Austin Kleon

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Notes on the art of reading books.

Ursula K. Le Guin’s translation of the Tao Te Ching

In the introduction to her translation of Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching, Ursula K. Le Guin writes:

The first Tao Te Ching I ever saw was the Paul Carus edition of 1898, bound in yellow clothe stamped with blue and red Chinese designs and characters. It was a venerable object of mystery, which I soon investigated, and found more fascinating inside than out. The book was my father’s; he read in it often. Once I saw him making notes from it and asked what he was doing. He said he was marking which chapters he’d like to have read at his funeral.

A few years ago, when you could actually shop in a bookstore and talk to strangers, an elderly woman walked up to me in a Half Price Books and said she had nothing to read.

“Well, you’re in the right place,” I said.

We got to talking and discovered we both enjoyed poetry. She said a lot of people in her life were dying so she was reading Lao Tzu.

“Lao Tzu?” I said. “I love Lao Tzu.”

We walked together from section to section. I browsed; she talked. At one point she recited some Robert Frost and some Basho:

Eventually we said our goodbyes. I think of this woman now when I pick up the Tao Te Ching, and I wonder how she’s doing.

“It is the most lovable of all the great religious texts,” Le Guin writes. “Funny, keen, kind, modest, indestructibly outrageous, and inexhaustibly refreshing. Of all the deep springs, this is the purest water. To me, it is also the deepest spring.”

Every poem seems to me a subtweet of our crooked world and our lousy, corrupt leaders.

And Le Guin’s footnotes are perfect:

If you read Le Guin after reading this translation, you realize how many lines from her books could’ve been lifted from Lao Tzu.

This sentence from The Left Hand of Darkness, for example:

“To learn which questions are unanswerable, and not to answer them: this skill is most needful in times of stress and darkness.”

Or this one:

“The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next.”

Le Guin’s version of the Tao Te Ching (more excerpts over at Brain Pickings) was a great solace to me for the past four years, so much so that I put it in the recommended reading for Keep Going. And there’s a fairly new reprinting, which means it’s pretty easy to find.

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Every Saturday Friday* I put one of my favorite books on the Bookshelf. To see more of my favorite books, check out my reading years.

* In the interest of preserving my sanity, I’m cutting my daily blogging, and hopefully all my online time, down to Monday-Friday.

David Eagleman’s Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives

David Eagleman’s Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives was published in February 2009. I read it in January 2017. (I called it “good pre-dream reading.”) Now I’m writing about it in February 2021. These dates suggest to me that it is a great wintering book, a collection of possibilities (that word will have more relevance later) in a season in which the possibilities feel quite grim: Death, frozen pipes, snow that is white and terrifying like a blank sheet of paper.

There are two afterlives in this book that I think about often.

The first is from the title story, “Sum,” in which you “relive all your experiences, but this time, with the events re-shuffled into a new order,” and “all the moments which share a quality are grouped together.”  So you sleep for 30 years, sit on the toilet for 5 years, have sex for 7 months, experience pain for 27 hours, etc. That story is a reminder that “a life where episodes are split into tiny swallowable pieces” is a well-designed and endurable one.

The second is the afterlife in “Metamorphosis,” a limbo-esque lobby the dead wait in until every single person on Earth has ceased to remember them. It starts this way: “There are three deaths: the first is when the body ceases to function.  The second is when the body is consigned to the grave.  The third is that moment, sometime in the future, when your name is spoken for the last time.”

I think of these three deaths whenever a loved one dies. Their first and second death has passed, but their third and final death has not, and the absolute earliest it will is at the moment my brain forgets their name. So, until my own first death, I keep them alive. This is easiest for my favorite musicians: Put on their record, and their voice fills the room.

I can’t remember if this blackout poem was inspired by the book or not…

One question that it didn’t even occur to me to ask when I first read the book: What are Eagleman’s actual religious beliefs? From the 2011 New Yorker profile of Eagleman called “The Possibilian”:

Eagleman was brought up as a secular Jew and became an atheist in his teens. Lately, though, he’d taken to calling himself a Possibilian—a denomination of his own invention. Science had taught him to be skeptical of cosmic certainties, he told me. From the unfathomed complexity of brain tissue—“essentially an alien computational material”—to the mystery of dark matter, we know too little about our own minds and the universe around us to insist on strict atheism, he said. “And we know far too much to commit to a particular religious story.” Why not revel in the alternatives? […] “Part of the scientific temperament is this tolerance for holding multiple hypotheses in mind at the same time,” he said. “As Voltaire said, uncertainty is an uncomfortable position. But certainty is an absurd one.”

“I’m not saying here is the answer,” he says. “I’m just celebrating the vastness of our ignorance.” (For more, look to his piece, “Why I am a Possibilian.”)

It’s really of no matter. Sum is like the movie Groundhog Day: it gets at something universal that will be claimed by humans of all walks.

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[PS. The New Yorker profile, which I only read this afternoon, features Eagleman hanging out with one of my heroes, Brian Eno, and hooking drummers up to an EEG monitor while they played. “The question is: do drummers have different brains from the rest of us?” Eno says. “Everyone who has ever worked in a band is sure that they do.” (Eno, an early reader and enthusiast of Sum, wrote some soundscapes to go along with readings, and the composer Max Richter actually turned it into an opera.)]

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Every Saturday I put one of my favorite books on the Bookshelf. To see more of my favorite books, check out my reading years.

Nathaniel Russell’s Fliers

Here’s a delightful book that makes you question what a book is: Nathaniel Russell’s Fliers, which is actually 20 perforated posters that you can tear out and hang up. I love all of Russell’s work (more on Instagram), but especially his fake fliers:

I almost hate to spoil the surprise, but in an extra stroke of brilliance, the book’s dust jacket folds out into a poster of a utility pole:

 

This work hits on all levels for me. It’s funny and it’s punk: It makes you want to make a bunch of fake fliers of your own and post them all over your neighborhood. (In fact, this is actually how my friend the punk artist Winston Smith got his start in San Francisco: by making fake fliers for made-up bands and posting them around town.)

a flyer by my son, Owen

You’ll never look at fliers the same way again. When my son lost a shoe on one of our walks, he made this flyer, and I immediately thought of Russell.

Come to think of it, fake fliers would be a super fun family activity for quarantine! Here’s an episode of The Art Assignment to get you started:

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Every Saturday I put one of my favorite books on the Bookshelf. To see more of my favorite books, check out my reading years.

Five Card Nancy

I finally got around to buying a blank deck of playing cards and making a deck for Five Card Nancy. The instructions for making a deck and playing the game are over on Scott McCloud’s website.

I haven’t actually played by those rules yet. So far I just use the deck almost like Tarot or Oblique Strategies, pulling a single card for fun, or doing a “past, present, future” draw.

Most of those panels were pulled from my beloved copies of the Nancy collections published by Fantagraphics. (So far, only volume one, volume two, and volume three.) These are gorgeous books, and sadly, if I’m not mistaken, out-of-print. Ernie Bushmiller’s strip has given me so much comfort over the years. When my second son was born, it was all I could read — now he absconds to his bunk with them to read before bed.

The old joke is, “it’s easier to read Nancy than to not read it,” but the strip is actually much more artful and sophisticated than you’d think. (For more, see the book How To Read Nancy.)

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Every Saturday I put one of my favorite books on the Bookshelf. To see more of my favorite books, check out my reading years.

David Epstein’s Range

David Epstein’s Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World came out less than 2 years ago, but it already feels like a classic to me, both a validation of how I’ve chosen to go about my life and a kick in the pants to not get complacent, to stretch out, and go down weird paths. It’s also, as Ryan Holiday suggested to me, a great parenting book in disguise.

One way you know if a book is any good is if you are still thinking about it a year after you read it. (Or five years, or a decade, etc. The longer you think about a book the better you know it is.) Another way to know if a book is good is if it seems like every week you read an article that could be a supplementary chapter.

For example: this week when I was reading about Venus and Serena Williams. There was a bit that could’ve been straight out of Range (or maybe David’s first book, The Sports Gene):

One thing Venus talked about that was interesting was how easy it is for professional athletes to pick up other sports. So what they are good at is not the sport itself, but it’s just a way of being in the world. It’s a sense of their own bodies and an ability to manipulate their own bodies and have sort of a visual map in your head of what the different parts are doing. At one point she was talking about doing a benefit with Peyton and Eli Manning. They’d almost never played tennis before and they started out awful, and she said it was amazing to watch them. It was like watching a film. Every stroke they hit was noticeably better than the last. Every time they hit the ball. She said you could almost watch their brains working and by the end of it they were totally competent tennis players.

Here’s James Kochalka basically saying what Williams is saying, only about being creative:

It’s been my experience that if you’re a creative person, and you’re good at one thing, you’re probably good at another thing. If you’re good at drawing, you might be good at writing, too. If you’re good at writing, you might be good at playing music, too. If you’re good at playing music, you might be good at pottery. If you’re good at playing guitar, you might be a good dancer!

In order to create, there’s some little thing you have to let happen inside yourself, of just letting yourself be free. If you can turn that little switch on inside yourself in one medium, you can probably do it in another medium.

This is not exactly a popular way of thinking, but I subscribe to it: there is a “a way of being in the world” or a “way of operating” that you pick up while working in one medium that you can translate to another.

“Everyone needs habits of mind that allow them to dance across disciplines,” Epstein writes.

By the way, when Kochalka talks about that freedom switch that allows you to get over your fear of not being good enough? There’s a passage in Range for that! Researchers stuck jazz musicians inside an MRI scanner while they were improvising, and the researchers said it was almost as if the jazz musicians’ brains were able to turn off some kind of circuit that allows you to criticize yourself.

Here’s another example: this week I came across an article with the title, “The musical score is the worst thing in the history of music.” It quoted producer Mark Fell:

In my opinion, I think the musical score is the worst thing that ever happened in the history of music. I think it’s done more damage to music than any other invention. As a technology, the musical score fundamentally skewed the whole of musical practice in the wrong direction, I think.

This grabbed my interest, because I have an 8-year-old who is a natural musician, but refuses to be taught. I gently nudge him towards taking piano lessons and learning to read music, but he refuses.

Guess what? There’s a section in Range for that!

“It’s strange,” Cecchini told me at the end of one of our hours-long discussions, “that some of the greatest musicians were self-taught or never learned to read music. I’m not saying one way is the best, but now I get a lot of students from schools that are teaching jazz, and they all sound the same. They don’t seem to find their own voice. I think when you’re self-taught you experiment more, trying to find the same sound in different places, you learn how to solve problems.”

I could go on, but instead, here’s a list of (somewhat) random highlights from the book:

  • “The most effective learning looks inefficient; it looks like falling behind.”
  • “Learning is most efficient in the long run when it is really inefficient in the short run.”
  • “Improv masters learn like babies: dive in and imitate and improvise first, learn the formal rules later.”
  • “In offering advice to parents, psychologist Adam Grant noted that creativity may be difficult to nurture, but it is easy to thwart.”
  • “[I] realized that I was not the type of person who wanted to spend my entire life learning one or two things new to the world, but rather the type who wanted constantly to learn things new to me and share them.”
  • “In [Dan] Gilbert’s terms, we are works in progress claiming to be finished…. The precise person you are now is fleeting, just like all the other people you’ve been.”
  • “One sentence of advice: Don’t feel behind.”
  • “Compare yourself to yourself yesterday, not to younger people who aren’t you. Everyone progresses at a different rate, so don’t let anyone else make you feel behind. You probably don’t even know where exactly you’re going, so feeling behind doesn’t help.”

For a while, I was threatening to write a “Range for Artists” post, because for every chapter I could think of an example of an artist I love that exemplified the subject.

I don’t have time for that right now, so this post will have to do.

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Every Saturday I put one of my favorite books on the Bookshelf. To see more of my favorite books, check out my reading years.

Mary Ruefle’s Madness, Rack, and Honey

I wrote about Mary Ruefle’s erasure book A Little White Shadow in the history section of Newspaper Blackout, but I didn’t truly fall in love with her work until I read her collected lectures in Madness, Rack, and Honey in 2013.

As someone who tries, desperately, to write books intentionally, it humbles me to look at the bookshelf and make note of how many of my favorite books were the author’s happy accident.

“I never set out to write this book,” Ruefle says in the introduction. In 1994, she had to deliver lectures to graduate students, and rather than trying to wing it, she wrote them out first, because “writing is my natural act, more natural than speaking.”

She notes that the book becomes more “increasingly fragmentary” as it goes, and David Kirby picked up on this in his NYTimes review:

In many ways, “Madness, Rack, and Honey” reads like a steroid-boosted version of a commonplace book, those thinking persons’ scrapbooks that became popular in early modern Europe and contained quotations from the classics, scraps of conversation, poem fragments, recipes, proverbs and lists of every sort. With all of Ruefle’s borrowings and rephrasings, it’s difficult sometimes to tell exactly who’s talking, which may be the idea. One authority burrows into another, as when the painter Cy Twombly is cited as quoting the poet John Crowe Ransom’s assertion that “the image cannot be dispossessed of a primordial freshness which ideas can never claim.” I believe the rappers call this “sampling.”

I like her idea for a class called “Footnotes”:

In it, the students would read a footnoted edition of a definitive text—I thought it might as well be The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge—and proceed diligently to read every book mentioned in the footnotes (or the books by those authors mentioned) an in turn all those mentioned in the footnotes of the footnoted books, and so on and so on, stopping only when one was led back, by a footnote, to The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge.”

And her connection between drawing and writing:

The greatest lesson in writing I ever had was given to me in an art class. The drawing instructor took a sheet of paper and held up a pencil. She very lightly put the pencil on the piece of paper and applied a little pressure; by bringing her hand a little ways in one direction, she left a mark upon the paper. “That’s all there is to it,” she said, “but it’s a miracle. Once there was nothing, and now there’s a mark.”

Some sentences I underlined in 2013. It is fun to realize how many of these ideas I have internalized — particularly the parts about “breaking bread with the dead”:

  • “if you have any idea for a poem, an exact grid of intent, you are on the wrong path”
  • “dread has the word read inside of it, telling us to read carefully and find the dead, who are also there”
  • “fear is overcome by procedure”
  • “In one sense, reading is a great waste of time. In another sense, it is a great extension of time.”
  • “I began writing because I had made friends with the dead: they had written to me, in their books, about life on earth and I wanted to write back…”
  • “I do not care if I am writing a poem or a letter—it is just making marks on a sheet of paper that delights and envelops me.”
  • “Poets are dead people talking about being alive.”
  • “Insanity is ‘doing the same thing over and over, expecting different results.’ That’s writing poetry, but hey, it’s also getting out of bed every morning.”
  • “For me, there is no difference between writing and drawing.”
  • “When I make contact with a piece of paper without looking up I am happy.”

I tend to love essays written by poets — it’s interesting to me that Ruefle is hesitant about writing prose essays, because they are the thing that led me to her poetry, not the other way around.

As I said, I have since become a huge fan of her work — I love her sense of wonder, her way with images, and her sense of humor. (And her erasures, of course, which she’s as crazy about as I am.) Her last two books, My Private Property and Dunce, were at the top of my 2020 reading list.

Her writing gave me much comfort at the beginning of lockdown and she became my quarantine queen, in a sense — I figured with her penchant for solitude and self-entertainment, if anybody could make it through this it would be her.

I was not disappointed when I googled her name the other day and found out she had spent a good portion of the pandemic mailing poems to Vermonters whose names she found in the phone book.

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Every Saturday weekend I put one of my favorite books on the Bookshelf. To see more of my favorite books, check out my reading years.

Olivia Laing’s The Lonely City

A moving mixture of personal memoir and art writing, Olivia Laing’s The Lonely City looks at the topic of loneliness by weaving her own story of a rough stay in New York with the work and stories of four different NYC artists: Edward Hopper, Andy Warhol, Henry Darger, and David Wojnarowicz.

This is a book you might want to read with a laptop nearby so you can study some of the artworks that come up along the way, even something like Hopper’s Nighthawks, which you’ve probably seen dozens of times, but have you really looked? (Something I never noticed that Laing points out: there’s no visible door to the outside.)

You might also put on this YouTube playlist and pull up this pinboard to get a visual representation of some of the books’ contents:

I read this back in 2016, but I imagine it has a different and maybe even deeper resonance for readers during a pandemic. Not long after finishing the book an acquaintance of mine mentioned that she’d been alone for a couple of weeks recently and sort of forgot what it was like to function in the world, something Laing writes about:

If you are not being touched at all, then speech is the closest contact it is possible to have with another human being. Almost all city-dwellers are daily participants in a complex part-song of voices, sometimes performing the aria but more often the chorus, the call and response, the passing back and forth of verbal small change with near and total strangers. The irony is that when you are engaged in larger and more satisfactory intimacies, these quotidian exchanges go off smoothly, almost unnoticed, unperceived. It is only when there is a paucity of deeper and more personal connection that they develop a disproportionate importance, and with it a disproportionate risk.

This is one of the themes of the book: when you most need intimacy — the opposite of loneliness — not only is it nowhere to be found, but the longer you stay away from it, the less and less you are equipped to bring it about. I would also add that the times you feel like a little disconnection, it’s impossible to get it — there were several times when I was distracted from reading the book by the hollering din of my wife and kids from across the house that I thought, “Gee, a little loneliness — or at least solitude — might be nice.”

Laing quotes from The Philosophy of Andy Warhol:

At the times in my life when I was feeling the most gregarious and looking for bosom friendships, I couldn’t find any takers so that exactly when I was alone was when I felt the most like not being alone. The moment I decided I’d rather be alone and not have anyone telling me their problems, everybody I’d never even seen before in my life started running after me…. As soon as I became a loner in my own mind, that’s when I got what you might call a ‘following.’

In “Open House,” off Songs for Drella, Lou Reed sings of Warhol, “I like lots of people around me… but don’t kiss hello and please don’t touch.” Laing writes of Warhol’s use of machines to distance himself from too much intimate contact — stick a tape recorder or a camera in between you and the person you’re interacting with, and it serves as a kind of filter:

Collage comes up a lot in the book — gluing broken or different things together — and it turns out that some of Henry Darger’s process wasn’t all that different from Warhol’s:

[Darger] started with found images, sometimes backing them on card or doctoring them in subtle ways, especially by painting over them, adding hats or costumes, or simply piercing the eyes. Next, he progressed to collages, cutting images out of newspapers and magazines and pasting them into increasingly complex composites. The problem with this technique was that each component image could only be used once, meaning that he had to find more and more raw materials, either at the hospital or by going through the trash. It was wasteful of resources, and also frustrating, having to surrender a favoured image, to commit to just one picture, just one scenario.

This is where tracing came in. With tracing, he could liberate a figure or object from its past context and reuse it dozens if not hundreds of time, inserting it by way of carbon paper into a diversity of scenes. I t was economical, a thrifty process, and it also let him magically posess the image in a way that scissors didn’t, transferring it first on to tracing paper and then again through the blue sheets of carbon into the painting proper. One of his favourites was a doleful little girl holding a bucket, one finger in her mouth. Once you’ve spotted her, she crops up over and again…

I knew nothing at all about David Wojnarowicz when I first read the book. His story, and the story of how AIDS basically decimated a whole NYC subculture in the 80s and 90s, was the one I found most moving in the book. (Laing quotes a lot from his memoir, Close To The Knives, and later wrote a very moving piece about his work in Funny Weather, also putting his face on the cover.)

So, other than art, how does one combat loneliness? What types of connection should we look for? In his great review, Dwight Garner quoted Laing on checking her Twitter feed (she quit Twitter a few years ago, but her Instagram is lovely):

“It was the first thing I looked at and the last, this descending scroll from mostly strangers, institutions, friends, this ephemeral community in which I was a disembodied and inconstant presence. Picking through the litany, the domestic and the civic: lens solution, book cover, news of a death, protest picture, art opening, joke about Derrida, refugees in the forests of Macedonia, hashtag shame, hashtag lazy, climate change, lost scarf, joke about Daleks: a stream of information, sentiment and opinion that some days, most days maybe, received more attention than anything actual in my life.”

Sometimes the data stream makes her feel joyous. “At other times, though, the whole thing seemed insane, a trading-off of time against nothing tangible at all: a yellow star, a magic bean, a simulacrum of intimacy.” Civic as well as personal space has been circumscribed. Ms. Laing describes Manhattan cafes “populated almost exclusively by people gazing into the glowing clamshells of their laptops.”

It’s interesting, looking back at my notes, the few things that I took here and there for Keep Going. For example, this quote about walking from Greta Garbo, taken out of its rather dark context (Garbo was stalked and photographed by a paparazzo):

“I would rather be outside walking that to sit inside a theater and watch a picture moving. Walking is my greatest pleasure.” And again: “Often I just go where the man in front of me is going. I couldn’t survive here if I didn’t walk. I couldn’t be 24 hours in this apartment. I get out and look at the human beings.”

Laing herself sums it up: “What matters is kindness; what matters is solidarity. What matters is staying alert, staying open…”

There’s so much good stuff in the book, I can’t begin to quote it all, or explain how it all weaves together. Here are my little brick notes I took while reading:

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Every Saturday I put one of my favorite books on the Bookshelf. To see more of my favorite books, check out my reading years.

Nobody to tell you what not to read

A poster for the ALA’s Banned Books Week, 2013 (I did not make this, btw)

Last month the Wall Street Journal reported that a school in Massachusetts has banned teaching The Odyssey and other “classics.” My friend Alan Jacobs, who wrote a whole book about the importance of connecting to the past through old books (but not a defense of the classics), wrote:

My take on this is simple: It is better for a good book not to be taught at all than be taught by the people quoted in that article. Yes! — do, please, refuse to teach Shakespeare, Homer, Hawthorne, whoever. Wag your admonitory finger at them. Let them be cast aside, let them be scorned and mocked. Let them be samizdat. Let them be forbidden fruit.

They will find their readers. They always have — long, long before anyone thought to teach them in schools — and they always will.

I have this romantic vision of some young, unknown artist, somewhere, either now or in the future, binging on the forbidden fruits of our past — all the taboo books and movies you’re not supposed to read or watch or talk about because they’re not appropriate or correct or they were made by the wrong people  — and stealing all the right moves from them, the stuff that other young artists won’t get exposed to because they don’t teach it in school or put it on reading lists, and mashing those good bits all together into something new that blows our minds. This artist might not even do it intentionally, but rather, out of ignorance — because they don’t know any “better,” and they don’t have anybody telling them what’s worthy of their attention. I don’t know where they’re supposed to find these materials — hopefully in a library — but maybe they’ll discover them in a trash heap like Wall-E.

It’s happened before. Ever since reading his short stories last October, I have thought a lot about Ray Bradbury, who didn’t have anybody telling him what not to read:

Bradbury never went to college — that’s one reason why he was so original. He was not indoctrinated in the mainstream assumption of the superiority of the realist mode. He educated himself. He read the books that he wanted to — from masterpieces to junk. Then he began to write children’s literature, which is to say, pulp science fiction and fantasy. But he mixed in elements from the realist tradition.

Then something amazing happened. In a 10-year period, Bradbury wrote seven books that changed both American literature and popular culture. They were mostly collections of short stories. Only two were true novels. In these books, for the first time in American literature, an author brought the subtlety and psychological insight of literary fiction into science fiction without losing the genre’s imaginative zest. Bradbury also crafted a particular tone, a mix of bitterness and sweetness that the genre had never seen before.

I’m thinking, too, of someone like Patricia Lockwood, one of the more original voices out there, who never went to college.

I have long felt that your own education is as much about the order in which you come into contact with things as anything else:

…it’s not just the holes, but the order you fill them in. For instance, if you read the canon straight through, from Homer to McCarthy (or whoever), how original would the connections in your mind be? Better to start with one author you love, who speaks to you, and move in every direction, backwards, forwards, sideways…the juxtapositions you see and the connections you make in your brain will be more unique.

For example: Did you know that Herman Melville didn’t read Shakespeare until he was 30 years old? That’s why we have Moby-Dick.

And now we try to teach it to 15-year-olds…

Charles Portis’s True Grit

my wife got me this OG copy for Christmas

“I didn’t know what I was doing. I was like a man fighting bees.” Charles Portis is the only novelist whose books I’ve read twice. (He only wrote five of them, so that helps.) True Grit is the most-perfect of his novels, a lean 215-page tale of a girl seeking revenge on the man who killed her father. Like all of Portis’s books, it is funny and absolutely packed with great sentences. No other fiction has given me so much comfort in the past few years. I plan on re-reading Portis until I’m as dead as Tom Chaney.

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Every Saturday I put one of my favorite books on the Bookshelf. To see more favorite books, check out my reading years.

20 great books I read in 2020

This reading year started out strong, somehow got even stronger during the early spring days of lockdown, peaked in the summer, and then was obliterated by election season. (It has yet to fully recover.)

Here are 20 books I loved, in the order I read them:

A Little History of the World 
E.H. Gombrich

Gombrich is probably best known for his art history survey, The Story of Art, but he wrote this book before, in pre-Nazi Germany. When a textbook publisher hired him to translate a history book for kids, he thought it was so bad he could write a better one himself. So he read all day and wrote a chapter each night until the book was done. I love the way he starts and begins the book with visual metaphors to help kids picture history.

 

Boom Town
Sam Anderson

Sam is one of my favorite working writers, but I didn’t really care much about Oklahoma City or basketball when I picked it up. And yet, I loved this book. While reading it I was like, “Is this as good as I think it is or is Sam nuts in the same way I am nuts or have I been driven nuts by reading it?” One thing I cannot get enough of is the sense when you’re reading a book that the author had a blast writing it — that they let themselves get carried away and went for the ride and wrangled the thing in just the right way so you could strap in, too.

 

Normal People
Sally Rooney

Every year I try to read a bestseller that everybody’s talking about. Last year it was Educated, this year it was Normal People. I got completely sucked into it, much like I did the mini-series. The whole time I read this book, I was thinking, “Why am I so into this?” (Because it’s a good love story, dummy.) By the way: the thing that unites bestsellers? They are compulsively readable — you can’t not turn the pages.

 

Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead
Olga Tokarczuk

Combination detective story and fairy tale with a huge dose of astrology  and William Blake thrown in. (It gets its title from Proverbs of Hell.)

A great winter’s tale.

 

A Love Letter To Texas Women
Sarah Bird

A lovely, slim book about Texas and the women who live here. I love her scenes of day-dreaming while wandering the aisles of HEB and how she writes about “neighboring,” the quality she most admires in Texas women, the “bone-deep instinct to be friendly to anyone who might cross one’s path.” (Rooted in the loneliness and struggle to survive in an often hostile frontier.)

 

My Private Property & Dunce
Mary Ruefle

Ruefle has really been my patron saint of lockdown. I love her sense of wonder, her way with images, and her sense of humor. (And her erasures, of course, which she’s as crazy about as I am.) I’m a huge fan of her essay collection, Madness, Rack, and Honey and I savored My Private Property slowly, one or two pieces at a time, early in the morning, with a cup of coffee. It took me a while to fall in love with her poetry, but Dunce did the trick. Her short, brilliant books are perfect quarantine reading. Get any title of hers from Wave Books, they’re all worth it.)

 

Growing Without Schooling, Vol. One

John Holt started his newsletter in 1977, “about ways in which people, young or old, can learn and do things, acquire skills, and find interesting and useful work, without having to go through the process of schooling.” I read an issue every day, tweeting out my favorite bit. A remarkable countercultural document of parents trying to figure out how to help their children learn from home at a time when homeschooling was, in many states, illegal. (Read my blog post about it.)

 

How To Be Idle: A Loafer’s Manifesto
Tom Hodgkinson

We’ve had Hodgkinson’s manifesto hanging on the fridge for years now, but I’d never bothered to read this. Tons of references to some of my favorite books, like Robert Louis Stevenson’s An Apology for Idlers and Lin Yutang’s The Importance of Living. I also enjoyed Hodgkinson’s book about parenting, The Idle Parent.

 

Life Among The Savages
Shirley Jackson

I’d read both of Shirley Jackson’s most famous novels, The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle, but I was not ready for how much I loved her book about motherhood, Life Among The Savages. It was so funny I would stop and read excerpts out loud to my wife until she read it, too. The writers who gave me the most comfort in early quarantine were women grappling with art and domesticity — May Sarton’s Journal of a Solitude, Eleanor Coppola’s Notes on a Life, and Anne Truitt’s Daybook — but none of their books made me laugh.

 

The Annotated Alice
Lewis Carroll

This books collects Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through The Looking-Glass, along with excised chapters, alternate illustrations (thought Tenniel’s are, in my opinion, unbeatable), and other ephemera. The stories are worth reading on their own, but the annotations give you a good context for what Carroll was doing.

 

How Buildings Learn
Stewart Brand

My wife read this in architecture school, and we’ve had this on our bookshelf for over a decade now. I’ve gotten a lot of it through osmosis, but I figured since I was working on these house collages, now was the right time to read it. So good! Like Christopher Alexander’s A Pattern Language, its lessons apply far beyond architecture. I think designers, in particular, would benefit greatly from reading it. Maybe my favorite book of the spring.

 

Tools for Conviviality
Ivan Illich

I picked this up so I could participate in the book discussion going on at The Convivial Society. (I read his book Deschooling Society years ago and it made a big impact.) Illich’s books are short, but they’re so dense with ideas, it can be slow going. Published in 1973, more relevant than ever.  (Other great books I read that addressed art and social issues: Audre Lorde’s Sister Outsider, Olivia Laing’s Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency, Greil Marcus’s Mystery Train, and John Berger’s Bento’s Sketchbook.)

 

Essays in Idleness and Hojoki
Kenko and Chomei

Two wonderful works of the Zuihitsu genre — “consisting of loosely connected personal essays and fragmented ideas that typically respond to the author’s surroundings“ — both read at my kitchen table. Somehow, I haven’t yet been able to get into the other classic of the genre, Sei Shonagon’s The Pillow Book, but I can see revisiting these two every couple of years.

 

The World of Yesterday
Stefan Zweig

“The greatest curse brought down on us by technology is that it prevents us from escaping the present even for a brief time. Previous generations could retreat into solitude and seclusion when disaster struck; it was our fate to be aware of everything catastrophic happening everywhere in the world at the hour and the second when it happened.” Zweig wrote that in 1942, and he sent the manuscript off to his publisher before committing suicide shortly after. If you can get through this book, you won’t forget it. I’m also a big fan of Zweig’s short biography of Montaigne. (For more reading on technology and disaster, see Elisa Gabbert’s The Unreality of Memory.)

 

The Dyer’s Hand and Other Essays 
W.H. Auden

I was brought to this book by two friends who also published great books this year: Alan Jacobs (Breaking Bread with the Dead) and Maria Konnikova (The Biggest Bluff). In his essay about Iago, Auden makes this life-changing distinction: Instead of asking yourself, “What can I know?” ask yourself, “What, at this moment, am I meant to know?” I wore down my pencil underlining this book. Like many collections by poets, the sentences sing, and can be savored on their own. Here’s another: “Some writers confuse authenticity, which they ought always to aim at, with originality, which they should never bother about.” A book I’ll be returning to often.

 

The Gardener and the Carpenter
Alison Gopnik

I’m in love with gardening as a metaphor for creative work and raising kids, but I’m not in love with the second half of Gopnik’s metaphor. Based on my (admittedly limited) knowledge of carpentry, it is a handcraft that requires selecting the right wood for the job and working with the grain, not against it, etc. I’m thinking, for example, of Pinocchio, which literally starts out with a talking log, and is about the perils of trying to “shape” materials into something they’re not. (For a great take on the parenting side of the Pinocchio story, see Edward Carey’s The Swallowed Man.) A factory would seem to be more the opposite of a garden, but that quibble aside, I think this book is worth it just for Gopnik’s explanation of why she’s against parenting as a verb.

Other good books I read about education: Richard Feynman’s Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman, Seymour Papert’s The Children’s Machine,  Murray Schafer’s Ear Cleaning: Notes for an Experimental Music Course, Kenneth Koch’s Wishes, Lies, and Dreams: Teaching Children to Write Poetry, and bell hook’s Teaching To Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom.

“One must never get tired of reiterating the obvious,” Papert wrote, and it’s true of so many great books about educating children: We know how it works best, we just won’t or can’t do the things that really help children thrive.

 

Everything She Touched: The Life of Ruth Asawa
Marilyn Chase

I can’t remember the last time I was so inspired by an artist’s biography. “I hold no hostilities for what happened; I blame no one. Sometimes good comes through adversity. I would not be who I am today had it not been for the internment, and I like who I am.”  How does an artist go through so much and still work so hard and give so much without any hint of bitterness? How in the world did she make such great work and raise six kids? (Answer to that one: very little sleep.) Other good artist’s (auto)biographies I read: Esther Pearl Watson’s Galactic Halo and Andy Warhol’s The Philosophy of Andy Warhol: From A to B and Back Again.

 

Caste: The Origins of our Discontents
Isabel Wilkerson

I picked this up after critic Dwight Garner called it “an instant American classic,” and it gripped me immediately. Amazing read. (Her previous book, The Warmth of Other Suns, was recommended several times as a book with an unusual but brilliant structure.) I would expect this to be at the top of any 2020 reading list. I keep thinking about her metaphor of America as an old house — problems lurk everywhere, and the work is never done.  (Fixer-upper or a tear-down?)

 

The Illustrated Man
Ray Bradbury

This October, I read a Ray Bradbury story every night before bed, many of them from The October Country, which is also excellent. I’d never read any of Bradbury’s short stories. It struck me how often manages to jam more ideas into a short story than most contemporary writers do in one novel.

A few years ago I had a reading-life-changing conversation with a good friend of mine, a fiction writer, who said, “Everything’s good now, but nothing’s that interesting.” He explained: Much of contemporary fiction is well-written on a craft level. The writers have been to MFA programs, they’ve been through dozens of workshops, etc. But how many actually have something to say? Bradbury had so much to say he seemed to be bursting. I shudder to think what a workshop would do with one his stories…

 

The Comedy of Survival
Joseph Meeker

One of the most intriguing and helpful books I’ve read in a decade. Put simply: Meeker advocates for a playful, comic approach to dealing with our contemporary disasters. It’s interesting how well the comic vs. tragic mode maps to Gopnik’s gardener and carpenter. A memoir that embodies much of what Meeker talks about is Ernó Rubik Cubed: The Puzzle of Us All. (Rubik is the creator of my quarantine hobby.)

* * *

Ok, y’all. I hope this list inspires you to read widely and adventurously, but more importantly, to read what you want to read. Life is short and time is precious, and any book that doesn’t have you turning the pages is not the book for you right now.

Having trouble reading? Here’s what works for me.

If you liked this list, I’ve been posting my favorite reads since 2006. You can read them all here.

If you’re lucky enough to have one, please buy these books at your local bookstore.

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