I just cannot say enough good things about this book. I love the main character, and the serial enthusiasms he's propelled into, and I could happily spend years just reading about whatever he's up to, whatever new thing he's learning about, dabbling in, experiencing.

There isn't a lot of sculpture I connect with, for some reason, but I loved this right away.

I love the expression on his face, and how it deepens and shifts, viewing it from different angles. I love and am intrigued by his garb, no recognizable pants or shirt but an unfamiliar draping shift, which makes me think of a monk or a medieval student or I'm not sure what. His posture, the tilt of his head, are so evocative, and make me feel an immediate liking for him.

I'm a big fan of the Rijksmuseum, especially their Rijkstudio feature that makes it easy to download public-domain works and use them to create your own objects or collages or whatever.

A recent casual search for 20th century works with a particularly lovely shade of green showed me a beautiful landscape by Gerrit van Blaaderen.

Merwin speaks to the September light, catching the birds' whispers, the perfect blue plums.

Leggiamo is an excellent resource for studying Italian.

The first level, Italian 101, consists of a series of short stories (actually, each story has a short version and an expanded version), with full audio of each story.

It's easy to download the full text and all the audio.

The material for Italian 102 is similar, but it's an adaptation of a single story: I promessi sposi.

Sometime in the past year or two, I came across a reference to people who were trying to eat 800 grams of fruit and vegetables a day. For some reason, the idea delighted me, and over time, I occasionally searched for more information ... but mostly I just kind of took in the idea and let it sit in my head.

And now it's a vague ambition - something I don't track (as it turns out, it's not very easy to track it automatically), something I don't take seriously at all - but something I enjoy as an approximate aspiration, something I can aim for in a careless way.

I always enjoy works (poems mostly, I guess) that describe a thing by telling you what it is not.

Nancy Hiller's series of profiles of woodworkers introduces me to so many interesting people with so many different ways into their love of working with wood.

I've been reading easy (extremely easy) Japanese books at tadoku.org, which has a large selection of extremely easy books for people learning Japanese.

Recently I read one about a man from America who had gone to Japan to build houses to replace a few of the homes destroyed when the US dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. The man was Floyd Schmoe.

I thoroughly enjoyed the Japanese book, and after I finished it, I wanted to learn more about Schmoe. Wikipedia was most helpful, of course, and I found some photos and articles online that filled in more details.

Recently during my daily practice of looking at art, I was poking around various pages at the Art Institute of Chicago, and I came across this article about Kinds of Red.

It had thumbnails of some beautiful works - I was expecially taken with the red diacritics in the 1000-year-old Qur'an, and the advertisement by Elsa Kula.

But what delighted me the very most was learning about the website's feature that lets you filter images by color. The article links to artworks matching a nice bright red as an example.