it has been!" she wrote. "I think it will always stand out in my memory. It has been very happy for me too – despite the misery & unhappiness in the world. I hope that does not mean that I am unfeeling – I really don't think I am, but somehow I just haven't been able to help being happy."

p. 250 Young people were reluctant to contemplate death without having shared their bodies with someone else. It was sex at its sweetest: not for money or marriage, but for love of being alive and wanting to give."

p. 434 [Goebbels's] diary crackled with enthusiasm for the war, and for life. "What a glorious spring day outside!" he wrote. "How beautiful the world can be! And we have no chance to enjoy it. Human beings are so stupid. Life is so short, and they then go and make it so hard for themselves."

p. 483 "I never gave them courage," [Churchill] said. "I was able to focus theirs."

A Gentleman In Moscow by Amor Towles, r. Jul. 2025

“After all, what can a first impression tell us about someone we’ve just met for a minute in the lobby of a hotel? For that matter, what can a first impression tell us about anyone? Why, no more than a chord can tell us about Beethoven, or a brushstroke about Botticelli. By their very nature, human beings are so capricious, so complex, so delightfully contradictory, that they deserve not only our consideration, but our reconsideration—and our unwavering determination to withhold our opinion until we have engaged with them in every possible setting at every possible hour.”

“He had said that our lives are steered by uncertainties, many of which are disruptive or even daunting; but that if we persevere and remain generous of heart, we may be granted a moment of lucidity—a moment in which all that has happened to us suddenly comes into focus as a necessary course of events, even as we find ourselves on the threshold of the life we had been meant to lead all along.”

“I’ll tell you what is convenient,” he said after a moment. “To sleep until noon and have someone bring you your breakfast on a tray. To cancel an appointment at the very last minute. To keep a carriage waiting at the door of one party, so that on a moment’s notice it can whisk you away to another. To sidestep marriage in your youth and put off having children altogether. These are the greatest of conveniences, Anushka—and at one time, I had them all. But in the end, it has been the inconveniences that have mattered to me most.”

“For as it turns out, one can revisit the past quite pleasantly, as long as one does so expecting nearly every aspect of it to have changed.”

“If patience wasn’t so easily tested, then it would hardly be a virtue. . . ”

“Alexander Rostov was neither scientist nor sage; but at the age of sixty-four he was wise enough to know that life does not proceed by leaps and bounds. It unfolds. At any given moment, it is the manifestation of a thousand transitions. Our faculties wax and wane, our experiences accumulate and our opinions evolve--if not glacially, then at least gradually. Such that the events of an average day are as likely to transform who we are as a pinch of pepper is to transform a stew.”

“For his part, the Count had opted for the life of the purposefully unrushed. Not only was he disinclined to race toward some appointed hour - disdaining even to wear a watch - he took the greatest satisfaction when assuring a friend that a worldly matter could wait in favor of a leisurely lunch or stroll along the embankment. After all, did not wine improve with age? Was it not the passage of years that gave a piece of furniture its delightful patina? When all was said and done, the endeavors that most modern men saw as urgent (such as appointments with bankers and the catching of trains), probably could have waited, while those they deemed frivolous (such as cups of tea and friendly chats) had deserved their immediate attention.”

“Here, indeed, was a formidable sentence--one that was on intimate terms with a comma, and that held the period in healthy disregard.”

“The principle here is that a new generation owes a measure of thanks to every member of the previous generation. Our elders planted fields and fought in wars; they advanced the arts and sciences, and generally made sacrifices on our behalf. So by their efforts, however humble, they have earned a measure of our gratitude and respect.”

“For what matters in life is not whether we receive a round of applause; what matters is whether we have the courage to venture forth despite the uncertainty of acclaim.”

“It is a sad but unavoidable fact of life," he began, "that as we age our social circles grow smaller. Whether from increased habit or diminished vigor, we suddenly find ourselves in the company of just a few familiar faces.”

“...the Confederacy of the Humbled is a close-knit brotherhood whose members travel with no outward markings, but who know each other at a glance. For having fallen suddenly from grace, those in the Confederacy share a certain perspective. Knowing beauty, influence, fame, and privilege to be borrowed rather than bestowed, they are not easily impressed. They are not quick to envy or take offense. They certainly do not scour the papers in search of their own names. They remain committed to living among their peers, but they greet adulation with caution, ambition with sympathy, and condescension with an inward smile.”

“Without a doubt. But imagining what might happen if one’s circumstances were different was the only sure route to madness.”

“Either way, he figured a cup of coffee would hit the spot. For what is more versatile? As at home in tin as it is in Limoges, coffee can energize the industrious at dawn, calm the reflective at noon, or raise the spirits of the beleagured in the middle of the night.”

“The first was that if one did not master one’s circumstances, one was bound to be mastered by them; and the second was Montaigne’s maxim that the surest sign of wisdom is constant cheerfulness.”

“From the earliest age, we must learn to say good-bye to friends and family. We see our parents and siblings off at the station; we visit cousins, attend schools, join the regiment; we marry, or travel abroad. It is part of the human experience that we are constantly gripping a good fellow by the shoulders and wishing him well, taking comfort from the notion that we will hear word of him soon enough. But experience is less likely to teach us how to bid our dearest possessions adieu. And if it were to? We wouldn’t welcome the education. For eventually, we come to hold our dearest possessions more closely than we hold our friends. We carry them from place to place, often at considerable expense and inconvenience; we dust and polish their surfaces and reprimand children for playing too roughly in their vicinity—all the while, allowing memories to invest them with greater and greater importance. This armoire, we are prone to recall, is the very one in which we hid as a boy; and it was these silver candelabra that lined our table on Christmas Eve; and it was with this handkerchief that she once dried her tears, et cetera, et cetera. Until we imagine that these carefully preserved possessions might give us genuine solace in the face of a lost companion.”

“Fate does not take sides. It is fair-minded and generally prefers to maintain some balance between the likelihood of success and failure in all our endeavors.”

I Served The King of England by Bohumil Hrabal, r. Jun. 2025

p. 25 ... and just remember, my boy, if life works out just a tiny bit in your favor it can be beautiful, just beautiful.

p. 151 I also learned that the closest one person can be to another is through silence, an hour, then a quarter-hour, then the last few minutes of silence when the carriage has arrived, or sometimes a military britzska, or a car. Two silent people rise to their feet, gazing long at each other, a sigh, then the final kiss, then the man standing in the britzska, then the man sitting down and the vehicle driving off up the hill, the final bend in the road, the waving handkerchief.

p. 182 That was the height of my career, that was what made me a man who had not lived in vain. I began to look at my hotel as a work of art, as my own creation, because that was how others saw it, and they opened my eyes...

p. 215 ... it was a way of making fun of myself, because I was independent now and beginning to find the presence of other people irksome, and I felt that in the end I would have to speak only with myself, that my own best friend and companion would be that other self of mine, that teacher inside me with whom I was beginning to talk more and more.

p. 226 ... when I looked back on [my life, it] seemed to have happened to someone else. My life to this point seemed like a novel, a book written by a stranger even though I alone had the key to it, I alone was a witness to it, even though my life too was constantly being overgrown by grass and weeds at either end.

p. 227 And I talked in a jumbled way about how beauty had another side to it, about how this beautiful countryside, like a round loaf of bread, was all related to whether you could love even what was unpleasant and abandoned, whether you could love the landscape during all those hours and days and weeks when it rained, when it got dark early, when you sat by the stove and thought it was ten at night while it was really only half past six, when you started talking to yourself...

p. 236 And I longed to write everything down just as it was, so others could read it and from what I said to myself paint all the pictures that had been strung like beads, like a rosary, on the long thread of my life, unbelievable beads that I had managed to catch hold of here as I looked out the window and marveled at the falling snow that had half buried the cottage.

p. 239 At first the pictures were unclear and I even wrote out some that had no point to them, but then suddenly the writing began to flow, and I covered page after page while the pictures in front of my eyes went by faster than I could write, and this gap between pictures and the writing kept me awake at night.