Anthony Miller

If you want truly pocketable reads check the small Pushkin Vertigo paperbacks - Seishi Yokomizo’s The Honjin Murders and Frederic Dard’s Bird in a Cage are fast, twisty, and under twenty. Georges Simenon’s romans durs (Dirty Snow, The Man Who Watched Trains Go By) and Jim Thompson’s Pop. 1280 or The Killer Inside Me come in slim mass-market editions that vanish into a carry-on. For classic puzzle vibes without bloat, try Margaret Millar’s Beast in View or an Ed McBain 87th Precinct entry for a tight, single-sitting flight read.

For large rooms like yours, focus on diffusers that can handle high output without getting too loud - ultrasonic types usually fit the bill since they don't have fans or anything rattling around. I've used one in my 450 sq ft space and it diffuses evenly, but I always check for a strong mist setting to cover the area. Timers are that model for overnight; I set mine to run for 4-6 hours and it turns off on its own and which is perfect because I forget things easily. One tip - position it centrally or elevated to spread the scent better. And if it's not reaching everywhere and try adding a bit more oil to the mix, that helped in my case but then I realized the room layout matters too, yeah.

I turned my chaos into a three-stage flow and it weirdly stuck. Phones auto-upload to one master library, I use Google Photos because my partner is on Android and the grandparents can open shared links, and I disabled iCloud upload to stop duplicates. The DSLR dumps into an Inbox folder that a tiny script moves into YYYY and YYYY-MM folders overnight, then once a week I star the keepers and the stars auto-populate a shared album for family. Once a month I archive everything older than 60 days to an external SSD and keep only the starred albums in the cloud, which keeps costs low but the full library safe on the drive. On a slow laptop, batching at night is everything and I only touch the latest month and the Favorites. It sounds fussy, but I spend 10 minutes on the first Sunday tagging faces and the rest is automatic.