We had such a wonderful winter, and then…well, you know. Despite the pains of quarantine, I got a lot of reading done this spring. Here are 10 good books I read, in the order I read them:

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.) [Buy indie]

Dunce
Mary Ruefle

I’m a huge fan of Ruefle’s essay collection, Madness, Rack, and Honey, but it’s taken me a while to fall in love with her poetry. This collection did the trick. I love Ruefle’s 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.) [Buy indie]

Journal of a Solitude
May Sarton

Are you detecting the pattern here? At the beginning of quarantine, the writers who gave me the most comfort were women grappling with art and domesticity. Other diaries I read: Eleanor Coppola’s Notes on a Life and Anne Truitt’s Daybook. The three diaries speak to each other in really interesting ways, and I recommend them all. [Buy indie]

Growing Without Schooling, Vol. One
John Holt

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, from The Idle Parent. [Buy indie.]

Life Among The Savages
Shirley Jackson

Speaking of parenting, 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. Looking forward to reading the sequel, Raising Demons. (I also enjoyed the introduction of Ruth Franklin’s biography of Jackson.) [Buy indie.]

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. [Buy indie.]

The Swallowed Man
Edward Carey

I’ve written about Carey several times on this blog, and his novel, Little, was one of my favorite reads of 2019. He sent me an advance copy of The Swallowed Man, which tells the story of Geppetto’s time in the belly of the whale. (Come to think of it, I owe him a blurb. How about this: “I can’t think of another working author who is so deftly weaving pictures and words into such wondrous and weird tales. I’ll read anything he publishes.” Like Little, this book contains illustrations drawn by the main character, something I’m not sure I’ve seen anybody else do outside of children’s literature. (Somewhat related: John Berger’s Bento’s Sketchbook, an exploration of drawing in which Berger creates what he thinks Spinoza’s lost sketchbooks might’ve been like.)  [Pre-order indie.]

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. [Buy indie.]

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 and Olivia Laing’s Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency.)

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It was a light, lovely winter for me (well, most of it) and I spent it reading at whim.

Here are five books that stand out:

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. [Buy indie]

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. [Buy indie]

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. It’s easy to see why Educated was a hit — it’s written well, it has an Oprah-style arc de triumph, and it confirms the dominant cultural narrative about the importance of formal education. But this book? The whole time I read this book, I was thinking, “Why am I so into this?” I think it’s the way Rooney manages to describe contemporary emotions (ew), but, like Educated,  I also think there’s magic in the pacing and the chunking. Hey man, no need to overthink it: If you’re turning the pages, it’s good. [Buy indie]

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. Definitely picking up her novel Flights soon — loved this excerpt. [Buy indie]

Mystery Train
Greil Marcus

If I had read this book when I was 19, it would probably hold a super high place in my personal canon. The thing that holds me back from outright adoration is my (perhaps unreasonably) low opinion of Elvis. I love the parts about the tension between artist and audience. I will probably go back and try to get through Lipstick Traces again this year. [Buy indie]

It strikes me, looking at this list, that every single one of these books was read on my Kindle. I think this is the first time this has happened and I don’t know how to feel about it. On the one hand, I much prefer reading on paper, with a pencil, but on the other, ebooks are so convenient, they allow me to flit and flirt and read promiscuously.

By the way, here are 5 other good books I read this winter:

• David Carr’s The Night of the Gun
• John O’Connell’s Bowie’s Bookshelf: The Hundred Books that Changed David Bowie’s Life
• Jennifer Keishin Armstrong’s Seinfeldia: How A Show About Nothing Changed Everything
• Alan Jacobs’ Breaking Bread with the Dead (galley)
• Elisa Gabbert’s The Unreality of Memory (galley)

More of my reading years here.

It was a wild summer for the Kleon family, and, unfortunately, I spent a lot of it not reading. But here are 5 good books I did read, in the approximate order I read them:

Educated
Tara Westover

I wanted to see what the fuss was over. The book is about many things, but one of them is the power of journals and diaries to help you cope with trauma and keep the facts of your life straight. (Westover has kept a journal since she was 10. “My journals supplied me with a level of detail I could never have had if I relied on memory alone,” she says. “I recorded meals I’d eaten, conversations I’d overheard, work I’d done for my father in the junkyard or my mother tincturing herbs.”)

Gringos
Charles Portis

When children are going through transitional periods, they’ll pull out old toys, old books, old stuffed animals. I do the same. This summer I re-read all of Portis’s novels, which is somewhat easy to do because there are only five of them. Gringos was the biggest surprise, and maybe the most underrated of all of his books? Such an interesting world and so many great sentences. I would love for another novel of his to turn up, but I also sort of hope he’s just kicking back on a porch somewhere in Arkansas, sipping bourbon, and enjoying his life.

Good Talk
Mira Jacob

Real talk: I was initially turned off by this book, because at a first glance I thought the clip-art drawings and photo backgrounds were out of laziness. (This is, by the way, the trouble with comics: our initial response as readers is an aesthetic one, and if you only read comics you’re aesthetically attracted to, you will miss out.) But no, this is a smart and heartfelt and well-executed book that wouldn’t work the way it does if it was drawn “better.” The book is great evidence for the cartoonist Seth’s equation that comics = poetry + graphic design. (Here’s a good interview about the making of the book.) Other good comic debuts I read this summer: Ebony Flowers’ Hot Comb and Malaka Gharib’s I Was Their American Dream.

Range
David Epstein

This book is both a validation of how I’ve chosen to go about my work and a kick in the pants to not get complacent, stretch out, and go down weird paths. (It’s also, as Ryan Holiday suggested to me, a parenting book in disguise.) I have been planning on writing a “Range for Artists” post, because for every chapter I could think of an example of an artist I love that exemplified the subject, but I just haven’t gotten around to it yet.

America
Andy Warhol

A book of Warhol’s photographs matched with his thoughts about the country. “We all came here from somewhere else, and everybody who wants to live in America and obey the law should be able to come too, and there’s no such thing as being more or less American, just American.”

Need more to read? Here’s the rest of my reading year so far and the past decade or so of my favorite reads.