Long and ambitious title for a blog post that comes after a long silence, huh? Thing is, I was carried away by sudden slew of ideas and inspirations as I started reading The Diary of a Nose this morning on the bus, so I thought I should cautiously get back to my blog, maybe writing shorter posts rather than lengthy articles that require time, research and labor limae.

I have not been totally idle, fragrance wise. While I’m still struggling to get my book finished (okay, I promise I won’t mention that anymore, it’s becoming pathetic), I’ve been working in the evenings and in the weekends on a couple of challenging custom projects and on the launch of my own non-custom brand. So, I’ve been busy with design, logo, labels etc., and this is the big news. I am still at pains with the refinement of the concept, as crystallising a whole creative approach into visuals and few words, in a way that is both genuine and commercially appealing, is all except straightforward.

Anyway, I’ve been skipping pleasure reading for a while, but I realised that for some reason I wasn’t reading at all in my commute, not even the pile of academic articles that I keep carrying in my bag for that exact purpose. So, I picked one of the three books I had bought from Amazon quite a few moths ago, intended for leisure reading, and read a few chapters. Inspired by almost every single paragraph, I decided to review it on the blog (1).

Pleasure reads (underneath, although equally pleasant, my work reads)

But hey, the inspirations were too many to handle, and I thought that my poor weak memory would have better managed a ‘diffuse review’, that is a review in installments – more of a random array of thoughts scattered with no particular order throughout the blog than a proper review. Continua a leggere →