Austin Kleon

You are here: Blog / Archives for Reading


Notes on the art of reading books.

10 good books I read this summer

It was a crummy summer, but we still had books. Here are ten good ones, in the order in which I read them:

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.)

 

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

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 Children’s Machine: Rethinking School in the Age of the Computer
Seymour Papert

In July, I jokingly tweeted the cover of this book with the caption, “Don’t worry about school reopening y’all I’m getting it figured out.” It actually turned out to be a great read, much more about how we learn and play and think than about computers.  Other good books I read about teaching, school, and kids:  Murray Schafer’s Ear Cleaning: Notes for an Experimental Music Course, Alison Gopnik’s The Gardener and The Carpenter, 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 education: We know how it works, we just won’t or can’t do the things that really help children thrive.

 

Intimations
Zadie Smith

A tiny collection of essays written during lockdown, inspired by Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations. By no means essential, nor was it meant to be. (Writing, she says, is primarily “Something To Do.”) Why should we ask writers to only publish long, “important” books, anyways? I think so highly of Smith’s essays, I’ll take whatever I can get. (Another short, lovely book I recommend: Esther Pearl Watson’s Galactic Halo, a collection of her flying saucer paintings along with a mini-memoir of growing up in small town Texas.

 

Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman
Richard Feynman

Half brilliant and half annoying, half illuminating and half cringeworthy. But, in total, what you have is a lively portrait of a curious mind, always turning, always thinking, always impatient with the stale thoughts and habits of human beings. I’d kind of like to cannibalize this book and cut it with the first essay in The Pleasure of Finding Things Out and some other works of his that focus more on learning and teaching.

 

My Private Property
Mary Ruefle

I savored this prose collection, reading it slowly, one or two pieces at a time, early in the morning, with a cup of coffee. Ruefle has really been my patron saint of lockdown. Her short, brilliant books are perfect quarantine reading. I liked this review: “Ruefle can seem like a supernally well-read person who has grown bored with what smartness looks like, and has grown attracted to the other side.” Honestly, grab any title of hers from Wave Books, they’re all worth reading. (Her newest poetry collection, Dunce, was one of my favorite books I read this spring.)

 

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.)

 

The Philosophy of Andy Warhol: From A to B and Back Again
Andy Warhol

What’s interesting to me about this book is that Warhol tipped his hand as far as how emotional and feeling he actually was. (Or wanted us to think he was — like many an artist, you have to take everything he says about himself with a grain of salt.) He famously said he wanted to be a machine, but you realize that’s just a reaction to the exhaustion of being an artist, having to constantly make choices. Commercial art, he said, was easy because people told him what to do. “The hard thing is when you have to dream up the tasteless things to do on your own.” He wanted a computer programmed to be a “boss who could tell me what to do…” (I skipped the “B” parts, FWIW.)

 

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.) Expect this to be up near the top of the best of the year lists, including mine.

 

(Here’s everything good I’ve read so far this year.)

Books with unusual but brilliant structures

The other day I was noodling on this notecard, thinking about how I would go about structuring a book based on a kind of non-linear system in which all the pieces needed to work together, and I asked Twitter and Instagram, “What book do you love that has an unusual but brilliant structure?”

I got hundreds of responses, mostly fiction. (Pamela Colloff noticed this right away and asked for non-fiction recommendations, starting another great thread.) Many weren’t really what I was looking for — lots of people recommended the Choose Your Own Adventure books or Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves or Chris Ware’s Building Stories, which are all brilliant in their own ways, but I was mostly interested in non-fiction that reads like a linear book, but has a structure that is weird but brilliantly maps to the subject matter.

John McPhee’s diagrams

There’s John McPhee, of course, the master, who learned to diagram structure from his English teacher, and shares many of his “inscrutable blueprints” in his book on writing, Draft. No. 4.

A new-to-me book I picked up immediately was Jane Alison’s Meander, Spiral, Explode: Design and Pattern in Narrative.

One of my very favorite writers, Sam Anderson (author of Boom Town), gave his list, which reminded me I still need to read Sei Shonagon’s The Pillow Book (I recently read two other works of Zuihitsu, Essays in Idleness and Hojoki), Anne Carson (Nox and others), and Annie Dillard. (My youngest loved The Monster at the End of This Book.)

Recent non-fiction mentioned that caught my eye: Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns, Lewis Hyde’s A Primer for Forgetting, Sarah M. Broom’s The Yellow House, and Carmen Maria Machado’s In The Dream House.

Fiction mentioned that I’ve been meaning to read for years: Tristram Shandy and The Rings of Saturn.

Old favorites mentioned: Richard McGuire’s Here, Christopher Alexander’s A Pattern Language, Alan Fletcher’s The Art of Looking Sideways, and the fragmented collage-like books of Maggie Nelson (The Argonauts) and Sarah Manguso (Ongoingness.)

One intriguing recommendation: Emerson’s essays, like “Circles,” which the recommender claimed could be read out of order, by paragraphs or sentences. (I’ve been meaning to read more Emerson after my year of Thoreau.)

You can poke through more of the recommendations, here, here, and here.

Happy reading!

10 good books I read this spring

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.)

Sign up for my newsletter for weekly reading recommendations.

If you are having trouble reading…

The stack of books on my wife’s nightstand

If you are having trouble reading right now, here is what works for me:

1. Keep a book at the breakfast table and read it in the morning instead of looking at the news on your phone.

2. Be promiscuous. Read more than one book at a time until one pulls you into monogamy.

3. Quit more books than you finish. Read lots of short books until you work up the concentration for longer ones.

4. Read poetry! First thing in the morning! It’s perfect with a cup of coffee.

5. Read trash! No guilty pleasures!

6.  Read old books! Read old favorites! (Every time you re-read a book you’re reading a new book.)

7. Read to your kids! If you don’t have kids, FaceTime someone else’s kids and read to them! (Optional: Steal books from your kids and read them.)

8. STOP READING BOOKS THAT AREN’T DOING IT FOR YOU. SERIOUSLY. STOP.

9. Try writing a book. It’ll make you want to quit and read instead. (“Read more than you write, live more than you read.”)

10. If you can’t read a book right now give yourself a break and just watch TV.

5 great books about art and motherhood

Happy Mother’s Day. Here are 5 of my favorite books about making art and being a mother:

1. Sarah Ruhl, 100 Essays I Don’t Have Time To Write

Short essays about making art and raising children, and the interesting ways that one influences and provides insight into the other. Ruhl is a playwright and a mother of three and writes beautifully about art’s need for solitude and quiet vs. the constant interruption of mothering:

There were times when it felt as though my children were annihilating me… and finally I came to the thought, All right, then, annihilate me; that other self was a fiction anyhow. And then I could breathe. I could investigate the pauses.

2. Sally Mann, Hold Still: A Memoir with Photographs

Mann is that rare master of both pictures and words, and her memoir shows off that mastery: the visual images are perfectly woven into the text to tell her story. The book covers her long, interesting life and career, but a portion of it reads as a cautionary tale about using your children in your art.

Not only was the distinction between the real children and the images difficult for people, but so also was the distinction between the images and their creator, whom some found immoral.

3. Jenny Offill, Dept. Of Speculation 

A wonderful short novel about art, marriage, and motherhood that you can read in one sitting. The way the text is fragmented replicates the way you think when you’re a new parent.

About the book she has said:

New parents, but especially new mothers like the [main character], have a set of alarms going off in their heads during the early, high stakes period of trying to keep a baby alive, while dealing with the pleasant lull of housebound boredom. The transcendence is undercut by the tedium. I wanted to get that feeling on the page. The solution I came up with was to describe her thoughts and actions in fragments, so that one would always be dislocating the other.

4. Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts

While all these books are in some way about women coming to terms with being both an artist and a mother, there’s the added complexity of Nelson being a queer-mother-artist, and an older one at that:

I’m an old mom. I had nearly four decades to become myself before experimenting with my obliteration.

Another very good (and fragmented) short read with a really smart system of quotation, and an excellent ending.

5. Sylvia Fein, Heidi’s Horse

Fein, a surrealist painter who celebrated her 100th birthday last year with a 70-year retrospective exhibition in Berkeley, took a break in her painting career to write this book and its followup, First Drawings. The book collects her daughter Heidi’s drawings of horses from the age of 2 to 17. (Fein raised her daughter on a horse ranch.)

I don’t know of any other book like this. A weird, remarkable work showing the development of a child’s drawings with a single subject. (More about the book in my post: What pictures of horses can teach us about art.)

* * *

Filed under: parenting

The best distance learning is reading a book

With all the talk of educational technology in this era of social distancing, I am reminded of Neil Postman, who said, “The act of reading a book is the best example of ‘distance learning’ ever invented.”

He put it this way in Building a Bridge to the 18th Century:

To use the term “distance learning” to refer to students and a teacher sending e-mail messages to each other may have some value, but it obscures the fact that the act of reading a book is the best example of distance learning possible, for reading not only triumphs over the limitations of space and co-presence but of time as well.

Crack open a book and you can not only learn from someone who’s several thousand miles away, you can learn from someone who’s several thousand years away.

(And even though I love the convenience of my Kindle, I try not to forget that paper is a wonderful technology.)

5 good books I read this winter


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:

More of my reading years here.

How to read like Rossellini

José Guadalupe Posada

In the latest edition of his new newsletter, Subtle Maneuvers, Mason Currey details filmmaker Roberto Rossellini’s nighttime reading habit:

I don’t sleep much at night. I read in bed, always a number of books at the same time, often six or seven. I find it tiring to concentrate on a single book, to wait for the end… .

While reading, I have the courage to note on the books’ margin the ideas that come to me. Later, before shelving the books, I make up some bibliographic cards. I make signs with different colors so I know what’s most important, less important, what’s complementary, what’s basic, et cetera. And I also write down the thoughts that come to me, impressions absolutely virgin. I reread my notes on the books’ pages and I write them down in notebooks under headings divided by letters A, B, C, D. Then I write ‘human,’ ‘education,’ ‘thievery,’ et cetera. These cards, later on when I need them, will permit me to reconstruct a certain type of person.

The filmmaker claimed he annotated over 9000 books and that his nighttime reading — gathering “an extraordinary amount of information” — gave him the freedom to be improvisational on set during the day.

Rossellini practiced at least 3 of my favorite methods for turning reading into writing:

1. Promiscuous reading, or reading more than one book at a time.

2. Marginalia, or reading with a pencil.

3. Revisiting your notes and copying them for later use.

It occurs to me that I would read a whole Daily Rituals-style book called Reading Rituals, about how great minds read. (Then again, that’s probably what I’m doing with this reading category.)

Towards a fuller picture of the reading life

I’ve been thinking lately about how only sharing the books you’ve finished or the books you recommend is not the full picture of your reading life.

There’s the reading you actually get done, and then there’s the reading you want to do. The books you check out of the library. The books you buy that pile into stacks on your nightstand.

The books you threw across the room!

I always enjoyed how Nick Hornby listed BOOKS READ and BOOKS BOUGHT in his “Stuff I’ve Been Reading” column for The Believer.

(One thing I think Kate Bingaman-Burt’s Daily Drawings do so well is show how purchases can add up to a picture of a person.)

Because there are so many more books I want to point to other than the ones I myself have read, I’m thinking about whether I can steal this read/bought format for the newsletter…

My reading year, 2019

Here are 20 good books I read this year (minus the book I wrote) in roughly the order I read them:

The Labyrinth
Saul Steinberg

First published in 1960. Out of print for years. Now beautifully reissued by NYRB. (Are they my favorite imprint? Maybe.) Incredible, 59-year-old drawings that look absolutely fresh. An American classic.

 

Bowlaway
Elizabeth McCracken

I don’t read as many novels as I probably should, and this is a novel novel. McCracken goes for it, doing in the book what, I think, only a novel can do. And damn, can she write a sentence. So many underlines. (Related post: “The religion of walking.”)

 

Let’s Go (So We Can Get Back)
Jeff Tweedy

I don’t really listen to audiobooks (they don’t fit into my commute-less life), but I got my hands on this one, and used it for company while shoveling snow during our Lake Erie sabbatical exile. I found it warm and smart, with a bunch of good stuff about the creative process and parenting. (Related post: “On solitude and being who you are”)

 

Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book
Walker Percy

Seems like a love-it-or-hate-it book, but I tore through it. One of those books that came at just the right place and just the right time for me. (Related reading: “Walker Percy’s problems of re-entry”)

 

Werner Herzog: A Guide for the Perplexed
Werner Herzog with Paul Cronin

A  500-page interview arranged to cover Herzog’s career in chronological order. This book  took me forever to get through, not because it was a slog, but because it’s so dense with insane stories and poetic insights, I was constantly stopping to underline. (Related reading: “Werner Herzog on writing and reading”)

 

The Library Book
Susan Orlean

I am a former librarian who read this on a flight from Cleveland to Los Angeles, so it was pretty much the perfect book at the perfect time. A real page-turner. Orlean knows what she’s doing. (Another good LA book, not a page-turner, but a page-lingerer: Christoph Niemann’s Hopes and Dreams.)

 

Less
Andrew Sean Greer

How great is it when an acclaimed book turns out to be worthy of the hype?

I laughed all the way through this book and then I cried at the end.

 

How To Do Nothing
Jenny Odell

When I came across the original talk I knew this was going to be a good book, but I liked my advance copy even more than I thought it would, and then I was quite pleased to see what a hit it became this year. A good contrast to Cal Newport’s productivity-focused Digital Minimalism. (A great companion: Rob Walker’s The Art of Noticing. )

 

The Three Robbers
Tomi Ungerer

My 4-year-old got obsessed with this book, and I got obsessed with it and with Ungerer. Another great classic picture book I loved: Edward Gorey’s The West Wing. (Collected in Amphigorey.) And let’s throw in Bruno Munari’s Drawing a Tree, which I loved even more upon re-reading.

 

The Love Bunglers
Jaime Hernandez

It’s taken me a decade or so for Love and Rockets to really click, but this book, along with its followup, Is This How You See Me?, made me fall in love. (I read Tillie Walden’s On A Sunbeam right after this, and it was such a great compliment — the budding master’s technicolor vs. the established master’s black and white.)

 

Essays After Eighty
Donald Hall

“Maybe we’ll soon have a new literary category, Old Adult, to match Young Adult,” wrote John Wilson, in his review of Hall’s posthumous collection of essays, A Carnival of Losses: Notes Nearing Ninety. I’d be so down for that. (See also: Ron Padgett’s Big Cabin.)

 

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. (If you’ve never read him, go ahead and start with True Grit, his masterpiece.) 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.( 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. (My friend Ryan Holiday, who finally got his well-deserved #1 NYTimes bestseller this year with Stillness is the Key, suggested, rightly, I think, that it’s a parenting book in disguise.)

 

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.”

 

The Word Pretty
Elisa Gabbert

I am a sucker for collections of short essays by poets. I was completely new to Gabbert’s work and took a chance on this based on a few mentions by Twitter friends whose taste I trust. Very glad I did and looking forward to reading her next one. (Other very good essay collections I dipped into but for whatever reason got distracted from and didn’t finish: Zadie Smith’s Changing My Mind and Feel Free.)

 

Big Ideas for Curious Minds: An Introduction to Philosophy
The School of Life

One thing I started doing on rough early mornings when I’m trying to wake up is read nonfiction books written for younger readers. (Hey man, it works for Jeopardy champions.) This one was great, and I also loved David Hockney and Martin Gayford’s A History of Pictures for Children, Dr. Seuss’s The Horse Museum, and Caitlin Doughty’s Will My Cat Eat My Eyeballs?

 

Heidi’s Horse
Sylvia Fein

Fein, a surrealist painter who celebrated her 100th birthday this year with a 70-year retrospective exhibition in Berkeley, took a break in her painting career to write this book and its followup, First Drawings. The book collects her daughter Heidi’s drawings of horses from the age of 2 to 17. (Fein raised her daughter on a horse ranch.) I don’t know of any other book like this. A weird, remarkable work showing the development of a child’s drawings with a single subject. (More about the book in my post: What pictures of horses can teach us about art.)

 

The River at Night
Kevin Huizenga

I read so many good comics this year by comics masters at the very top of their game — see Jaime Hernandez above, Eleanor Davis’s The Hard Tomorrow, and Lynda Barry’s Making Comics — but this really felt like Huizenga’s masterpiece. A clever, coherent collection of stories (some old and some new), and a beautifully produced book that shows off his cartooning at its best.

 

God Save Texas: A Journey into the Soul of the Lone Star State
Lawrence Wright

I’ve lived in Texas for over a dozen years now, I’m the father of Native Texans, so it’s time to admit it: Yeah, I’m a Texan. Wright’s book is the perfect read for someone like me: an urban liberal’s look at the good, the bad, and the ugly of our vast state.

* * *

I’ve been posting my favorite reads since 2006. You can read them all here.

Want to read more next year? Here’s my advice.

Recent posts

Follow me elsewhere

This site participates in the Amazon Affiliates program, the proceeds of which keep it free for anyone to read.