Austin Kleon

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Notes on the art of reading books.

5 good books I read this spring

Why wait until the end of the year? I shared 5 good books I read this winter, so here are 5 good books I read this spring (and bonus reads):

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. (Another great novel, one I re-read: Charles Portis’s True Grit.)

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 it even more than I thought it would. (Another book about attention I knew was going to be good based on the original Medium post: Rob Walker’s The Art of Noticing. I’d also throw in Bruno Munari’s Drawing a Tree, which I loved even more upon re-reading.)

The Three Robbers
Tomi Ungerer

My 4-year-old got obsessed with this book, and I got obsessed with it and with Ungerer. (Other great graphic tales [but not for kids]: Tillie Walden’s On A Sunbeam and Jaime Hernandez’s excellent comic, The Love Bunglers and the followup, Is This How You See Me?)

Essays Over 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.

Okay, back to reading. Get more reading recommendations in my weekly newsletter, or browse the past decade of my favorite books.

How to read more

“I always read a lot. I read the same amount, no matter what season it is. I read every night. When I’m on book tour, I’m on airplanes all the time, so I’m always reading. People say, ‘How do you have time to read?’ Oh, come on, it’s simple! You’re single and you don’t watch television.”
—John Waters

“How do you make time for that?” can almost always be answered with, “I make time for that.”

Still, here are 5 things that have helped me read more, and might help you, too:

1. Quit reading books you don’t like.

“I believe that the phrase ‘obligatory reading’ is a contradiction in terms; reading should not be obligatory… If a book bores you, leave it; don’t read it because it is famous, don’t read it because it is modern, don’t read a book because it is old…. If a book is tedious to you, don’t read it; that book was not written for you.”
—Jorge Luis Borges

“Nobody is going to get any points in heaven by slogging their way through a book they aren’t enjoying but think they ought to read.”
—Nancy Pearl

“There is only one way to read, which is to browse in libraries and bookshops, picking up books that attract you, reading only those, dropping them when they bore you, skipping the parts that drag — and never, never reading anything because you feel you ought, or because it is part of a trend or a movement. Remember that the book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty — and vice-versa. Don’t read a book out of its right time for you.”
—Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook

If you aren’t getting anything out of a book, put it down, and pick up another book.

Every hour you spend inching through a boring book is an hour you could’ve spent plowing through a brilliant one.

When it comes to books, quitters finish more.

Sometimes a book just isn’t for you, or it’s not for you yet.

It helps if you choose the right books in the first place. Stop reading what you think you should be reading and just read what you genuinely want to read. Read what you love and read at whim.

2. Carry a book with you at all times.

“Because I was carrying the book around all the time, I pulled it out all the time: On the subway, walking down the block to get groceries…”
—Clive Thompson, “Reading War and Peace on my iPhone”

Get used to carrying a book around with you wherever you go and reaching for it in all the spare moments you’d usually pull out your phone. (Commutes, lunch breaks, grocery store lines, etc.)

Go to bed early and bring your book with you. If you fall asleep while reading, pick it back up when you wake and read for a bit before you get out of bed.

Always have a book queued next in line for when you finish the current book you’re reading.

Feel free to read promiscuously — date 3 or 4 books at the same time until one makes you want to settle down with it.

I am partial to carrying paper books and reading with a pencil, but I also love my e-reader, and a smartphone is undeniably handy, if you can avoid social media and the internet.

Which brings us to our next point.

3. Keep your phone in airplane mode.

“Reading is socially accepted disassociation. You flip a switch and you’re not there anymore. It’s better than heroin. More effective and cheaper and legal.”
—Mary Karr

A big part of reading is visiting other worlds, and you can’t visit another world if you’re constantly distracted by this one.

If you’re gonna read on your phone, switch it into airplane mode so you’re not even tempted to go online.

When you sit down to read a paper book, either put your phone in airplane mode, or plug your phone in across the room so you’re not tempted to reach for it.

Get a paper dictionary, so when you read at home or in the office, you don’t have to pull out your phone to look up words.

4. Make regular trips to your local library and/or bookstore.

“You must go to the library and fall in love.”
—Ray Bradbury

I find a lot of great books through friends and online and through my own reading, but there’s nothing quite like the “serendipity of the stacks,” the magical discoveries that often happen when you’re browsing in a library or a bookstore.

If distraction is terrible for book reading, it’s great for book discovering. You never know what you’ll bump into in the stacks. You go hunting for a book and you find an even better book shelved a few books down from it.

I frequent the “New” and “Recently Returned” shelves at my local library and sometimes I’ll even snoop to see what people have on hold on the reserve shelves.

Nothing beats a well-curated selection in a great indie bookstore. It’s glorious to spend an afternoon shopping at Bookpeople or Powell’s or The Strand or any number of the great stores I’ve had the pleasure to visit on book tour.

5. Share books you love with others. (They’ll give you more books to read.)

“Read the books you love, tell people about authors you like, and don’t worry about it.”
—Neil Gaiman

Keep track of what you read, whether it’s in a private notebook or on a site like Goodreads. (Take inspiration from Art Garfunkel, who has a list of every book he’s read since 1968.)

Share the books you love in whatever way you can. (Every week, I share what I’m reading in my weekly newsletter, and every year, I make a list of my favorite reads.)

The great thing about sharing your favorite books is that you meet other people who love those books, and they’ll share with you even more books to love.

Take notes, and let the books stack up. Gigantic book piles aren’t a sign you’re doing it wrong, they’re a sign that you’re doing it right.

* * *

If you need something to read, my new book, Keep Going, is out April 2nd.

5 good books I’ve read this winter

Why wait until the end of the year? Here are 5 really good books I’ve read so far this winter:

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. Except for the “aw shucks, can’t believe I’m writin’ a book” intro (come on, man), I found it really warm and smart. 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”)

Okay, back to reading. Get more reading recommendations in my weekly newsletter, or browse the past decade of my favorite books.

Werner Herzog on reading and writing

I picked up Werner Herzog: A Guide for the Perplexed a week or so ago, and it’s taking me forever to read because 1) it’s 500 pages long and I’m slow, and 2) it’s so dense with insane stories and great wisdom about creative work that I’m constantly stopping to underline sentences.

He describes himself as an autodidact, who “never felt comfortable in school” and “never trusted teachers”:

I’ve always been more interested in teaching myself. If I want to explore something, I never think about attending a class; I do the reading on my own or seek out experts for conversations. Everything we’re forced to learn at school we quickly forget, but the things we set out to learn ourselves — to quench a thirst — are never forgotten, and inevitably become an important part of our existence.

“When he was in school,” his mother says, “Werner never learned anything. He never read the books he was supposed to read, he never studied, he never knew what he was supposed to know, it seemed.”

But over and over, in the book, and in other interviews, he has one unwavering piece of advice for filmmakers: “Read.”

Read, read, read, read, read. Those who read own the world; those who immerse themselves in the Internet or watch too much television lose it. If you don’t read, you will never be a filmmaker. Our civilization is suffering profound wounds because of the wholesale abandonment of reading by contemporary society.

He gives his Rogue Film School students a “mandatory” reading list and he brings two books with him on film shoots: Martin Luther’s translation of the Bible and Livy’s account of the Second Punic War. (“The Book of Job acts as consolation, Livy gives me courage.”)

He talks a lot about approaching his screenplays with a literary sensibility, often abandoning traditional structure for prose descriptions of scenes. He’s convinced that Conquest of the Useless, his diary of making Fitzcarraldo, will outlive all of his films. “I suspect that my true voice emerges more clearly through prose than cinema,” he says. “I might be a better writer than I am a filmmaker.”

It is a really terrific book.

If you want to be a writer, you have to be a reader first

It’s been said a million times — it’s one of the main points of my books Steal Like An Artist and Show Your Work! — and yet, it still seems to be controversial or confusing to young people who are starting out: If you want to be a writer, you have to be a reader first.

“You can’t be a good writer without being a devoted reader.”
—J.K. Rowling

“If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot. There’s no way around these two things that I’m aware of, no shortcut… If you don’t have the time to read, you don’t have the time or the tools to write.”
—Stephen King

“Writing comes from reading, and reading is the finest teacher of how to write.”
—Annie Proulx

“The ugly fact is books are made out of books.”
—Cormac McCarthy

“Read with the mind-set of a carpenter looking at trees.”
—Terry Pratchett

“Read, read, read everything — trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read!”
—William Faulkner

“If you stuff yourself full of poems, essays, plays, stories, novels, films, comic strips, magazines, music, you automatically explode every morning like Old Faithful. I have never had a dry spell in my life, mainly because I feed myself well, to the point of bursting.”
—Ray Bradbury

“When I’m reading, I’m looking for something to steal. Readers ask me all the time the traditional question ‘Where do you get your ideas from?” I reply: ‘We are all having ideas all the time. But I’m on the lookout for them. You’re not.’”
—Philip Pullman

A hacked street sign in LA, 2015

“Reading is grist. Reading is bliss.”
—Nora Ephron

“I find it weird to meet writers who aren’t also big readers. Met one the other day at a bar and I looked at him queerly. He said he couldn’t find the time. This reminded me that readers are probably my people first, before writers. Writers are more likely to be dicks.”
—Rosecrans Baldwin

“I had never had any desire to be a writer. I wanted to be a reader.”
—Adam Phillips

“I don’t enjoy writing. I enjoy reading.”
—William Giraldi

“If only you’d remember before you ever sit down to write that you’ve been a reader much longer than you were ever a writer. You simply fix that fact in your mind, then sit very still and ask yourself, as a reader, what piece of writing in all the world [you] would most want to read…”
—J.D. Salinger, Seymour: An Introduction

“If you feel the urge to write, just lie down and read a book: it will pass.”
—Fran Lebowitz

My reading year, 2018

Here are 20 good books I read in 2018, in no order other than the order in which I read them:

Tape For The Turn of the Year
A.R. Ammons

In 1963, Ammons got a roll of adding machine tape from the hardware store and decided to write poems on it every day until the tape was used up. I started the book on December 6 of last year, and followed along with each entry until January 10th.

 

Largesse of the Sea Maiden
Denis Johnson

Beautiful stories.

A perfect swan song.

 

Reinventing Bach
Paul Elie

Takes a look at Bach’s work through the recordings of his works throughout the years. I especially liked reading about Glenn Gould and Pablo Casals.

 

A Natural History of the Senses
Diane Ackerman

I originally thought Keep Going would have more about the senses in it, so I picked this up for research. Very dense, lush book.

 

Prince and The Purple Rain Sessions
Duane Tudahl

A day-by-day play-by-play of Prince in the recording studio at the height of his powers. I did a lot of skimming and skipping around, but really enjoyed it.

 

A Philosophy of Walking
Frederic Gros

A sausage-fest, but a good sausage-fest. (Compliment with Rebecca Solnit’s Wanderlust or Keri Smith’s The Wander Society or Lauren Elkin’s Flâneuse.)

 

You & A Bike & A Road
Eleanor Davis

A comic diary of Davis’s bike across the south. I love her work so much. If I had to pick, this might be my favorite book I read this year. (I also read How To Be Happy and her newest one, Why Art? Both very much worth reading.) She’s on fire, and I can’t wait to read what’s next.

 

Meet Me In The Bathroom
Lizzie Goodman

An oral history of NYC music from 2001-2011. How much you enjoy it will probably depend on your familiarity with the music — I was eighteen and a freshman in college when I saw The Strokes in Newport, KY, in 2001, so it made me pretty danged nostalgic.

 

Calypso
David Sedaris

I mean, what’s there to say? The dude makes me laugh out loud… and he keeps getting better and better. (I also enjoyed the visual compendium of his diaries.)

 

Confabulations
John Berger

Considering how much Ways of Seeing influenced me, I’m ashamed I haven’t read more Berger. This was the last book he published before he died.

 

Monograph
Chris Ware

A gorgeous, gigantic tome dedicated to the work of one of our great Midwestern artists.

 

Agnes Martin: Paintings, Writings, Remembrances
Arne Glimcher

By far the most expensive book on this list. (I bought it for my wife years ago, but I’m not sure she ever read it.) Gorgeous printing, with life-size facsimiles of Martin’s notebook pages bound in with the regular pages.

 

Priestdaddy
Patricia Lockwood

I was a year late to this, but it’s as advertised: Smart, smutty, and laugh-out-loud funny.

 

Twentieth-Century Boy: Notebooks of the Seventies
Duncan Hannah

I loved this book, which was edited from Hannah’s actual diaries that he kept as a young man in 70s NYC. My only gripe is that the book doesn’t include images of the actual notebooks, which are wonderfully visual.

 

The Hildafolk Series
Luke Pearson

It’s a rare, wonderful thing when stars align and you love reading the same books as your kids. (Last year: Jon Klassen’s Hat Trilogy) Pearson’s Hilda comics are like a cross between Miyazaki and my beloved Moomins with a dash of unschooling. Magic.

 

Words Without Music
Philip Glass

Devoured this one, and afterwards, was surprised it took me so long to pick it up. Glass writes about so many of my favorite topics: creativity, day jobs, parenting, lineage, etc. Totally accessible, and made me want to listen to more of his music.

 

The Folded Clock: A Diary
Heidi Julavitz

I’m not so sure that Julavitz and I would get along together at a party, but dang, I liked her book.

 

Eve’s Hollywood
Eve Babitz

What I wrote about Slow Days, Fast Company in last year’s roundup works here, too, so: “I love reading and thinking about Los Angeles, and I love writing that’s smart and trashy, so I liked this a lot.”

 

Little
Edward Carey
A strange, gloomy work of historical fiction with wonderful Gorey-like, Gothic drawings. (I was delighted by the show at the Austin Public Library.)

 

They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us
Hanif Abdurraqib

Abdurraqib and I were born in the same year and grew up within a 45-minute drive of each other in Ohio, but our worlds were so very, very different. Columbus — a city I never felt much affinity for, despite its proximity in my youth — is one of the main characters here, and the book exposed me to a different side of it.

* * *

Here are 20 other good books I read, many of which, on another day, or in another month or year, could be in my top 20 (again, listed in the order in which I read them):

Note: I usually don’t post my favorite reads until the very end of the year, but I’m poking through this annotated Walden and Emily Wilson’s translation of The Odyssey right now, so I think it’s safe to say I won’t finish any other books before 2019 arrives.

See the past 13 years of my reading, here.

The agony of list-making

I don’t post my year-end reading list until the end of the year, but I definitely start working on it this early. (This year’s biggest problem: I’m devouring Emily Wilson’s translation of The Odyssey, and if I keep up at this pace, I’ll have to bump something from the list above.)

Last year I wrote about rethinking making lists entirely, and this year in August I posted a list of favorite reads (so far) of 2018, but I’m still loathe to finish this year’s final list. Reading has become more and more of a private thing for me as the online universe has disintegrated: The page is where I go to not be judged, but to be understood (a book is a mirror, etc.). The minute you make some kind of public list you’re opening yourself up to all sorts of judgments and scrutiny about your habits.

Overall, I think the best move (as a non-critic, at least) is to go with an unranked list. Music writer Ted Gioia, for example, switched to an alphabetical ordering for his Best of 2018 list. “I am doing this because each of these albums deserves recognition and the sequential ranking tended to focus too much attention on just a few recordings.”

I also like Gioia’s explanation for why he still makes lists:

Like any music lover, I enjoy sharing my favorite music with others. But in the last few years, a different motivation has spurred me. I believe that the system of music discovery is broken in the current day. There is more music recorded than ever before, but it is almost impossible for listeners to find the best new recordings….

I have nothing so noble for a cause, but let’s face it: I’ll suck it up and make this year’s, if for no other reason than because I’m a list junkie and a completist.

Reading with a pencil

Oliver Sacks’ writing in a Noam Chomsky book

The intellectual is, quite simply, a human being who has a pencil in his or her hand when reading a book.
—George Steiner

Photographer Bill Hayes wrote a nice essay about Oliver Sacks’ love of words, and he’s been posting images of Sacks’ hand-annotated books on Twitter:

Sacks “loved to write notes on the pages of books he was reading — thoughts, ideas, arguments with the author, diagrams.” What a delight it must be to go through such a library (of 500+ books) and see Sacks’ raw thoughts in margins and endpapers:

This is, of course, an ancient practice called marginalia. (A nice, short read on the subject is Mark O’Connell’s piece, “The Marginal Obsession With Marginalia.”)

I believe that the first step towards becoming a writer is becoming a reader, but the next step is becoming a reader with a pencil. When you underline and circle and jot down your questions and argue in the margins, you’re existing in this interesting middle ground between reader and writer:

Patricia Lockwood put it this way:

 There’s a way of reading that is like writing. You feel in collaboration… You have a pen in your hand, you’re going along in a way that’s, like, half creating it as you go. And you’re also strip-mining it for anything you can use… you’re sifting for what could be gold.

Panning for gold, or “shopping for images,” as Allen Ginsberg puts it in “A Supermarket in California.”

Mark Twain’s copy of Plutarch’s Lives

Sometimes marginalia is the next best thing to punching an author in the face. I’m a huge fan of Sam Anderson’s “A Year in Marginalia” in which he posts snapshots of his marginal comments:

Sam Anderson marginalia

The writing I enjoy doing most, every year, is marginalia: spontaneous bursts of pure, private response to whatever book happens to be in front of me. It’s the most intimate, complete, and honest form of criticism possible — not the big wide-angle aerial shot you get from an official review essay, but a moment-by-moment record of what a book actually feels like to the actively reading brain.

Whether you’re panning for gold or slinging shit at a dead man, marginalia turns reading into writing. (See Billy Collins’ poem.) My friend John T. Unger once said to me, “Every piece of art I’ve ever made was because I saw bad and could do better, or saw great and needed to catch up.”

Francis Ford Coppola’s notes on Puzo’s The Godfather

In Sam Anderson’s “What I Really Want Is Someone Rolling Around in the Text,” he points out that marginalia used to be more of a social practice:

[P]eople would mark up books for one another as gifts, or give pointedly annotated novels to potential lovers…. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the undisputed all-time champion of marginalia, flourished at the tail end of this period, and his friends were always begging him to mark up their books. He eventually published some of his own marginalia, and in the process even popularized the word “marginalia” — a self-consciously pompous Latinism intended to mock the triviality of the form.

I own books that were marked up by my father-in-law and my wife when they were in high school. Reading through them is like a kind of time travel — get to visit with them in the past. Sometimes I imagine my kids reading one of my books and coming across a note from me…

My notes in Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts

I love this idea of marginalia as a way to turn a book into a medium for conversation — a kind of literary note-passing. G.K. Chesterton’s once went through a friend’s newly-published book of aphorisms and answered each one with his pencil. (It was later published as Platitudes Undone.) Sam Anderson and David Rees wrote notes to each other in a copy of Dan Brown’s Inferno. J.J. Abrams and Doug Dorst actually used handwritten marginalia as a device in their novel, Ship of Theseus. (I was delighted to see readers swapping their marginalia for my book, Show Your Work!)

David Foster Wallace’s copy of Suttree

Finally, marginalia is a way of really owning your books and your reading experience. Here’s Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren in their classic, How To Read A Book:

Full ownership of a book only comes when you have made it a part of yourself, and the best way to make yourself a part of it — which comes to the same thing — is by writing in it. Why is marking a book indispensable to reading it? First, it keeps you awake — not merely conscious, but wide awake. Second, reading, if it is active, is thinking, and thinking tends to express itself in words, spoken or written. The person who says he knows what he thinks but cannot express it usually does not know what he thinks. Third, writing your reactions down helps you to remember the thoughts of the author. Reading a book should be a conversation between you and the author….Marking a book is literally an expression of your differences or your agreements…It is the highest respect you can pay him.

Read with a pencil! (I recommend Blackwing Palaminos.)

Favorite reads of 2018 (so far)

I usually wait until the end of the year to make this kind of list, but it’s been a pretty good one so far, so here are 10 books I really enjoyed in the first half of 2018, listed in the order I read them:

Tape For The Turn of the Year
A.R. Ammons

In 1963, Ammons got a roll of adding machine tape from the hardware store and decided to write poems on it every day until the tape was used up. I started the book on December 6 of last year, and followed along with each entry until January 10th.

 

Largesse of the Sea Maiden
Denis Johnson

Beautiful stories.

A perfect swan song.

 

Reinventing Bach
Paul Elie

Takes a look at Bach’s work through the recordings of his works throughout the years. I especially liked reading about Glenn Gould and Pablo Casals.

 

A Natural History of the Senses
Diane Ackerman

I originally thought my new book would have more about the senses in it, so I picked this up for research. Very dense, lush book.

 

Prince and The Purple Rain Sessions
Duane Tudahl
 
A day-by-day play-by-play of Prince in the recording studio at the height of his powers. I did a lot of skimming and skipping around, but really enjoyed it.

 

You & A Bike & A Road
Eleanor Davis

A comic diary of Davis’s bike across the south. I love her work so much. This might end up my book of the year.

 

Meet Me In The Bathroom
Lizzie Goodman
 
An oral history of NYC music from 2001-2011. How much you enjoy it will probably depend on your familiarity with the music — I was eighteen and a freshman in college when I saw The Strokes in Newport, KY, in 2001, so it made me pretty danged nostalgic.

 

Calypso
David Sedaris
 
I mean, what’s there to say? The dude makes me laugh out loud… and he keeps getting better and better.

 

Confabulations
John Berger

Considering how much Ways of Seeing influenced me, I’m ashamed I haven’t read more Berger. This was the last book he published before he died.

 

Monograph
Chris Ware

A gorgeous, gigantic tome dedicated to the work of one of our great Midwestern artists.

 

This list originally appeared in my weekly newsletter.

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