I am a voracious reader and every week I come across either a book, online piece or website I want to share with others. I’ve decided to curate these gems and highlight them on Friday. I hope you find these faves as insightful as I do.

• I love collecting notebooks and stash them in my office, closet and the drawers of my nightstand. I adore blank pages and the creative designs on the covers. This article was one I thoroughly enjoyed, “Why the Humble Notebook is Flourishing in the iPhone Era,” by Josephine Wolff in the New Republic.

• The intermingling of life, death and sunsets is beautifully expressed in Kristen Ploetz’s,The Elucidating Light of a Missed Sunset. The entire essay resonated, but this passage in particular: “I am compelled to somehow take better stock of my own fortuity that, on balance, my chance of witnessing another sunset seems quite certain. I need to do this because I think I’ve forgotten.”

• I found this interview with Ta-Nehisi Coates fascinating. All creatives should ponder what he says here: “Things don’t just flow out of your brain. It’s not like, Hey, I’m brilliant. Show up, paper right here, bam, another banger. No—you sit and you struggle with yourself and you stop cutting your hair. I’m not cutting my hair right now. You stop shaving, like I’m not shaving right now. You remember that you can fail. I’ve failed several times. The fact that everybody else don’t see that don’t give me the right to not see it.”

• I adore Austin Kleon’s book, Steal Like an Artist and regularly follow his work on his blog. His recent piece, Advice for a Recent Graduate offered insights we all could use.

• A bonus Friday Fave (and self promotion) – I wrote the essay, Here,  for the literary journal Mothers Always Write. I loved how the various threads of my life came together in this piece.

What were your favorite reads this week?