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10 good books I read this winter


What a completely bleak winter. Good riddance. Life always feels a little bit more tolerable when you have a good book to read, and here are 10 books that helped me through, listed in the order I read them:

The Biggest Bluff
Maria Konnikova 

A writer who’s never played poker before learns the game and becomes a champion. Maria is a friend of mine, and I could be making this up, but it feels like one of those books where an author is coming into her peak skills while also finding a perfect subject for those skills. The mantra from Maria’s mentor, poker legend Erik Seidel, is perfect for our times: “Less certainty, more inquiry.”

 

“The Plague Year”
Lawrence Wright

Not a book… yet.  30,000 absolutely riveting words in The New Yorker, one of only a handful of times the magazine has devoted so much space to one piece. Wright is the perfect writer for the job, here: he wrote a pandemic novel that came out a month after lockdown began in the U.S. Wright is expanding the material into a book coming out this summer. (His book God Save Texas was on my favorites of 2019 list.)

 

A Theory of Fun for Game Design
Raph Koster 

This was a new experience for me: I don’t think I’ve ever been more turned off by the design of a book (crude drawings and pesky endnotes) while simultaneously devouring it. “Fun is just another word for learning,” Koster writes. His definition of a good game is “one that teaches everything it has to offer before the player stops playing.” (I wonder if we can apply that to books: A good book is one that teaches everything it has to offer before the reader stops reading. I like that.)

 

The Poetics of Space
Gaston Bachelard

“It is better to live in a state of impermanence than in one of finality.” One of those infuriating books that lose you for a few pages and you start skimming and the very second you’re about to put it down and read something else, a sparkling gem of a sentence appears that you double-underline and scribble in your commonplace book, and gets you to start reading again.

 

One Long River of Song: Notes on Wonder
Brian Doyle

A posthumous collection of an author I wish I’d read when he was alive. Maybe my favorite thing I read all winter. I savored a handful of essays each night in bed. If you’re new to his work, try his ode to the heart, “Joyas Voladoras,” or “The Greatest Nature Essay Ever.” There’s a big archive of his at The American Scholar. (Recommended to me by a newsletter reader. Thanks, Cate!)

 

No One Is Talking About This
Patricia Lockwood

“You’ll be nostalgic for this, too, if you make it.” Think about how hard this is to pull off: a poet writes a bestselling memoir and then follows it up with a novel. (Priestdaddy was on my favorites of 2018, and I expect this to be on my favorites of 2021.) One of the most original writers of our generation.  I will be instantly reading whatever she writes next.

 

Too Loud a Solitude
Bohumil Hrabal

The Czech writer Bohumil Hrabal once worked as a trash compactor, and, according to the critic James Wood, he “rescued books from the compacting machine and built a library of them in the garage of his country cottage outside Prague.” He based his wild, short novel on his experiences, giving them to the fictional narrator, Hanta, who says he “can’t quite tell which of my thoughts come from me and which from my books.” (Same.)

 

In Praise of Shadows
Jun’ichiro Tanizaki

The shortest book on this list, coming in at barely 50 pages. Written by a novelist and first published as an essay in Japanese before WWII. My favorite part is when he writes about the aesthetics of Japanese toilets. Seems like it might be a “problematic” text these days, but it gave me a lot to think about. (Recommended to me by an architect friend. Would pair well with Koren’s Wabi-Sabi.)

 

The Perfect Wave: More Essays on Art and Democracy
Dave Hickey

My third-favorite Hickey collection after Air Guitar and Pirates and Farmers. I read an essay for dessert after lunch each day for a few weeks. There are some really excellent essays here, but they’re mostly front-loaded at the beginning of the book. (I picked this up after reading a galley of Far From Respectable: Dave Hickey and His Art.)

 

Parable of the Sower
Octavia Butler

A dark, brilliant page-turner and very hard to read right now, given that it feels like we’re living in the prequel.

“There is no end
To what a living world
Will demand of you.”

(I wrote more about the book here.)

 

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The two Coconuts

To catch you up to speed: at the end of December, an owl appeared in the palm tree in our backyard.  We named it Coconut. I started taking pictures of it every day and drawing it. After a freak snow day here in Texas, we decided to have a house built for it. On Valentine’s Day, we spotted Coconut in the house, and then the ice storm hit, ruining Coconut’s old spot in the palm tree. On February 19, we confirmed that there were two owls in the box, and probably two owls we’d been seeing all along.

Two Coconuts.

At the end of February, I bought a cheap spotting scope with a cell phone attachment and started taking timelapse videos of them:

The trouble is, I still can’t tell them apart unless they’re next to each other. (Males are slightly smaller than the females.) Eastern screeches are able to sort of morph their bodies to blend in with tree branches, so one minute they might be puffed up and happy, sleeping in the sun (as Coconut used to be in the palm) and the next minute they’ll look all skinny and mean, like they want to murder you. (They are, after all, killers.)

We had a scare a few days ago, when the box was empty and we couldn’t find the owls anywhere, and there was a goddamned SQUIRREL in the box. I was distraught, until the next day, when we spotted them both up in the tree very close together, preening and cleaning themselves, which suggested to me that they were about to mate. Then, yesterday, Coconut was back in the box. Now, this morning, they’re both in the tree.

So I don’t know what the hell is going on with these owls. According to everything I’ve read, this should be the time of year that they mate and lay eggs. The female should roost in the box, leaving around dusk and dawn to defecate (yes! owls poop! it’s a good way to spot them) and hunt, and stay on the eggs the rest of the day. The male should hang out nearby in a tree to keep an eye on things and fly in food.

But that’s the wonderful thing about observing animals, human animals, too: there’s the way they’re supposed to behave, and there’s what’s in front of your eyes.

Regardless, they’ve been a bright spot in a winter that was downright grim. If you’d like to see more photos and videos, check out the #coconuttheowl tag on Twitter and Instagram.

You have to be obsessed

“Talent is cheap — you have to be obsessed, otherwise you are going to give up.”
—John Baldessari

This week I finished Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower, which is so prescient it feels like we’re living the prequel. The main character, Lauren, is a young writer who keeps a diary and invents a new religion called “Earthseed” while surviving in an America that has collapsed due to climate change.

At one point Lauren writes:

I’m trying to speak—to write—the truth. I’m trying to be clear. I’m not interested in being fancy, or even original. Clarity and truth will be plenty, if I can only achieve them.

Any time a character writes things down the story in some ways becomes a story about writing and what the act of writing can do for a human being. (I wonder how many people remember that 1984 begins when Winston Smith buys an illegal diary to write in.)

I was interested in Butler’s ideas about writing before I even read any of her work. (I’ve previously blogged about the positive affirmations she wrote in her commonplace books and her method of reading.)

After finishing Parable, I found a couple of her essays collected in Bloodchild and Other Stories, which are worth reading for any artist.

The first is called “Positive Obsession,” and it tells the story of how Butler became a writer. Obsession, she writes, is simply about not being able to stop. “Obsession can be a useful tool if it’s positive obsession.”

She took archery in high school, and saw positive obsession “as a way of aiming yourself, your life, at your chosen target. Decide what you want. Aim high. Go for it.”

There’s a similar emphasis on persistence in the second essay, “Furor Scribendi.” (A mania or rage for writing.)

Forget talent. If you have it, fine. Use it. If you don’t have it, it doesn’t matter. As habit is more dependable than inspiration, continued learning is more dependable than talent.

Persistence, she said, was her most important talent. Sticking with it.

What connects these two pieces, for me, is how much easier persistence is when there’s obsession behind it. (And likewise, discipline is much easier when it’s fueled by desire.)

But obsession, John Baldessari warned us, cannot be willed.

So, in some way, the question to ask yourself isn’t just what you want or need to be doing, but what you can’t stop doing or can’t stop thinking about. That’s your obsession. The thing you cannot will.

Obsession is a living thing. A kind of beast. When you find a positive obsession, an obsession that seems like it can take you somewhere good, you keep feeding it, and you ride the beast until it’s dead.

He could sing the phone book (or an oven manual)

“People say that I could sing the phone book and make it sound good.”
—Edith Piaf

“Elton would say to me, “Why don’t you put out more albums?” I would say, “Why don’t you put out less albums?”
—Billy Joel

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oio83_iHIwg

In this clip from 1997’s An Audience With Elton John, the actor Richard E. Grant asks Elton John if he can create a song out of his oven’s instruction manual. Elton obliges.

This might seem miraculous, but it’s, essentially, exactly how Elton John works in his partnership with Bernie Taupin:

[Taupin] labors for weeks on his horse ranch in Southern California and delivers the lyrics fully formed to Mr. John, who goes into a studio, props the papers on the piano and churns out melodies and harmonies to fit the words at breakneck speed. “It’s kind of spooky,” Mr. John said in an interview. “I get bored if it takes more than 40 minutes.”

John says he barely looks at the lyrics before he goes into the studio to write. He says he likes to go in fresh, and let the lyrics evince melodies and music out of him.

This way of working goes all the way back to their very first days of collaborating, including their first hit, “Your Song”:

“I wrote that song one morning when Elton and I shared an apartment in Northwood Hills just outside of London. And I remember writing it as I was having breakfast. The original lyric had tea-stains on it.”

“[Elton] wrote it the same day. We went into the room where the piano was and just hammered it out.”

In the second volume of Paul Zollo’s wonderful Songwriters on Songwriting, Taupin displays an unreserved awe for his partner’s “borderline genius”:

It’s ridiculous. He has written four songs in a day sometimes. Sometimes he doesn’t even write songs before he goes into the studio. He goes in the studio on the morning that they are going to start recording and writes a couple of songs, and when they come in he starts recording. Go figure.

It’s hilarious to me that Taupin works so hard on his lyrics and John is so casual with them:

I put them all in a folder. And he just goes to the piano, puts the folder up, and sees what catches his eye. He’ll skim through it. I’m sure he looks at titles too. Sometimes he won’t even read through a lyric. He’ll just start. [Laughs] He won’t even understand what the song’s about till probably it’s recorded, and six months later he’ll come up to me and say, “You know, just figured out what that song’s about.”

You could give him the phone book — or an oven manual! — and he’d write you a song.

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