The pages are just lined with a date at the top. It has a lot of room for words. Maybe too much room.

One of my friends in the department said she would have preferred the kind of planner with little boxes and not so much room to fill. “It feels like an assignment or obligation to fill the pages,” she said.

I snooped on Amazon to see what the chair spent on our gifts. Significant money, though I assume he was cleaning out some departmental account for the end of the year. “Take us out to lunch,” said one of my colleagues.

There are certainly many options in shopping for these planning books. I have to assume that many people use them.

I know what my friend means about having so much space to fill. I feel guilty that my book has some blank pages. Did nothing happen in my life on February 11, 2026? According to the book, it was a nothing day.

I’m no Samuel Pepys, who is considered one of the greatest English diarists. His journals provide a day-to-day account of 17th-century London. His entries capture major historical milestones, including the Great Plague and the Great Fire of London, alongside candid, personal confessions.

I did try to write something every day at the start of the year. Not diary-styled confessions, but more like to-do lists and notes on what happened. I looked in the book with my morning coffee and opened it again at the close of the evening before going to bed. Better than the blue light of a screen, right?

Confronted with a blank page at night, I would scribble a few widely-spaced notes.

Sunday May 24, 2026 rain again saw Simon in the afternoon and had wine and quiche which was a mistake because I had dinner plans with Anna and her husband. Now I feel fat and tired.

That’s no Pepys, but I suppose it might be useful in some way to be able to look back at some point in the future at days as a reminder. Maybe. Not sure about that.

I do journal, but not daily or even weekly. I approach that blank book almost like an essay or a logbook of my life. I encourage my students to do journaling and often assign something like that at the start of the semester as an assignment with the hope that some will continue on their own.

These kinds of books are supposed to be reminders, so what reminder comes from blank pages? My life is empty? No, but my memory is often lapsing. What DID happen on Saturday, April 11? I can’t recall anything memorable or trivial.

June 2, 2026 I went to my campus office and did some cleaning up before summer break. I took home a few books and notes and the holiday cactus on the window ledge. I like it to look ready when I return in August for prep for the fall semester. This officially is the start of summer for me.

Perhaps the best use of these books is to force your memory into motion and provide a record for the future.

Today I can write:
I posted about how I use this book and my guilt about not writing anything some days, as if nothing happened (untrue). I shouldn’t treat any precious day that way.

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J.D. (Jerome David) Salinger published his first story, “The Young Folks,” and then had The New Yorker publish “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” and more stories. One of those, “Slight Rebellion off Madison,” is an early Holden Caulfield story.

Following Salinger’s time in the Army in World War II, Salinger worked on The Catcher in the Rye featuring that Holden character. It was an immediate bestseller and that made Salinger unhappy. He didn’t want the attention. He retreated to Cornish, New Hampshire, to a home where he grew increasingly private, eventually erecting a wall around his property and publishing just three more books.

His last published story came in 1965. “Hapworth 16, 1924” was a 20,000-word “letter from camp” written by a seven-year-old Seymour Glass. It took up almost an entire issue of The New Yorker. I’m not alone in viewing it as a pretty terrible piece.

Salinger gave up on publishing. There was a plan to publish “Hapworth 16, 1924” as a standalone book through a small press in 1997, but after the news leaked and fans began pre-ordering it on a then-new website called Amazon, Salinger pulled the plug.

He died of natural causes on January 27, 2010, at the age of 91.

Though his bizarre lifestyle and the #metoo movement has not helped his reputation, his books continue to sell.

Salinger said he was constantly writing but that nothing would be published until after his death. Since his death, his son, Matt Salinger, has been working to organize a massive archive of unpublished material. In 2019, he confirmed that his father never stopped writing and that “all of what he wrote will at some point be shared.” But as of this writing, there have been no official releases yet. The estate has noted that the process is taking a long time because the material is “messy” and significant in volume—reportedly covering 50 years of private writing. I am also not alone in thinking that most of what he wrote in those hermit years is not publishable.

Then again, any new Salinger book would sell just out of curiosity. A collection of all those early stories that never were published in book form seems to be the obvious choice as a first posthumous book. I’ve read most of them via magazine files and bootlegged photocopies, and I like them. They are early efforts and probably the best of his stories are in Nine Stories, but the others are complete, edited and ready to go.

J. D. Salinger: The Last Interview: And Other Conversations
BIOGRAPHIES:
Salinger by David Shields and Shane Salerno
J. D. Salinger: A Life by Kenneth Slawenski

Here is an amateur audio of Salinger’s story “The Ocean Full of Bowling Balls”

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