Sixty Cards In

The rack is nothing fancy, a cheap metal recipe card holder I bought for four dollars at a hardware store because I needed somewhere to put the cards other than a shoebox, and it sits clipped to a shelf bracket at the bottom of the basement stairs where I see it every single time I come down. One card per book or game, title at the top, finish date, one line verdict, sometimes a number if I bothered rating it in my head, sometimes just a word. I’m at sixty something now, and I only really started paying attention to the pattern of them a few months ago when I was looking for a specific card and had to flip through the whole stack to find it.

It started because I kept losing track of what I actually thought about something a month or two after finishing it. I’d remember liking a book, or not liking it, but the specific reason would be gone, replaced by a vague impression that didn’t help me when someone asked what to read next or when I sat down to actually write a review of the thing. The card forces me to write the reason down while it’s still sharp, even if the reason is just three words. Rulebook fought me the whole way. Wanted to like it more. Best thing all year.

What I didn’t expect is how much the stack reads like a timeline of the last few years without meaning to be one. There’s a run of cards from a stretch where I was clearly reading a lot of hard science fiction back to back, and I can place roughly when that was because I remember what else was going on that winter. There’s a card for a game I know I only played because Deke was between shifts and bored, and one for a book I picked up because my daughter’s teacher mentioned it in passing at a parent conference and I got curious. None of that context is written on the cards themselves. It’s just there, underneath, the way a person’s own handwriting starts to carry information beyond the words on the page if you look at enough of it at once.

I don’t know what happens when the rack fills up, which it’s getting close to doing. Buy a second one, probably, and let the two of them sit side by side, sixty cards becoming a hundred and twenty becoming whatever it becomes. I like that it’s a physical object I have to walk past every day instead of a file on a phone I could go months without opening. It’s a small thing. I still think it’s worth mentioning.