5 Things: Ten Minutes, Memoirs, and The Diplomat

Here’s what grabbed my attention this week. A little thinking about where we live, two books on my reading pile, a show we’re bingeing, and the feeling of trying to keep up with it all. Friday at Five.

• Your ten-minute radius. This made me think:

  Your 10-minute radius matters more than almost anything else about where you live: Think about what you can get to in ten minutes without making it a whole thing.

  A walk, a coffee, a few groceries, somewhere to sit outside. What we can easily get to shapes so much of an ordinary day. I like this way of thinking about where we live.

• A Grief Observed, by C. S. Lewis. I am reading more memoirs lately, and this is one I’m currently reading. Lewis drew it from four personal notebooks he wrote in after his wife, Joy Davidman, died. It’s an intimate account of grief and the questions loss raises about love, faith, and everything we thought we understood. It’s beautiful.

• The Art of Memoir, by Mary Karr. I’m also reading more books about the craft of writing a memoir. Karr has taught the form for decades at Syracuse, and this has so many accessible insights. She includes passages from some of her favorite memoirs and breaks down how they work. There’s something so useful about getting to look closely at a piece of writing with someone who can help you see what the writer is doing.

• The Diplomat, Season 4. The new season has dropped, and we are bingeing it. Such great writing. The conversations, the relationships, the tension. I think we’ll go back and watch every season again once we’re through this one.

• The exhaustion of keeping up, The New York Times. This captures how exhausting it feels to keep up with the pace of everything happening in the world.