Posted in Stationery

7 years

Posted on by Alice

Ever since stumbling upon it on YouTube, I’ve always desired a Traveler’s Notebook. It was just the right creative spot for me because I could use it for all sorts of things, from journaling to collaging and even creating the inserts myself. However, back in the days, the only option for me was Amazon and they were (and still are) very expensive there, at least the original ones.

So I had tried to go the cheaper way and get a faux leather one, the material was vinyl and I hated the plastic-y feeling at the touch and it broke fairly easy after a couple of weeks of usage. But then, I was lucky enough to find a real leather one on Amazon for only 19,90€ by an unknown brand that included 3 inserts, a plastic folder and a paper sleeve. It was perfect. And I’m pretty sure the price was so low because they weren’t that popular here in Italy yet. Was it an unethical choice? Absolutely. Did it make me happy while I was an unemployed student about to graduate and with limited online resources without customs to pay? Absolutely.

I have such fond memories of this notebook. I purchased it with the money I was earning with my freelance job, I was so excited about it that I couldn’t put it down and I decided to take a selfie with it.

It wasn’t a proper selfie, because half of my face was cut (on purpose). But it turned out one of my all time favourite photos of myself, the one I would use as avatar on Teams at work if I could.

Some days ago, I was thinking about this whole thing, a bit frustrated that my cover, after all this time, still looked very chuncky with just one insert because the leather was crafted in a way that didn’t make it bend very much. I was also a bit frustrated that I had to switch inserts all the time according to the situation. Then I realized that I could actually afford a Traveler’s Company cover now because I have a job! And I could even purchase it from an independent local shop that sells amazing stationery from around the world!

Now, the colour choice. Brown has always been my favourite. But my Amazon cover was almost identical to the TN in Brown and I didn’t want to have two covers in the same colour. Black, blue and olive are not exactly for me, I know I would get bored easily with them, I would have gladly chosen the Love and Trip Limited Edition cover that was a beautiful dark red, but sadly it’s no longer available. So I went with camel and I’m very happy about it!

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The leather is very soft and has a suede feel and it’s very different from all the other ones (that I had the chance to properly touch, hold, sniff and hug during a visit to a local shop…I promise that was looking as weird as that time I was testing the floppiness of paperbacks in a bookstore).

So far, I decided to do very little customization and I changed the elastic using the spare green one it came with. Inside, I have the cardboard folder and an A5 Muji lined notebook that I’ve trimmed to size where I like to write long form journaling with my fountain pen. I like it better than the TN inserts because the notebook can lay flat while the stapled ones always struggle.

While I was holding and hugging my new prized possession, I felt the urge to see that old selfie again and then I had my own Bilbo moment.

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I decided to recreate the picture. Not Bilbo’s meme, my own selfie. I even found the exact same T-shirt I was wearing (this probably says a lot about my fashion cares) at the back of a drawer.

And so here it is. Seven years apart.

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Different house, different phone camera (2019 photo taken blindly from the main phone camera with the timer, 2026 photo taken with a frontal camera to match the pose), different filter, different notebook, different job, different me (but not too much).

I didn’t think it would have been so difficult to find the correct angle, I didn’t even completely nailed it but that’s fine. I guess that the 5 years or so that I’ve been away from Instagram made my selfie skills quite rusty. I won’t deny it, for the whole time while I was struggling with this damn photo I was feeling like my favourite boomer gif.

Now I just hope I won’t have to wait other 7 years to get the limited edition red cover or the comparison photo process may look even more awkward.

Posted in Tolkien

On Escapism and Tolkien’s Work During Challenging Times (Republished)

Posted on by Alice
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Happy Tolkien Reading Day!

To celebrate today I thought it would be fun to republish the very last article that I wrote for Middle-earth News. The website is no longer active, but I have been one of the Staff Writers for several years and I will always remember that time with fondness.

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This is how my article looked like on the website homepage back in 2020

We were in the thick of the pandemic when I wrote this article and I noticed that rereading it during difficult times still brings me comfort nowadays. Spring is a season that always made me think of the Shire, Hobbits and cosy living, so I decided this would be the right time to bring my words back 🙂

Haven’t you ever wanted to throw a brick at your TV or computer, run outside your front door to find Bilbo sitting there in the garden, smiling while he offers you a beautiful poppy-seed cake and a seat at his table?

Sounds familiar? This is part of an article written by Quickbeam (Clifford Scott Broadway) on TheOneRing.net dating back to August 22, 1999. Yes, you read it right, 1999.

I was browsing their Library archives (formerly known as Green Books) the other day in a wave of nostalgia for the old times and the title of this article, In Defense of Escapism, piqued my interest. Right after starting to read it, I realized Clifford’s words completely resonated with me and couldn’t be more current than that.

As I wrote on Twitter a couple of months ago, social distancing surprisingly turned into social media distancing for me during the current pandemic. Being bombarded with terrible news at any time of the day wasn’t good for my mental health, so I decided to distance myself from social media (I never watch television so that wasn’t a problem for me) and only read the bare minimum to keep myself informed on the important things. However, for literally months, I haven’t been able to properly concentrate to read a book, even if I was looking forward to diving myself into Professor Tolkien’s work once again especially during the lockdown without the pressure of not having enough time to dedicate to it. But my brain had other plans. Luckily though, Escapism comes in many forms, so I got myself into movies and videogames and, thanks to Peter Jackson’s trilogies and Standing Stone Games’ The Lord of the Rings Online, I was still able to find refuge in Middle-earth.

Now that my brain started to finally process all this and we are still forced to coexist with Covid-19 in our day-to-day lives, I’m slowly getting back to my beloved books and I am looking forward to September to start rereading The Lord of the Rings and then branch out over The Silmarillion, probably with The Hobbit in between for a change of pace. To use Clifford’s words once again:

Going back to reread these works is just as rewarding. Ask any fan and they’ll tell you straight up: “It’s like visiting an old friend.” Indeed, I indulge myself another reading of Tolkien’s creation every few years because it’s a more welcome place to be than here. Those hobbits and elves are people I want to spend time with–I want to sit by their fires and listen to their songs. As the alarming speed of today’s telecommunications brings the world’s brutality right into my living room, the comforts of the Shire are more inviting than ever.

But what makes Professor Tolkien’s work so special to so many people, besides the characters, the story and the setting? For years, I’ve been trying to answer this question taking stock of all the things present in his books, but I never thoroughly thought about those that were absent.

Tolkien’s writing is by turns powerful and highly romantic, true, but there is something in the work that beckons me back, continually appeals no matter how many times I read it. Actually, it’s a particular set of things ABSENT that I find so wonderful: a world with no obscenities, guns, or sex. Seriously, it makes all the difference to the modern reader’s experience.

In conclusion, many things have changed during the last twenty years but, at the same time, the world can still be an overwhelming and scary place. But, luckily for us, Middle-earth will always be there to welcome us back home when we’ll find the need to escape and we will still find Bilbo sitting in his garden no matter what’s happening around us.

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Posted in Books

Reading life reflections and goals

Posted on by Alice

During the last two years, I’ve read more than 50 books (each). To me, this is an absolute huge amount of them, however, besides the series that changed my adult life (like ACOTAR and Fourth Wing, excluding the last book), I don’t have much memory of what I read. Some books, especially the ones on my Kindle, would have been completely erased from my memory if I wouldn’t have started logging them on the StoryGraph since 2024.

The ebook format is great to read while travelling or to tackle huge books that would be uncomfortable and heavy to hold in your hands but they have the habit to slip away from my mind because, visually, I’m just facing a black and white cover when I put the Kindle on stand-by and the font/layout is the same in every ebook. Basically, they have no personality.

While watching this video by my friend Lucia, I was reminded of how impressed I was by a friend of mine for remembering so well a book she was reading. We had both started Quicksilver before the Holidays and then I decided not to continue it because it just wasn’t for me. However, I was curious about the story and so I asked her to tell me what happened after the point I had stopped reading. She started telling me about all the events, plot twists, revelations and, by the end of her speech, she had a sore throat by how much she had talked.

I was so impressed because I would have never been able to remember all the details of a book as she did.

Despite my Bachelor and Master’s degrees, I have always struggled to study and remember things. Like a lot. I hated those classmates who read things just once and remembered everything and got the highest grades, while I spent hours and hours studying only to remember a fraction of the things. This is also probably why I hate writing reviews, it reminds me too much of my school years.

However, analysing my friend’s reading routine, I realised the following interesting points:

  • She always reads only one book at a time. If she starts a new one before finishing her current read, it’s because that first book is paused because she’s not vibing with it and will end up either as DNF or she will get back to it later on. DNF almost always win.
  • She doesn’t set specific reading goals for the year and she doesn’t use her book tracking app as a way to doomscroll and procrastinate, therefore she doesn’t get massive FOMO and the temptation to rush through books in order to increase her numbers or read the book everyone is talking about.
  • She reads only when she has some focused time to dedicate to the book, mostly in the afternoon after work / before dinner. This means that if she has plans for the weekend, she simply doesn’t pick up the book but she admitted to me of not feeling any guilt about it.

I got really inspired to notice my friend’s reading life unfold, after years and years she couldn’t read a single book (we studied at University together and experienced unemployment at the same time, so I know very well her struggles).

Both my friends mentioned above inspired me to try to be more mindful with my reading. So I decided that I want to focus on the following aspects and habits in my reading life:

  • read one book at a time
    • an additional read is allowed on the side if it’s an audiobook of a different genre
  • check my book tracking apps (StoryGraph and Pagebound) only for logging my updates and not for doomscrolling
  • read when I have some time to properly focus on my book
  • prioritise purchasing (and reading) physical books over ebooks
  • don’t rush finishing a book just for the accomplishment feelings (this is hard)

I’m interested to see if I’ll manage to stick with this list and if my end of the year count will drop a bit compared to the previous years!

Posted in Tolkien

A demon of the ancient world. My Lego Book Nook!

Posted on by Alice

During the last two Christmas Holidays, I became more and more aware of my age because relatives started gifting me typical old-person gifts: parmesan cheese and olive oil.

From an external (read: non-italian) point of view, this may look like Roman Emperor level kind of haul but you have to know that here it’s customary to gift high quality food during the holidays. Baskets of regional edibles, bags with wine bottles, panettone, and so on. I got my two favourite things, don’t get me wrong, but they screamed middle-aged lady to me, rather than 30-something millenial with an insane passion for books, pirates and stationery (I accidentally found my internet bio, can I also add it to my LinkedIn?). So when my mom declared “dad and I thought about gifting you some money to cover a month of your gym subscription this Christmas!” I was feeling like shit for not feeling excited about that, but at the same time I was feeling grateful. It was a complicated mess.

“…unless there is something specific that you would like?”

And that’s when the words ‘LEGO BALROG BOOK NOOK’ formed into my head. And the rest, as they say, it’s history.

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And here it is, in all its glory, on my book case. I have added a small battery-operated votive candle next to it that lights up at the same time every day, so when I get home from work I’m greeted by the lights of the depths of Khazad-dûm.

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I spent the Holidays building it while half-watching Hallmark Christmas movies in the background. Pure bliss.

Posted in Blog

Hello World!

Posted on by Alice

I debated wether to change the default title for this first post but then I decided against it, it’s properly cringe-worthy and somehow matches the name of my blog.

For a full origin story, I would recommend reading my about page. Now, to the reasons that brought me here, on a cold Winter night of January 2026.

Around two and a half years ago, I moved to a new home, away from the countryside where I grew up and, at the same time, a long-distance relationship abruptly ended. I was feeling sad and lost and I just wanted to write. I didn’t have the energy to set up a blog or a website and so I decided to give Substack a go. It was now the place where everybody was, right?

But, after three years on the platform, I can say I never felt really at home there. The environment is made in such a professional way (WordPress too but it’s different because you can customise your blog as much as you want) and people interact there out of curiosity and pleasure but also, let’s be honest, to gain new subscribers. I often felt self-conscious about my little personal updates going straight to people’s inboxes and called “newsletters” while what I considered a personal blog was a “publication”. It sounded so formal and professional. You may think “it’s just a matter of wording things”. Well, yes and no. They say that Substack feels like the old days of blogging, but to me it’s not the old-old days from where I come from, it’s the old days from when people had started making an income out of their blogs so they had stopped sharing scattered and imperfect personal updates and everything had become a listicle.

I have nothing against beautiful Substack publications, I’m currently subscribed to a bunch of them and I event went the paid route a couple of times in the past. It just doesn’t feel like the right place for me to write freely at this stage of my life.

I want to mindlessly write and add photos and not think about post covers and branding. I no longer want to spent two hours on Canva trying to build my own online brand identity, creating the perfect page dividers and cursing the free account that doesn’t allow to make the background transparent so I have to export the image and work my way through Gimp but then I realize that I forgot all the commands because I now have a full-time computer-based job and no longer have the capacity to play around with programs like I used to, so I have to google free image editors and then I wonder what piece of my soul will be taken because “if they are free you are the product”… I’m exhausted already typing all this.

Another thing that started bothering me on Substack is all the noise brought by the Notes feature. When I joined the platform for the first time, it was just a feed of published newsletters, a sort of feed rss, it was calm and controlled and also helpful if you didn’t want to check your email for new content. Now it has become a sort of mash-up of Twitter, Instagram Reels, Facebook posts. It’s a social media through and through, algorithmic feed and all. Sure, you can avoid the noise not checking the page. But let me put it clear, it’s fucking tempting. I have zero self control when it comes to social media and that’s why I quit it all before 2020 (with Instagram being the very last one leaving during the pandemic after living my entire days in there despite my attempts not to).

With Substack Notes is kind of different, but in the end it’s not. I still get tempted to post, I still get a pang of disappointment if nobody likes my posts, I still find myself scrolling through it during breakfast from the computer browser, I still gain nothing positive from it, exactly like social media.

So, yeah, I wanted a fresh start. I wanted a tiny corner of the web to decorate and make mine.