Reading Report: June 2026

Hello friends, Sweltering is such a satisfying word for an uncomfortable experience. It's sticky here in NYC and while I managed to escape for a bit, I'm pretty much here for the duration of the summer. I'm taking the time to buckle down on my revision and get ahead on articles for you all. Whatever your summer plans, I hope you take a bit of time to rest. Happy Writing. ~EM

Year of Joy

• Have you played Anthropeum yet? Guess where and when 10 objects in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum come from. Like wordle for art history nerds.
• Missing summer camp? Let your computer's curser explore Cursor Camp, an utterly charming way to spend a few minutes. Don't miss the inside of the camp buildings!
• I've been revisiting Pharaoh: A New Era a remaster of the 1990's classic Pharaoh citybuilder. It's not perfect, but the various quality of life improvements are a huge bonus. And the remastered soundtrack hits just right.

American Sentences

I was intrigued by this tiny excerpt at the end of an article about the sentences that formed America from the NY Times about the poet Allen Ginsberg's American Sentences.

All this talk of American sentences reminded me of the poet Allen Ginsberg, who wanted to create an American version of haiku, the Japanese poetic form that calls for stanzas of five syllables, then seven syllables, then five once more. Ginsberg proposed the American Sentence instead, a 17-syllable single-line poem, no other rules. He put a lot of them into his 1994 collection, “Cosmopolitan Greetings.” Some may say something about the American story, too:

• Put on my tie in a taxi, short of breath, rushing to meditate.
• Get used to your body, forget you were born, suddenly you got to get out!
• To see Void vast infinite look out the window into the blue sky."

So I looked up some more:

• "Rainy night on Union Square, full moon. Want more poems? Wait till I’m dead."
• "Tompkins Square Lower East Side N.Y."
• "Bearded robots drink from Uranium coffee cups on Saturn's ring."

Here's a little more about the form, and why it was created.

Writing Bits & Bobs

• Ways to make a small story feel substantial - WriterUnboxed - increase the impact of small stories by adding constraints or ticking clocks.
• Efficiency Isn’t Everything - Chronicle of Higher Education - A short meditation on why performing tasks manually has value in an age of automation.

“The value of an apology, like the value of a lovingly homemade meal, does not reside primarily in the final product but in the mode of production”  Alan Levinovitz in “Efficiency Isn’t Everything” in The Chronicle of Higher

• Balance is a Practice - WriterUnboxed - Short essay on sustaining your writing routine by allowing it to be flexible and dynamic. Especially important over the summer months in my opinion.

Longread

I was incredibly inspired by this longer piece this month. It starts with a lottery ticket found in a used book, and continues onto an exploration of community, nostalgia for the lost intimacy of movie theaters, and a mediation on resistance even in writing about everyday things.

• Mediations in an Emergency - In the Dark Times Will There Also Be Singing

“But the ticket dangled before me as if it was a ticket for me to write about something a little more removed, a little less urgent. I miss who I was as a writer before the current crises, which is to say I miss what I might have thought about, what I might have written, where my attention might have gone.”

Books I'm Reading

• Darksight Dare - Lois McMaster Bujold - A new Penric and Desdemona Novella. A new demon, a moral dilemma, and a fun quick read.
• Ode to the Half-Broken - Suzanne Palmer - A grumpy robot and cyberdog wander New York City and the surrounding countryside looking for the robot's stolen leg.
• Yes, Your Serpentine Excellency - Kate Stradling - A surprisingly sweet romance in a world of shifters and teleporters. A setting I would certainly visit again.
• Roverpowered 5 - Drew Hayes - An aspiring alchemist and her bonded corgi companion get into more trouble together.
• Eye of the Bedlam Bride & This Inevitable Ruin (Dungeon Crawler Carl 6 & 7) - Matt Diniman - I continue my slow roll through this series,
• How to Take Smart Notes - Sönke Ahrens - This was...maybe useful. I'm experimenting with a zettlekasten-ish implementation on Obsidian. More on that later, probably. Reading inspired by this How to make writing less hard article by Oliver Burkeman.
• Bird by Bird - Anne Lamott - Anne Lamott's classic. More on this one in July.
• Wild Mind - Natalie Goldberg - Follow up to Writing Down the Bones, which I still can't find in my house. Which means I probably lent out my copy.

Acountability - Busy with a short story project I can't share quite yet. More on that hopefully in a few weeks.