I’ve been in a funk lately, and I’m dying for a good book to read. I don’t care if it’s a comic book, fiction, non-fiction, or a religious text. It just has to be a book that swings for the fences. A book that won’t let me put it down. A book that smacks me around and makes me want to live.
Leave me a comment if you can fill this tall order, please.
Or just tell me your favorite book.
Feed me some ideas.
The Chicago Reader has an article on the amazing, enduring Anders Nilsen:
…just when doors started to open for Nilsen, he entered the most painful period of his life. Two years ago, at the age of 37, [his fiancee Cheryl] Weaver died after the sudden, devastating onset of Hodgkin’s disease. Afterward Nilsen buried himself in his work, creating two raw and intimate books dealing with her final days and his struggle to carry on without her, Don’t Go Where I Can’t Follow and The End. He was mourning, and he was doing it with more people paying attention to him than ever had before.
I buy everything of Nilsen’s I can get my hands on — his work makes me feel like everything I’ve done up until this point is silly, and it makes me want to go deeper, think bigger, work harder. I can’t recommend Don’t Go Where I Can’t Follow enough.
One of my favorite writers who drew on another writer who drew:
TROUT: You ever meet anybody who was really smart?
KV: Only one: Saul Steinberg, the graphic artist who’s dead now. Everybody I know is dead now, present company excepted. I could ask Saul anything, and six seconds would pass, and then he would give me a perfect answer. He growled a perfect answer. He was born in Rumania, and, according to him, he was born into a house where “the geese peeked in the windows.”
TROUT: Like what kind of questions?
KV: I said, “Saul, what should I think about Picasso?” Six seconds went by, and then he growled, “God put him on Earth to show us what it’s like to be really rich.” I said, “Saul, I’m a novelist, and many of my friends are novelists, but I can’t help feeling that some of them are in a very different business from mine, even though I like their books a lot. What would make me feel that way?” Six seconds went by, and then he growled, “It is very simple: There are two kinds of artists, and one is not superior to the other. But one kind responds to the history of his or her art so far, and the other responds to life itself.”
I said, “Saul, are you gifted?” Six seconds went by, and then he growled, “No. But what we respond to in any work of art is the artist’s struggle against his or her limitations.’
Windsor McCay on cartooning:
“Start drawing and do not stop – draw everything you see, no matter how badly…Every drawing you make is better than the one you made before. Don’t take yourself seriously—nor your drawing. The drawing you think is good to-day may turn out to-morrow to be so badly done you will be ashamed of yourself for showing it yesterday. You should never be satisfied….WORK! WORK! That’s all there is to cartooning.”
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