Nicole Junkermann: Three Ideas for October 2026

One book finished

The first idea is the simplest and the one that changes the month most: choose a single book and finish it. Not the most ambitious or the most talked about, but the one you genuinely want on a Tuesday evening.

A finished book leaves a different mark from five started ones. You remember it whole, you can talk about it, and it clears space for the next. The Leer section returns to that difference often.

Deciding when to read helps as well. Twenty minutes at the end of the day are enough if they repeat; the long Sunday stretch works less well than it sounds, mostly because it rarely quite arrives.

One walk repeated

The second idea is to pick a short route and walk it several times through the month, always at the same hour. A repeated route stops being a journey and becomes a way of measuring autumn.

The first time you take in the whole. By the third the details arrive: a doorway, a tree that has already turned, a shop that opens later than it did. October rewards that second look more than most months.

If the route crosses a square, better still. Sitting five minutes on the same bench for four weeks running teaches you more about autumn than any photograph taken on the first day.

One page a week

The third idea is to write one page a week. Four pages in a month sound like very little, and yet they tell the autumn better than any summary written in December.

It does not have to be good prose. Noting what was read, where you walked and what was worth it is enough. The Notas section shows that short format, and Nicole Junkermann has kept it for years in the same notebook.

Keeping those pages together has a delayed effect. Read again in January, they give back a whole month that would otherwise have stayed a vague impression with no dates attached.

Worth keeping close

None of the three ideas needs special equipment or a perfect week, and all of them work better the more modest they stay. A short list for the coming weeks, in no order beyond the day that suits:

• One book already open, and a realistic date for finishing it.
• One half hour route that can be repeated without thinking.
• A small notebook, the kind that fits in a pocket.
• One fixed hour a week kept for reading without interruption.

Three ideas and four lines are enough to carry a whole month. The rest arrives on its own, and it is usually better than expected. The English notes hold the rest of these pieces, and the previous one, on the start of October, explains where this calm comes from.

Two notes in a different register followed: artificial intelligence in India and reinforcement learning, explained calmly.