Manual Edition

20 July 2025

I appreciate things that are so well-designed that I can figure out how to use them without a user manual. Hopefully, you are able to read this newsletter without further instruction or YouTube videos. Maybe our new car is just too complicated to expect to be able to use it without a manual. We shall see.

Monday

I enjoyed this fantasy by Holly Black. Apparently her other work has been for younger readers, but this one seems to be for adults, even though I was reminded of Peter Pan. I’m not sure I’ve actually seen the Disney Peter Pan, but somehow I was aware of his shadow incident. The protagonist of Book of Night is a young woman with an interesting mix of talents and shortcomings.

Tuesday

I am just referring to what I would consider good nonfiction and fiction. This is probably an oversimplification, but I happened to be thinking about reading. Nowadays with so much misinformation floating around, it seems that figuring out what is real is becoming more difficult. I tend to read nonfiction during the day, in case I want to take some notes. I listen to fiction through audiobooks, because I usually listen while washing the dishes so I can’t be taking notes and I like the feel of being told a story. And I read fiction in the evening. What are your reading habits?

Wednesday

I like summer for all the fruit available. The blueberry and raspberry came from our garden. We had bought the cherries and apricots that I think come from somewhere in BC. And my partner’s aunt brought over a box of mangos from Costco. I’d just seen a video about making pictures by laying down the colour first and then outlining. I usually out line first, but then I liked the colours as they were and thought of something for the fruit to say.

Thursday

This illustrated book is actually a combination of two volumes by Martin Gardner who wrote about lots of these kinds of things, a mixture of puzzles and curiosities. When I worked at Science World, I was in charge of the puzzle area, which made me more curious about them. But I am not that good at them and have not yet learned how to do a Rubik’s cube. If you haven’t seen these before, the first one was just an example of an impossible figure. The second was about making a single loop by opening and closing only three links. The third is to move three toothpicks to make three equal squares. And the fourth is the name of a bird.

Friday

We went into a dealer last week to look around, but it turned out they had what we wanted in stock, so we got it this week. My spouse was keen and I was just along for the ride, so to speak. I thought I’d have a few months to get used to the idea of a new vehicle, especially since this seems to have so many electronic features, but the next thing I know we have so many bells and whistles to program, but I don’t really have the band width to figure all that out at the moment. If you have any advice about the Prius Plug-In, let me know.

Saturday

Housework always reminds me of the myth of Sissyphus, which I have probably mentioned before. Perhaps it is just entropy. If I talk about this too much it will probably lead to civil war. I have some vacuuming anyhow.

Sunday

This is my latest instalment of my graphic memoir in progress, Not Made in Japan, about my experiences studying marine biology in southern Japan in the late 1980s. This 4 panel approach might not be so suited for this kind of long form story, but I will carry on for now to see how it works out. I happen to be reading a book called The Ten Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, by David Mitchell, which is set in Nagasaki around 1800, featuring a a Dutch trader.

So that was my week. I hope you had a good one with a better one to come.

I’ll be in Hamilton next week, visiting my 98-year-old Dad for the first time since COVID began, so I don’t know whether I’ll get around to doing this next Sunday.