August Scrapbook: Red Socks, Books About Color, and Ripley From "Alien"

August Life Lives Redux

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Welcome to the first Friday edition of Life Lives! I’m thrilled to be writing to you as a social media divorcee. Yesterday, I deactivated all my accounts except Substack, and I already feel a little bit more free.

To honor my separation from everybody’s highlight reel, I wanted to share my highlight real (ooh, cheeky!) with you. Below are the genuine moments of joy, self-discovery, and thoughtfulness that colored the last week. I hope you enjoy, and thank you, thank you, thank you for reading Life Lives.

1. Some books about color

The main character of my new book is a painter. This presents an interesting challenge, given that I know next to nothing about visual art or (on an even more basic level) color. This week, I suddenly had an insight: Learning more about the rainbow could help me understand how my character sees the world around her. And so, like a completely rational person, I ordered not one, not two, not three, but four books about the palette of our world. I can’t wait to flip through these.

The 🌈 books I purchased: Color: A Natural History of the Palette, Victoria Finlay | Color, Betty Edwards | The Secret Lives of Color, Kassia St. Clair | Werner's Nomenclature of Colours: Adapted to Zoology, Botany, Chemistry, Mineralogy, Anatomy, and the Arts, Patrick Syme