About Harrow's Notes

The Harrow-shelf Reader is a curious crossbreed of the Homo Bibliophilus and the Homo Ludens. Anthropologists will be relieved to hear that this species is easy to spot by using anything that smells like a well-aged paperback as bait. Other researchers have successfully relied on a delicate mixture of hardcover novels, meeples, black coffee, a linen cloth, and the muffled sound of dice landing on a wooden table to catch a rare glimpse of the Harrow-shelf Reader.

Here is a peculiar specimen, photographed mid-morning in his natural habitat, the corner armchair, before the second cup of coffee has gone entirely cold:

With a little patience, if we remain very quiet, we can occasionally hear the Harrow-shelf Reader muttering under his breath about the third act of the novel currently in his lap. More typically, however, this species prefers writing to speaking. What follows is a series of dispatches, a quiet journal, kept for anyone who wishes to know a little more about the person on the other end of these reviews.

Diary of a Harrow-shelf Reader

Day 4,720. Autumn closed early this year, and the books I had meant to finish before the first frost now belong, somehow, to spring. Yet I, Alex Harrow, current custodian of Harrow's Notes, am determined to keep the shelf moving, as I currently am a…

Reader

I read across genres, but I have a soft spot for literary fiction, quiet science fiction, and any nonfiction that trusts its reader. I read slowly, usually two or three books at once, one for mornings, one for evenings, and one small enough for the pocket of a coat. I keep a physical reading log that I've kept for over a decade, and I re-read more than most people, which is why Middlemarch and Piranesi keep turning up on this site. Everything you'll find here operates on the quiet assumption that slow attention rewards you back. You can peek at my most recent reviews, or at what's currently on the shelf.

Player

I gravitate toward two-player games, tile-layers, and anything with a merciful sixty-minute play time. My partner and I have a standing games night on Sundays; a small group of friends comes over roughly once a month for something longer. I am forever suspicious of an eight-hour board game. I would rather play a short, sharp game three times than a long game once, and almost every game reviewed on this site has been played at least three times before I've written about it. Have a look at the games shelf.

Writer

Reviews on this site run long. That's on purpose. A book or a board game that has taken someone years to make deserves more than a paragraph, even when the verdict is quick. Most pieces here are between two and four thousand words, and I edit them at least twice before publishing. Everything on this site is written by me, no AI drafts, no ghostwriting, no sponsored reviews. When I get something wrong, I fix it in the post and add a small note at the bottom, dated. Occasionally I write essays that don't belong to any particular book or game; you'll find them in the margins.

Teacher

Transforming knowledge into something readable is my mission. As they say: the best way to learn something is to teach it, and I couldn't agree more. My day job is teaching literature to undergraduates at a small liberal arts college in western Oregon. I teach one seminar on the nineteenth-century novel, one on twentieth-century American short fiction, and my favourite, a first-year introduction called "How to Read a Sentence." Much of what appears on this site about attention, patience, and rereading comes directly from what I try to teach in that room.