The Weekly Digest is a weekly (no shit?) update that captures highlights from the week that was. At the end of each week, I share a collection of thoughts, recommendations, and links. Like everything else I write, it's awesome, but it may be too long for email so make sure you click through.
Substack Summer Update
Substack Summer has turned into a bit of a Substack Bummer and yes, I spent all month thinking of that joke. I always underestimate how busy Summer because I mentally align it with relaxation and beaches and taking things easy. Of course, spending 20ish hours driving your family around, working a full-time job, raising a three-year-old and keeping up with friends tends to add up quicker than you’d think.
Anyways, here’s the previous two (so far) entries into Substack Summer. #3 will be joining shortly.
Midwestern Death Trip by Meaghan Garvey.
If you are an author with a completed work you’d like reviewed, you can find out how I manage Review Requests here. If you’ve already sent me an ARC of your work (or if I bought it myself), you are already on “the List.”
☁️Help, I’ve Forgotten What I’m Doing
On Falling Off The Wagon
Golf looks easier than it is and that’s the real indignity of it. I spent a weekend playing three rounds with friends, drinking, going out to dinner, watching 1990s music videos on YouTube and just generally ball-busting (both jocular teasing and also firing golf balls into neighborhood homes and traffic).
One of my buddies said to me, “Vinny, you’re a good guy but you get on a golf course, and you become chaotic evil.” That probably tells you all you need to know about how well my rounds went this weekend. Nevertheless! It was a blast and I took the opportunity to tell my friends that I love them in a little speech that made at least one of them think I might be dying.
Since that trip, I’ve hit one of my rare manic/productive modes. I got back on a health kick and started working out again. From the nips up, I’m an Adonis and the less said about the rest of me, the better. Mrs. Reads also had to suddenly skip town as part of her job as an international spy to visit an ailing friend, so Kiddo and I had a Dudes’ Week from which we both managed to survive.
Part of all this chaos caused me to ruthlessly deprioritize a lot of my reading and all of my writing. I’m still trying to forever strike the perfect balance like someone overcorrecting into a skid, but I’m hoping to put aside some time to finish FEVERCHAIN this week/weekend and get a review up in the next week or so.
A last bit of good news on that front: I picked up Willy Vlautin’s The Horse on a whim yesterday and tore through about the first 2/3rds of it. It was exactly the kickstart my reading habit needed. Sometimes you just need the right “mood book” to get the engine firing.
📚Book Bits
Bonus Review: will return next week with “Never Liked Men” by Silvia Fonseca from Masculine (Bad Clown Books, 2026). I read it, but I read it a while ago and need to re-read it to review because I write marginalia, not notes.
The Death of the Artist by William Deresiewicz (finished)
How Creators Are Struggling to Survive in the Age of Billionaires and Big Tech. The answer to this question ranges from “a lot” to “a fucking lot.” This book was published in 2020, so far to say that things have continued to get worse for artists since we’ve now entered the Age of Trillionaire(s).
Drive by Daniel H. Pink (finished)
An interesting book about extrinsic versus intrinsic motivation. A lot of these “self-help” books also carry parenting advice or at least some ideas that you can adopt for kids.
The 12-Week Year by Brian P. Moran (finished)
One of those rare “systems” books where I said, “okay, I gotta try this out.” So far I’m 3 weeks into my ‘year,’ and on pace to hit a number of fairly ambitious goals. Sustainability, as always, is the major bugaboo but I think completing one 12-week cycle would be a good start.
Grit by Angela Duckworth (finished)
I heard a lot of good things about this book, and it mostly lived up to the hype. Like all of these books, it drags in places but overall the message is that pushing through adversity is the surest predicter of success. It’s why you’re actually getting a Digest this week.
Inside the Box by David Epstein
About 80% through ItB and it’s one of those good-not-great ones. It’s interesting how constraints seem to drive creativity, iteration, and ultimately success but — as the book points out — identifying bottlenecks only seems obvious with hindsight. I find myself struggling to find interesting ways to apply the lessons of this one.
Recent Book Haul:
Magazine Non Grata Vol. 3
Push The Wall: My Life, Writing, Drawing, and the Art of Storytelling by Frank Miller
FEVERCHAIN by M.A. Knight (my paperbook copy from Dylan Bosworth).
Escape Velocity by Charles Portis — Collected works that I found in a Little Free Library.
📺Screen Time 🖥️
For some reason I haven’t finished the final season of Mr. Inbetween. I started this at the beginning of July and haven’t gone back to it. I always tend to tail off when binging shows because I don’t want to get to the end and have it be done-done.
I also started watching season 3 of Daredevil so that I can pick at Born Again. I think I crapped out early in this season but it’s actually damn good. The “Karen” episode is spectacular.
Claude Code. My secret shame is that I have been thoroughly enjoying “vibe coding” with Claude Code. This is the step up from the (borderline useless) free LLMs that everyone’s played around with. My job is really pushing AI (shocking), so I started trying to teach myself more and more of it. I’ve been kit-bashing together a “Life Operating System” and as someone who used to code: this is not coding. It’s actually a lot more fun and significantly more productive (for me, anyway). When I was a Computer Science undergraduate, I excelled at the conceptual aspects of programming and sucked at the actual coding itself. This is like a group project with the best coder in the class. I’ll give you all a heads up when I cure cancer.
💡Substack Spotlight:
I’ve been really out of the loop, skimming or ignoring most of the stuff that’s come through my inbox. I do have a large backlog saved from a lot of the usual suspects I mention here. I have been enjoying the more frequent posts from Alexander Sorondo now that he is a free(lance) man.
Bad Clown Books announced their next anthology: WAR & PEACE. Submissions open on August 15th which happens to be my 40th birthday, so in lieu of a gift make your submissions extra good.
Congrats to Daniel Falatko on winning the Samuel Richardson Prize For Best Self-Published Literary Novel for his awesome novel, The Wayback Machine. I reviewed TWbM for the first Substack Summer, which you can read here.
🖋️Writing
On You Filthy Ingrates
I took a whole month off unannounced and actually gained subscribers! You people prefer it when I don’t write?! Bastards, the lot of you! Anyway, I have officially given up trying to figure out how Substack works or what people want to read or like about what I write. I’ll likely be keeping these Digests as they are a weekly reminder to read/write/think, but outside of that I may start getting weird with it. I do have a goal of reaching 500 subscribers by the end of the year, so I gotta find new and interesting ways to sing for my supper.
🐕Fleeting Thoughts
7/22 was the Old Boy’s “gotcha” day. Weird to know the exact date that you started to turn your life around… unless, I guess, you’ve been to rehab. Regardless, this is number 12 and there’s likely more of these anniversaries in the past than in the future. He doesn’t sleep in bed with me anymore because I don’t think he likes making the leap up there. Instead he curls up on a cat bed that is significantly smaller than him, just outside Kiddo’s room. Or he’ll sleep on the couch if Mrs. Reads falls asleep on it.
I hope someone will miss me as much as I’ll miss him one day. 1
Hopefully this marks a return to our regularly scheduled programming. Apologies for the technical psychological difficulties. Fall down 7 times, get up 8.
🍻+🤙,
— V
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He’s healthy; don’t worry about him.