Austin Kleon

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Notes on the art of reading books.

David Epstein’s Range

My November pick for our Read Like an Artist book club is David Epstein’s Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World. To get the book in time to join our discussion next month, sign up now.

Here’s my intro:

“A jack of all trades is a master of none, but oftentimes better than a master of one.” What does it say about our culture that we’ve hacked the ending off of that famous phrase? John Steinbeck said people don’t want advice, they want corroboration, and maybe that’s why I love this book so much: it’s both a validation of how I’ve chosen to go about my life and career and a kick in the pants to stay true to my instincts, to not get complacent, to stretch out, and go down weird paths…

Learn more about David and read what I’ve previously written about the book.

To join our discussion, sign up for the club!

An act of perpetual self-authorization

“Nothing in your education has taught you that what you notice is important,” writes Verlyn Klinkenborg in Several Short Sentences About Writing.

But everything you notice is important.
Let me say that a different way:
If you notice something, it’s because it’s important.
But what you notice depends on what you allow yourself to notice,
And that depends on what you feel authorized, permitted to notice
In a world where we’re trained to disregard our perceptions.

Who’s going to give you the authority to feel that what you notice is important?
It will have to be you.
The authority you feel has a great deal to do with how you write, and what you write,
With your ability to pay attention to the shape and meaning of your own thoughts
And the value of your own perceptions.

Being a writer is an act of perpetual self-authorization.
No matter who you are.
Only you can authorize yourself….
No one else can authorize you.
No one.

“This doesn’t happen overnight,” he writes. So how does one begin?

Start by learning to recognize what interests you.
Most people have been taught that what they notice doesn’t matter,
So they never learn how to notice,
Not even what interests them.
Or they assume that the world has been completely pre-noticed,
Already sifted and sorted and categorized
By everyone else, by people with real authority.
And so they write about pre-authorized subjects in pre-authorized language.

I have copied this passage out several times now, because it’s one of the best things I’ve ever read about giving yourself permission to write, to draw, to do anything creative.

Here is a nice, long interview with Klinkenborg in which he discusses the book’s origin and his teaching.

“What I do now is essentially help students escape from their education,” he says.

They’re taught that what they notice is not important. That the things they pay attention to really don’t matter, because they’re going to be taught how to handle what other people notice, what other people have written, what other people would have said. Well, what if you say to a student, “No actually, what you notice is important and it’s important because you noticed it.” What if you pay attention to the pattern of the way you notice the world around you? What if you pay attention to the perceptions that you have and the character of them, and trust their validity?

I cannot recommend the book enough. One of my favorite reads of the year.

10 good books I read this summer

Here are 10 books that helped me through the long summer, listed in the order I read them:

In a Narrow Grave: Essays on Texas
Larry McMurtry

“Let those who are free of Texas enjoy their freedom.” McMurtry’s first book of essays, published in 1968, after his novel, The Last Picture Show. Belongs on the shelf next to Wright’s God Save Texas and other great books about this insane state I happen to live in. (Related reading: The Pirate Gardener.)

 

Smile: The Story of a Face
Sarah Ruhl

“Imperfection is a portal. Whereas perfection and symmetry create distance… imperfection and the messy particular had the power to open the heart.” I loved Ruhl’s 100 Essays I Don’t Have Time To Write, so I was delighted to read an advance copy of her memoir, which comes out next month. A playwright, McArthur “Genius,” and mother of 3, she writes beautifully about the intertwining of her art and everyday life.

 

Everything Now: Lessons from the City-State of Los Angeles
Rosecrans Baldwin

“Less of a city than a country. Less of a community than a climate. Less of a metropolis than an eighty-eight-city nation-state.” I picked this up because I am fascinated by all things Los Angeles. (I try to get out there to see my friends at least once a year, but it’s been over two years since I’ve seen the Pacific!) LA is one of those cities that everybody has an image of, but I really had to have it explained to me before I could get my head around it…

 

Cyclopedia Exotica
Aminder Dhaliwal

As an almost-lifelong four-eyes, I love thinking about vision and I love comic stories that take full advantage of the medium, so Dhaliwal’s book about a world in which Cyclopes are a minority group was right up my alley. “I remember saying to a friend, I want to do a book on microaggressions, but that’s, like, so old. Is it even worth doing?” Dhaliwal said in this profile. Lucky for us, she kept going.

 

Several Short Sentences About Writing
Verlyn Klinkenborg

“Being a writer is an act of perpetual self-authorization,” Klinkenborg writes. “Who’s going to give you the authority to feel that what you notice is important? It will have to be you.” This is simply one of the best books about writing I’ve ever read. Up there with Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird and other classics. (Related reading: “The most important thing you do.”)

 

Walkman
Michael Robbins

Great cover. I read this poetry collection one poem at a time, one poem per meal:

“I wish I had a shed out back…
I don’t mean
some romantic Unabomber
shit, just a shed.”

Big same!

 

Prince and the Parade and Sign O’ The Times Era Studio Sessions: 1985 and 1986
Duane Tudahl

I am a recording nerd who grew up obsessing over books about The Beatles’ recording sessions, so I tore through the official the Prince archivist’s second volume chronicling the Purple One’s unbelievable output at what was arguably the height of his powers. (Read along with this Spotify playlist!) Tudahl’s volume about the Purple Rain sessions inspired another playlist and made my favorite reads of 2018. I will read as many of these as he puts together.

 

Seek You: A Journey Through American Loneliness
Kristen Radtke

These can be lonely times, and this was the right book at the right time for me. Somewhat unclassifiable — my favorite kind of book! —  it’s not a traditional comic in panels, but more a kind of illustrated nonfiction essay. Made me want to re-read Olivia Laing’s The Lonely City and pick up Sherry Turkle’s Alone Together. I’m now a big fan of Radtke’s work, and I look forward to reading her first book, Imagine Wanting Only This.

 

Jess: O! Tricky Cad and Other Jessoterica

I’d known about Jess’s work for years, but never really spent much time getting to know it in detail. This is a gorgeously-produced collection of the San Francisco collage artist’s work — the fold-out poster and extra booklet reminded me of some of Chris Ware’s book design. Other books about the artist I picked up: Jess: To and From the Printed Page and An Opening of the Field: Jess, Robert Duncan, and Their Circle.

 

Art & Physics: Parallel Visions in Space, Time, and Light
Leonard Shlain

Alain de Botton once said that the least interesting thing about religion is whether it’s true or not, and I feel that way about Shlain’s thesis that great artists anticipated leaps in physics — sometimes by several centuries. What is thrilling to me as a reader is to watch a sharp mind work through the history of these two fields and juxtapose their developments. (There’s a nice afterword in new editions about how the surgeon came to be a writer.)

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Read more of my favorite books and sign up for my newsletter for weekly recommendations.

Sally Mann’s Hold Still

My October pick for our Read Like an Artist book club is Sally Mann’s Hold Still. To get the book in time to join our discussion next month, sign up now.

Here’s my intro:

Sally 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. (While best known for her photography, Mann holds a BA in literature and an MA in creative writing.) This book covers her long, interesting life and career, including her friendship with the painter Cy Twombly (there’s a surprising scene of him people-watching outside of a Walmart) and her struggle to make art while being a mother to three children. It’s not often that an artist can tell their own story in prose that sings, and that’s what makes this book so special to me.

This book was on my list of 5 great books about art and motherhood, and a portion of the book also 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…

On this subject, the story has a sad afterword, which I will leave readers to discover for themselves.

To join our discussion, sign up for the club!

Rob Walker’s The Art of Noticing

My September pick for our Read Like an Artist book club is Rob Walker’s The Art of Noticing. To get the book in time to join our discussion next month, sign up now.

Here’s my intro:

The quickest way to improve your creative life is to learn to pay better attention to your everyday world. I love Rob Walker’s mind and the marvelous newsletter he has spun out from this volume. It might be a risky and unconventional choice for a book club because there is no real narrative here—it’s a smorgasbord of 131 exercises and inspirational quotes designed to get you looking and listening and exploring and discovering the extraordinary in the ordinary life around you—but I thought this would be the perfect read to dip in and out of throughout September, a month when we all get busy again after the lull of summer. I hope we can share our favorite quotes and exercises and all the curious things that we notice…

To join our discussion, sign up for the club!

Tamara Shopsin’s Arbitrary Stupid Goal

My August pick for our Read Like an Artist book club is Tamara Shopsin’s Arbitrary Stupid Goal. To get the book in time to join our discussion next month, sign up now.

Here’s my intro:

This is a wonderful illustrated memoir of writer and illustrator Tamara Shopsin’s childhood in 1970s Greenwich Village, growing up with her brothers and sisters in their parents’ grocery store and restaurant, Shopsin’s. The “arbitrary stupid goal” of the title is a bit of the unconventional practice and wisdom of her father (the legendary Kenny Shopsin), which is sprinkled throughout the book. Like almost all memoirs by artists, it is partly the story of how the author became an artist. I love the way this book is written with pictures and words. Reading a Shopsin book gives me the same jolt I get when I read something like Kurt Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions: “I didn’t know a book could do this!”

Shopsin is quite simply one of my favorite creative people around, and I’ve written about her work several times on this blog. Really excited for people to fall in love with this book, and I’m even more excited for her first novel, LaserWriter II, which comes out in October.

To join our discussion, sign up for the club!

10 good books I read this spring

Here are 10 books that helped me through the spring, listed in the order I read them:

Revolution in the Head: The Beatles’ Records and the Sixties
Ian MacDonald

Have you heard of the Beatles? They were pretty good. This is probably the best book about the band I’ve ever read. I love how saucy MacDonald gets: of “A Day in the Life,” arguably the high point of their achievement, he writes, “More nonsense has been written about this recording than anything else The Beatles produced.” Of Paul’s granny music: “If any single recording shows why The Beatles broke up, it is MAXWELL’S SILVER HAMMER.” A highlight for me is when MacDonald points out that how many of the big British bands of the sixties were made up of kids who went to art school. (Beatles, Stones, Kinks, Who, etc.) You could blow up the chronology stuffed in the back and make another book out of it.

 

The Writer’s Map: An Atlas of Imaginary Lands
edited by Huw Lewis-Jones

A downright gorgeous book. I’ve always been a bit obsessed with maps and even started my own collection of imaginary maps way back in 2008. If I’d have owned this book when I was doing my undergrad thesis, who knows, maybe I’d be a novelist? The Writer’s Map would pair well with Peter Turchi’s book, Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer.

 

The Order of Time
Carlo Rovelli

Beautifully written — which really means it was beautifully translated from the Italian by husband/wife team Simon Carnell and Erica Segre. I found out while writing this post that Segre died unexpectedly this year. Rovelli said, “They not only captured perfectly my meaning but they could completely render the feeling and sound of my Italian — and improve it, because their English language is remarkably beautiful and rich.” (I also read the couple’s translation of Rovelli’s Seven Brief Lessons on Physics.)

 

The Sabbath
Abraham Joshua Heschel

Another book about time, specifically, an exploration of Judaism as a religion obsessed with the architecture of time. As the rabbi explains, each Sabbath is a kind of a mini-eternity — something to look forward to. I picked this up after reading Beth Pickens’ Make Your Art No Matter What, and the two books together influenced me to rethink how I go about my weekends.

 

Emerson: The Mind on Fire
Robert D. Richardson

The great reading project of my spring was reading Richardson’s trilogy of biographies: Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind (so good which was so good Annie Dillard wrote him a fan letter and they wound up getting married), Emerson: The Mind on Fire (which I swear reads in spots like he was showing off for his new partner), and William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism. (I also read his short biography of his mentor, the biographer Walter Jackson Bate.) Emerson is my favorite of the three and set me on a path of rethinking my indexing and filing systems. If you’re new to Richardson’s work, I might start with First We Read, Then We Write: Emerson on the Creative Process.

 

The Not So Big House: A Blueprint for the Way We Really Live
Sarah Susanka with Kira Obolensky

This is a book I found while picking through my wife’s shelf of architecture books. It was partly inspired by two of my all-time favorite books — How Buildings Learn and A Pattern Language — and it has a very simple but strong premise: when it comes to houses, the quality of the space is more important than the quantity of the square footage. (Our family lives in a small 1949 bungalow, so the idea obviously appeals.) Before you buy a new house or remodel, give it a read.

 

Conversations of Goethe
Johann Peter Eckermann

This was a favorite book of Emerson and some of the other transcendentalists. Eckermann was 31 when he met the 74-year-old Goethe, and this book is a record of their conversations over nine years. Like many old books, this book is a great reminder that human beings have always been hilarious — I love how Eckermann will ask a question and Goethe goes into these long monologues that read almost stand-up routines. “The truth must be repeated over and over,” Goethe said. “My merit is, that I have found it also, that I have said it again, and that I have striven to bring the truth once more into a confused world.”

 

Weather
Jenny Offill

Jenny Offill’s Dept. of Speculation is one of my favorite books about art and motherhood, so I’m not sure why it took me so long to read her followup. (Both could go on my list of good books you could finish in an afternoon.) The book was written before the pandemic, but it contains a brilliant sentence that sums it up: “And then it is another day and another and another but I will not go on about this because no doubt you too have experienced time.” (Try to get the hardcover with a jacket by John Gall.)

 

How to Take Smart Notes
Sönke Ahrens

Several people recommended this to me after my post about indexing and file systems. Not sure if I’ll go for a full Zettelkasten or not, but it’s one of the better books I’ve read about writing. (I really wish I’d read it in college.) Like a book it’s influenced by, David Allen’s Getting Things Done, it’s deeper and more Zen than you might expect. Ahrens’ insight is simple, but huge: if you arrange your writing and reading life correctly, you never really have to stare at a blank page or start from scratch.

 

Wendy, Master of Art
Walter Scott

I feel like you can’t go wrong with a good sendup of art school. Anybody who went is like, Oh god, this is too real, and anybody who didn’t can laugh and feel smug. The only comic book I read this spring, which makes me want to go out and catch up with everything I’ve missed.

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As a bonus, here are some pictures and sound I enjoyed…

TV: I loved Hacks and The Knick.

Music: the new Pharaoh Sanders record was wonderful, Vikingur Olaffson made me fall in love with “Bruyères” on the piano, and while I’ve loved Violator since college when my drawing teacher played it on repeat, Depeche Mode 101 turned me into a huge fan of the band.

Documentaries: Oliver Sacks: His Own Life and The Donut King.

Buddy comedies: Midnight Run and Plan B. 

Swashbucklers: Captain Blood and The Duellists.

Movies that were as great as people said they were: Sing Street, The Mitchells vs.The Machines, and Sound of Metal.

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See more of my favorite books and sign up for my newsletter for weekly recommendations.

Tove Jansson’s The Summer Book

My July pick for our Read Like an Artist book club is Tove Jansson’s The Summer Book. To get the book in time to join our discussion next month, sign up now.

Here’s my intro:

Tove Jansson, the writer and artist best known for creating the Moomins, spent her summers on an island in the gulf of Finland with her lifelong partner, Tuulikki Pietila. She wrote most of her books there, and she wrote The Summer Book, about a girl and her grandmother living on an island, at the age of sixty, after losing her mother. I love this book because it’s what I wish all my summers would feel like, deep and just a little dark and surrounded by the sea…

painting by Tove Jansson

The timing couldn’t be better: a new festival is starting in the UK called The Woman Who Fell in Love with An Island. (Inspired by a letter she wrote to Tooti in 1963, asking her partner if she’d read the D.H. Lawrence story, “The Man Who Loved Islands”: “How about ‘The Woman Who Fell in Love with an Island’?”)

The Guardian recently published “How Tove Jansson’s love of nature shaped the world of the Moomins,” with more about their life on the island, including this passage about their “hut” and routine:

Like the lighthouse that the author hymned in Moominpappa at Sea, the hut’s one room had windows facing in all directions so that Tove and Pietilä could watch the horizon from 360 degrees, and see the winds and storms coming and going. Seated at separate desks (in Helsinki they lived in separate apartments joined by an attic corridor), they “got a lot into the day”. While Jansson wrote, Pietilä drew, or filmed with her 8mm camera. Occasionally they had a joint project, constructing scenes from the Moomin books, with Pietilä making the 3D models and Jansson painting them: “That was their play time.”

Back in April, I watched a (rare) documentary made up of footage Tooti shot on 8mm: Haru, Island of the Solitary.

Jansson wrote a piece called “The Island” that is, according to translator Hernan Diaz, “at once a short story, an essay, and a prose poem,” which “reads both like a sketch for The Summer Book (published eleven years later) and a vignette of Klovharu, the island where Jansson and Tuulikki Pietilä, her partner, built a summerhouse in the mid-60’s.”

It begins: “There is a surprisingly large number of people who go around dreaming about an island.”

I am one of them!

Sign up for the club to join the discussion.

My new book club: Read Like an Artist

I’m starting a new book club called Read Like an Artist, hosted by the folks at Literati. 

Every month I’ll chose a book from an eclectic mix of creative nonfiction, novels, artist memoirs, comics, and more, all of which speak to living a more creative life.

You can choose to get the books mailed to you in a handsome package each month, or pick a digital-only, buy your own book option. Either option gets you access to the Literati app, where our discussion will happen.

The fun begins on June 1st, but you can sign up now.

(Unfortunately, only people in the US can sign up right now. Literati tells me they’re working on international memberships. If you have any more questions, please contact Literati!)

My first pick for the club is How To Do Nothing by Jenny Odell.

It was really hard picking the launch book! Like choosing a first song on a mixtape, or the first sentence for a book — you have to set the tone. I wanted a book written by a woman who’s a working artist. The club starts in June, so I wanted a book that was deep, but could also be read on the beach. I wanted a book that’s a little weird but still accessible and I wanted a book that speaks to my belief in the creative power of idleness. (A northern Winter is for hibernation, a southern summer is for estivation.)

When I watched Odell’s original talk in 2017, I knew it could be a good book, but the book took off in a big way. Readers were loving it and sharing it and it was selling well by word-of-mouth, but then Obama named it one of his favorite books of 2019, and eight months after publication it finally hit the NYTimes bestseller list. (For the record, it was on my 2019 list, too.)

A bit of trivia: How To Do Nothing came out in April 2019, the same time that my book Keep Going came out. Jenny and I crossed paths at the very beginnings of our book tours in a morning talk show green room in Portland. We took this selfie together:

Anyways, I like reading books a lot more than I like writing books, so a book club seemed like a great idea.

Books are my creative fuel, and reading is at the very heart of my practice as a writer and an artist. Not many people know this, but I used to work the reference desk in a public library. In many ways, I still feel like a librarian: a big part of the joy of my work is pointing my readers “upstream” to the books I love. 

I hope the books I choose will be both useful and beautiful, but most importantly, I hope these books will be fun to read.

I firmly believe that reading should be fun.

Join me!

(And, again, if you have any questions, please contact Literati!)

Reading like a bird of prey

William James said that our stream of consciousness, “like a bird’s life, seems to be made of an alternation of flights and perchings.”

I wonder if our reading life — that is, for those of us who read to write — isn’t like a bird’s life, too.

Swoops and perches.

“Like most writers, I don’t educate myself sequentially,” says the poet Gary Snyder, “but more like a hawk or eagle always circling and finding things that might have been overlooked.”

In Emerson: Mind on Fire, Robert Richardson writes that Ralph Waldo Emerson read “like a hawk sliding on the wind over a marsh, alert for what he could use.” Emerson read to “nourish and to stimulate his own thought.”

“The glance reveals what the gaze obscures,” Emerson wrote. “Somewhere the author has hidden his message. Find it, and skip the paragraphs that do not talk to you.”

So the reader/writer hunts like a hawk or an eagle, but then, after we devour books, we must be like the owl: “Keep only what is useful. Regurgitate the rest.”

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