Five stars or walk the plank

Yo ho ho and a bottle of stars!

Howdy Traipser! A hearty welcome to Traipsing About, my newsletter about reclaiming creativity and ditching tired personal paradigms. No bot writing here—credit is mine for all bad puns, drawings, photos, and typos.

Flashback: If this were 1455 and Gutenberg’s press was cranking, I’d painstakingly set this newsletter in metal type, ink it up, and crank out copies by hand.

Since the internet, pianos and bicycles weren’t around, I’d entertain myself watching the ink slooowly dry, then bundle the fresh prints and send them off by courier.

Today, I sip my hot chai, edit with one hand, and just click send.

For you new readers, here's your host on haircut day. (aka Chelsea combs my hair into weird shapes, then laughs and laughs.)

Hot off the Not-Gutenberg press this week on Paging About, Edition #141:

• 📅 A year of five-stars⭐

• 📚📚📚 Books, books, books.📚📚📚

• ⏳ Resolutions fade (thankfully).

• Traipsing tidbits:

  • 🌆 New cities.

  • 📸🍽 Feed the world.

  • 🏙️📐Old city

  • 🔨🖼️Cracked glass portraits

In case you missed it: Last time I wrote about the forks in the road(s) of our lives. Afterward, Dave in N. Carolina sent me this graphic from Wait But Why, which is so perfect:

---

Only five stars

Last year, I changed how I approach books: I stopped forcing myself to finish them. And the result?

Five-star reads, every time.

Well, call me Captain of the Good Ship Grade Inflation and make me walk the plank! Clearly I’ve become a book propaganda pirate.

Not quite. Looking through my Goodreads list, I finished 52 books, but also tossed 22 over the starboard side.

In the past, I’d hang onto a book like a dog wrenching on a chew toy, as if making it to the final page was a test of character.

These days, I’m subscribing to a “life’s too short” quick and dirty rule for letting go of books guilt-free:

“If you're 50 years old or younger, give every book about 50 pages before you decide to commit yourself to reading it or give it up. Over 50, subtract your age from 100 and quit there.

Part of my five-star mentality is that I don’t just randomly select books from a library sale or blindly click through Great Romance Novels on Amazon. I know there are upsides to serendipitous reading, but I’ve mostly found that a scattershot selection of books doesn’t provide much value for me.

Instead, I get recommendations from sources I trust, including award winners, authors, friends whose taste I respect, or savvy pirates. This carries over to random internet reading; I prefer curated reads from people I trust.

A matter of taste

This shift in my reading habits reflects a larger philosophy I’ve adopted: not everything is meant for me—and that’s okay.

Just because we don’t like a book whatever item/experience doesn’t mean it’s bad. I’ve reframed matters of taste into what Austin Kleon describes as “that’s not for me.”

Bad restaurant experience? The food wasn’t for me.

Bad movie? Not for me.

Bad book/song/mountain bike trail: Simply not for me.

However, some things might just not be for me at this time. For instance, I’ve revisited (and loved) books that initially bored me or enjoyed bike trails I first thought should be a goat obstacle course.

We humans are constantly changing, so of course different experiences hit us from a new angle sometimes. Perceiving things as a matter of personal taste is a laid-back way to navigate the world without taking things as a personal affront.

A mantra for 2025

All of this echoes a piece of wisdom my mom recently shared with me, one that’s been sticking with me:

Does it need to be said? Does it need to be said by me? Does it need to be said by me, now?

It’s the perfect mantra for this year—and not just for books or restaurant reviews. In a world overflowing with political tension, knee-jerk opinions, and distractions, maybe the best thing we can do is focus on what lights us up.

Here’s to spending less time savoring what speaks to us most and less time mired in the noise. Life’s too short, ye landlubbers.

Playing around with watercolors…zero idea what I’m doing!

---

Books books books

Alright Dak HotShot, Five-Star Dude… Give me some book recommendations!

I’m glad you asked. In no particular order, here are some my favs. Please send me yours too, oh insightful Traipsing reader.

1. Meditations for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman: I link to his newsletter all the time because it’s awesome…and so is this book of thought-provoking books on being imperfectly human. Must-read!

2. The Cemetery of Forgotten Books by Carlos Ruiz Zafón: Dark secrets and a legacy of intrigue unfold in Barcelona.

3. Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout: A Pulitzer winner exploring themes of love, loss, and the complexities of being human.

4. On the Move by Abrahm Lustgarten: All the hurricanes and fires have me convinced we’ve all got some hard decisions coming, so I’m diving into learning more about climate migration.

5. Mozart in the Jungle: Sex, Drugs, and Classical Music by Blair Tindall: A book (and popular TV series) about the challenges, scandals, and realities faced by musicians striving for success in a highly competitive field. Note to myself: enjoy being an amateur musician!

6. James by Percival Everett: The story of Huck Finn retold by Jim. So creative, funny, and yet not pulling punches on the realities of the time.

7. Tunnel 29: The True Story of an Extraordinary Escape Beneath the Berlin Wall by Helena Merriman: The unreal true story of a group of students who dug a tunnel under the Berlin Wall to help people escape from East to West Berlin.

8. The Painter by Peter Heller: A successful expressionist painter (and fly fisherman) finds himself on the run, grappling with his inner demons. My fav Peter Heller novel yet!

9. Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes by Morgan Housel: My favorite finance author exploring the enduring principles that govern human behavior and decision-making via excellent storytelling.

10. North Woods by Daniel Mason: The stories of multiple generations inhabiting a single house in the New England woods. A simply beautiful book…with some surprises…

11. Being with Dying: Cultivating Compassion and Fearlessness in the Presence of Death by Joan Halifax: : This book helped me a lot last year during a tough family moment. Zen teacher Joan Halifax offers guidance on how to approach death with compassion and mindfulness in a practical way.

So many more, but I’ll stop there. Scope out my Goodreads profile if you’d like more!

I’m fired up on various applications of AI tools, including for language learning.

---

Finding the right dose of self-discipline

My favorite thinkers these days aren’t the 23-year-old tech bros with steely discipline and a love of 5 a.m. ice baths. Instead, I’m attracted to nuance and acceptance of our foibles as humans from writers like Anthony Demello and British writer Oliver Burkeman.

From Burkeman’s The Imperfectionist blog, here’s a way to think about the (probably faded) New Year’s resolutions:

Hopefully, by now, all such initiatives [resolutions] have run safely into the sand, leaving you free to consider what actually works when it comes to achieving your goals. And one thing that actually works is to find the dose of self-discipline that works for you—and to recognise that it might be quite a lot smaller than you’d assumed.

Some of my favourite techniques for getting things done function by permitting me to harness the self-disciplined side of my personality, without suffocating the inspiration-and-spontaneity part. Doing things ‘dailyish’ is a good example: it’s disciplined, but in a gentle and resilient way, not a rigid and brittle one.

Another is using “no-later-than” times in scheduling your day: if you aspire, say, to start getting up at 6am, resolve instead to get up no later than 7am. As if by magic, this transforms every morning you rise at 6.20 or 6.45 from a failure into a success, because you’re doing even better than the standard you’ve set.

PREACH, ye wise Brit! May we all be kinder to ourselves this year.

Traipsing About Tidbits

1. Loved this series by Tomas Pueyo on where ten new cities could be located.

2. Check out this the world series of feeding the world photos by George Steinmetz—so beautiful.

3. This cross-section illustration of the infamous Kowloon City shows how the city evolved and built intricate layers on top of itself.

4. Incredible portraits made by cracking glass with a hammer, whaaat.

   

   Meanwhile, I enjoyed doodling these monsters while I chatted with a friend.

---

My printing press is out of ink, so that’s the end of Traipsing About newsletter #141.

Unsolicited advice for this round:

Before posting online (or before saying anything?), ask yourself:

Does it need to be said? Does it need to be said by me? Does it need to be said by me, now?

Onward,

Dakota

P.S. This is so much easier than going to Goodwill!

Thanks for reading Traipsing About! I appreciate your time and attention in a world where it’s a precious commodity. If you’re got a minute, hit reply and let me know what you’re thinking about these days.