Three years of notebooks and no way back into them. This summer I started a single index card per book — author, one sentence, page numbers that mattered. It turns out the constraint is the point: if a book will not fit on a card, I have not finished thinking about it.
Walked the stretch from Cley to Weybourne with the wind straight off the water. Everything I had read about the light there is true and none of it is useful until you have stood in it.
Cut the reading list from forty titles to nine. The ones that survived had all been recommended twice by different people, years apart. That seems as good a filter as any.