Austin Kleon

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Notes on the art of reading books.

Seneca on reading

I’m reading Seneca’s Letters from a Stoic, which is basically a 2,000-year-old advice column.

Here’s what he said in letter 2 about reading, and specifically, spending a lot of time reading writers “whose genius is unquestionable”:

To be everywhere is to be nowhere. People who spend their whole life traveling abroad end up having plenty of places where they can find hospitality but no real friendships. The same must needs be the case with people who never set about acquiring an intimate acquaintanceship with any one great writer, but skip from one to another, paying flying visits to them all.

While I am a great proponent of reading more than one book at a time and letting books talk to each other, I also believe that when you find a writer who unlocks something in you, you should spend as much time with them as you can, read and re-read everything they wrote, and then “swim upstream” and try to read what they read.

This need not happen all at once. I like to think of these writers as old friends that I can rely on. No matter where we are, we can pick up where we left off.

Right now I’m reading Charles Portis’s The Dog of the South for the third time. (I’ve read all his novels twice.) And the normal things are happening that happen during a re-read — I’m noticing new things I never noticed before, re-underlining passages that I’ve already underlined — but I’m also starting to feel like I’m really understanding what’s going on in his sentences.

I re-read Donna Tartt’s remembrance of him and laughed out loud when she recalls their first phone conversation:

“Oh I beg your pardon. I thought you were my crank caller… I have a regular crank caller and almost every day he telephones about this time. If I don’t pick up he rings and rings.”

“Do you know who it is?”

“No, it is just some prankster. Local, I think. Many people around here do not seem to have much to do.”

“That must be a big nuisance.”

“No. To tell you the truth I am a little disappointed on the days he does not telephone. I have come to look forward to his calls.”

This exchange reads almost exactly like something out of his novels. My reaction is the kind you would have upon hearing from somebody something your friend had said to them. “Yeah, that sounds just like Charlie.”

Reading about animals

I finished Temple Grandin’s Visual Thinking and in the chapter on animal consciousness she mentions Michel de Montaigne’s great line from his An Apology for Raymond Sebond, “When I play with my cat who knows if I am not a pastime to her more than she is to me?”

Serendipity: The next day, in preparation for my celebration of Montaigne’s birthday with Sam Anderson, I read his essay about animal voyages: “To return home from an animal voyage is to become, yourself, a new animal living in your old habitat.”

Sam’s piece led me to John Berger’s wonderful essay, Why Look at Animals? (“The pet offers its owner a mirror to a part that is otherwise never reflected.”)

Now I’ve picked Ed Yong’s An Immense World back up and I am enjoying it immensely.

Books as toys

C. S. Lewis, in a letter to Arthur Greaves, 1932, describing the pleasure of a particular kind of marginalia, or reading with a pencil:

To enjoy a book like [Froissart’s Chronicles] thoroughly I find I have to treat it as a sort of hobby and set about it seriously. I begin by making a map on one of the end leafs: then I put in a genealogical tree or two. Then I put a running headline at the top of each page: finally I index at the end all the passages I have for any reason underlined. I often wonder — considering how people enjoy themselves developing photos or making scrapbooks — why so few people make a hobby of their reading in this way. Many an otherwise dull book which I had to read have I enjoyed in this way, with a fine-nibbed pen in my hand: one is making something all the time and a book so read acquires the charm of a toy without losing that of a book.

Emphasis mine.

Alan Jacobs brought this to my attention, and we texted a bit about it. He pointed out that little kids have a tendency to ignore purpose-built toys in favor things they can turn into toys, like cardboard boxes, sticks, dirt, etc. (See: “Throw out the instructions.” As Alan put it, if you only follow the instructions for a toy  — or a book — you get what you expect, no more, no less.)

It makes me wonder if irreverence towards an object is the first step towards turning it into a toy, a plaything.

One of my favorite designers, Bruno Munari, did a series of “libri illeggibili” (“unreadable books”) which seem to start with this irreverent spirit and resemble toys — objects you play with:

a spread from Munari’s Books

One thing these books do is highlight how interactive a paper book is, no matter the content — you turn the pages, you take them in. It’s your energy that unlocks whatever is on the page.

But the minute you become a little irreverent towards a book — underlining, dog-earing, scribbling arguments with the author — that’s the minute things really get cooking and reading becomes the act of making that C.S. Lewis was talking about.

When I was thinking about books as toys, chapter 88 of Grant Petersen’s Just Ride popped in my head: “Your bike is a toy. Have fun with it.”

IF YOU’RE SERIOUS ABOUT something, there’s a tendency to talk about the equipment for it as tools as opposed to toys. Tools are for work, for being productive and efficient; toys are for play. Tools cost more than toys, so there’s that, too. A wealthy amateur photographer with a Leica M9 wouldn’t call it a toy, nor would the shop that sold it. It’s “a tool for self-expression, a tool for communication, a tool for social change.” Calling it a toy will get you kicked out of the camera shop.

No matter how much your bike costs, unless you use it to make a living, it is a toy, and it should be fun. Whatever benefits accrue from riding won’t stop accruing just because you’re having fun. In fact, the more fun you have on it, the more you’ll ride it.

Montessori said play is the work of the child. Play is also the work of the artist. Can we get closer to play if we re-label our tools as toys?

Reading recklessly

one of my Austin Public Library hauls

Adam Sternbergh has started a newsletter, and his first dispatches concern his “Year of Reading Recklessly,” brought about by a sense of dissatisfaction looking at his year-end list.

“My reading life had become a grim slog,” he writes. “My TBR pile — ever higher, ever teetering, ever chastising — had become my enemy and jailer, not my conspirator and friend.”

(Unfortunately, I can relate!)

To spice things up, Adam set himself new goals: “Browse more. Purchase impulsively. Let books surprise me. Give myself a chance to stumble on something revelatory.”

He sprinkled some tips amongst his list of recent shelf discoveries:

Lesson 1: A.B.B. Always. Be. Browsing.

Lesson 2: Books make the best souvenirs.

Lesson 4, 5, 6: Very short books are a great way to leaven your reading routine and let you take risks you might not otherwise take. Also, trust staff picks. Also, if you set a reading goal, cheat with abandon.

You can read more over at Substack.

I love this idea of reading recklessly. I can point to two things have helped me: Kindle sample chapters and weekly visits to the library.

Letting books talk to each other

A few years ago, I wrote a post about reading more than one book at a time. I wrote, “One of my favorite ways [to generate new writing] is to have 3 or 4 books going at the same time and let them talk to each other.”

Someone recently asked me what it looks like in practice. I am loathe to muddy it any further with explanation, but here goes.

A mundane and far-from-perfect example: I was reading Tree Abraham’s Cyclettes and she mentioned the brain’s “default mode network,” something I don’t know anything about. I may or may not have paid much attention to it, but I had just finished John Higgs’ William Blake vs. The World and remembered that he wrote about it, too.

Now, if I’d just read about default network mode in either of those books, solo, I might’ve just ignored it and moved on with my life, but the fact that two books in succession mentioned it made me think I needed to investigate it further.

Lo and behold, Steven Johnson wrote about it for the NYTimes several years ago and also in his book Farsighted. Now I have another book to dip into, and three books on different subjects talking about the same thing. That’s enough for a blog post, at the very least.

In this case, it was chance and happenstance, but you can sort of tweak your reading life in such a way that these sort of things happen more often. If you read books on different topics and different genres and different formats at the same time, your brain can’t help but find weird connections between them.

This is so obvious to me that it hardly seems worth going into, but I realize it might not be so obvious to others.

Reading this way is a form of “input as collage,” and of course, you can take a multi-media approach to it: I remember last year I watched Kenneth Branaugh’s Much Ado About Nothing while I was reading Iris Murdoch’s The Sea, The Sea, and I can’t identify exactly how, but they spoke to each other in some way that glued them together in my mind. (Later, I found out that Murdoch was a big Shakespeare freak.)

Another example: Yesterday’s blog post on Simic and Steinberg exists simply because Charles Simic died and I was going around the house trying to find all the books in the house of his I could find.

On the back cover of The Monster Loves His Labyrinth: Notebooks I noticed that Simic’s portrait was drawn by Saul Steinberg. A quick google of “Charles Simic” and “Saul Steinberg” made me remember that I have a catalog of Steinberg’s with an intro by Simic. So I pull that book out and read the intro and find out they were friends. A few more googles and I have everything Simic wrote about his friend (I think) at my fingertips.

As I read those pieces, they started talking to each other, and suddenly I had something to write about.

My reading year, 2022

I read a terrific batch of novels this year. Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow surprised and delighted me up until the very end, and I think that book deserves any acclaim that comes its way. Don Delillo’s White Noise was spectacular and also had an extra layer of meaning, as I read it right after reading Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death, an obvious influence. I liked Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven way more than the TV show, which I understand is a somewhat controversial opinion? (Every year I read a bestseller and every year I’m reminded that all bestsellers have this in common: they are page-turners, they make you want to turn the page.) Iris Murdoch’s The Sea, The Sea drove me absolutely crazy, but I have the strange urge to re-read it, which is how I know if something is good. Antoine Wilson’s Mouth to Mouth made me want to go to bed early so I could stay up reading it.

At the very end of the year I read John Higgs’s William Blake vs. the World, a book which somehow managed to connect to so much of my year’s reading: in particular, William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience. (A wonderful book. James could write his ass off.) The sections on neuroscience and hemisphere connected with a lot of Iain McGilchrist’s massive, two-volume The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World. As for Blake himself, I see his influence in Gareth Brookes’ The Dancing Plague and Edward Carey’s Plagues and Pencils: A Year of Pandemic Sketches.

My comfort reading is books about music. There is a perfect 250-page book in the 400 pages of Dan Charnas’s Dilla Time. I read an essay or two from W.A. Mathieu’s The Listening Book: Discovering Your Own Music every night at the dinner table. Craig Brown’s 150 Glimpses of the Beatles had an outstanding ending — I love it when a book sticks the landing. I was surprised I didn’t connect with David Toop’s Ocean of Sound more, as it’s full of writing about music I love. (It might be a commode book — and I mean that as a compliment — one you dip in and out of at random.) I had a magical visit to a Barnes & Noble on a trip to Philly when I took a chance that they’d have Mike McGonigal’s 33 1/3 entry on My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless and they did. Chuck Klosterman’s The Nineties: A Book was about much more than music, but we’ll throw it in here. A big nostalgia trip for me.

I read a bunch of books about movies and making movies. Kyle Buchanan’s Blood, Sweat & Chrome: The Wild and True Story of Mad Max: Fury Road made me like that movie even more than I already did. It’s a miracle it got made. I read Aljean Harmetz’s The Making of The Wizard of Oz after having an unexpectedly emotional reaction to watching Dorothy’s adventures with my kids for the first time. Matt Zoller Seitz’s The Wes Anderson Collection mixes handsome art and interviews with the filmmaker. I had been looking forward for years to Ander Monson’s Predator: A Memoir, a Movie, an Obsession, a great case for studying something you love in depth.

This is a golden age for non-fiction comic books. I thought Box Brown’s Cannabis: The Illegalization of Weed in America was a real showcase of his talents. (See also his strip Legalization Nation on his Instagram.) I also liked Darryl Cunningham’s Putin’s Russia and Billionaires. A book that seemingly came out of nowhere was Two Heads: A Graphic Exploration of How Our Brains Work with Other Brains. I admired the cartooning in Kate Beaton’s Ducks, how she managed to stay loose while dealing with a serious subject matter.


My major obsession this year was my bicycle, and I synced up immediately with the spirit of Grant Petersen’s Just Ride: A Radically Practical Guide to Riding Your Bike. I also loved reading his “Bicycle Sentences” illustrated by Betsy Streeter and published on Instagram. (They just published a riding journal of them.) I thought Jody Rosen’s Two Wheels Good: The History and Mystery of the Bicycle would be right up my alley, and parts definitely were, but I ended up wishing it was tighter and shorter and felt less like magazine pieces stitched together.

For a brief, beautiful few weeks my son and I were playing chess together every day. I loved David Shenk’s The Immortal Game: A History of Chess, especially the brilliant structure of alternating the chess moves of the famous game with the historical chapters. I also made my way through the classic, Bobby Fischer Teaches Chess.

I read some great art books, of course. Anni Albers’ On Weaving is unbelievably gorgeous. Martin Gayford’s Spring Cannot Be Cancelled: David Hockney in Normandy was a wonderful read, my first of the spring, about one of my favorite artists. Lourdes Grobet’s Lucha Libre: Masked Superstars of Mexican Wrestling is out-of-print but worth tracking down. (Fun fact: her son was the cinematographer for Nacho Libre and the second season of The White Lotus.)

I’m always interested in the intersection between art and family, and for years have been trying to figure out my own book on the subject. Ada Calhoun’s Also A Poet: Frank O’Hara, My Father, and Me was a really beautiful memoir, and it has added power and depth if you read “The Art of Dying” by her father, the art critic Peter Schjeldahl, beforehand. Julie Philips’ The Baby on the Fire Escape: Creativity, Motherhood, and the Mind-Baby Problem will go up at the top of my list of favorite books about art and motherhood.

My youngest son was diagnosed ASD this year, and while I’ve read a bunch of books about autism, Barry M. Prizant and Tom Fields-Meyer’s Uniquely Human: A Different Way of Seeing Autism is probably the first book I will recommend to family and friends. An extremely hopeful read.

And two books I liked that somehow don’t fit in elsewhere:

I love the “Little Histories” series, and Nigel Warburton’s A Little History of Philosophy didn’t disappoint.

David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5000 Years was long, but very good.

* * *

If you liked this list, you will enjoy my newsletter, where I share what I’m reading every week.

I’ve been doing a year-end summary of my reading since 2006. You can read them all here.

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

Having trouble reading? Here’s how to read like an artist.

3 great books I read this fall

I get much less reading done in the fall compared to the summer. Summer here is fairly easygoing: the kids are home, everyone’s on vacation so they don’t expect much from me, and it’s so hot outside that floating in the pool with a book seems a perfectly reasonable way to spend time. Fall brings school, and sickness (from school), and emails.

One thing about going through a reading slump is that it’s easy to determine what’s really doing it for you. Here are 3 great books I read this fall. All published this year. All of them will probably go on my yearly top 10, maybe even top 5, and I highly recommend all of them:

  1. I picked up Antoine Wilson’s Mouth to Mouth and got immediately sucked in. It’s one of those perfectly short novels that makes you want to go to bed early so you can stay up late finishing it.
     
  2. Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, a novel about two friends who make video games. It surprised and delighted me right up until the end, and everyone I know who read it liked it. (The title comes from Macbeth.)
     
  3. I picked up Ada Calhoun’s Also A Poet, a memoir about her father, the art critic Peter Schjeldahl and the poet Frank O’Hara, right after her father died. The book’s poignancy is doubled, I think, if you read his essay “The Art of Dying” before you start. (One of my favorite bits is when she tells him she got a writer’s residency: “My father rolled his eyes. He thought residencies were lame. He said he wouldn’t be caught dead at a writers’ colony. My mother snapped at him: ‘Your whole life is a writer’s colony.’”)
     

Filed under: my reading year 2022

Saving things for print… and missing out

Here is my lunch (leftover enchiladas with a fried egg on top) and Amanda Petrusich’s 9,000-word profile of Metallica in The New Yorker. Petrusich is in a handful of writers I love whose work I honor by saving it to read in print, with a pen.

This practice has become harder and harder for me to maintain.

First, almost everything shows up online before the magazine or the paper gets here. This isn’t a huge deal, it just requires a little patience, which I am happy to practice.

Second, and much worse, a lot of stuff is now edited down for print and expanded in digital. A profile will have more photos, an interview will run much longer, etc.

If you only read in print, you actually miss out on stuff.

For example, yesterday I shared this “By The Book” interview with Sam Lipsyte. This morning Matt Bell reposted it with this unfamiliar bit:

I will often read passages from my favorite writers to remind myself how some people really just know how to give it up, by which I mean give up their secret dreaming selves, with honesty and artistry. Their example lifts me, emboldens me, when I am feeling depleted and paltry.

How on earth did I miss that quote? I thought. Because it didn’t run in the paper! It was edited out of print and only shows up on the website.

I do my best reading in print with a pen, so now I guess I have to honor my favorite writers by reading everything they write twice: once in print, and once in digital to discover the bits the publication cut for print.

The bookends approach to reading

Literacy scholar Maryanne Wolf, author of Reader, Come Home, on The Ezra Klein Show describing her “bookends” routine of beginning and ending the day with books:

I begin my day with meditation. And then reading at least 20 minutes a philosophical or theological or spiritual or sometimes political — something that will absolutely take me out of myself and center me, completely center my thinking. Slow it down. It prepares me for, if you will, clearing the deck of whatever detritus from the night or even the day before. And readying myself with a particular mind-set for whatever the day brings.

And then at the end of the day, I do two things that may or may not be helpful to people, especially people with young children. And that is I have to find a way for the world of imagination to take me away from the work of the day. Sometimes it’s films; sometimes it’s novels; but it has to be something truly in the world of imagination for me. And then I end that because I don’t want to be on a screen at the very end of my day.

I often end it with some essay by Montaigne. I mean, that sounds really strange. But he was the first essay writer. And those essays are sometimes really funny, sometimes really boring. But whatever they are they give me a kind of peace that I find in very few places. Wendell Berry, Marcus Aurelius, those are the kinds of people who make me feel the peace at the end of the day is something that is really well, well worth striving for. So I end and I begin each day with books.

I like this a lot. (And I love Montaigne.)

I always read fiction before bed to help put me in the dream state, but I also really enjoy reading in the morning. (Instead of opening Twitter, I try to reach for a book or open the Kindle app.)

If you modded this a little bit and threw in some lunchtime reading, you could do Ray Bradbury’s one essay/one poem/one short story plan. (I might prefer nonfiction in the morning, but Kingsley Amis swore by poetry as a hangover cure.)

This is the time of year people tally how many books they’ve read and set goals for the next year, but if you really want to build a reading habit, I think you’re  better off committing to a certain amount of reading a day vs. a certain number of books read over the year. (Somewhat related: “Quantity leads to quality.”)

A dozen summer reads

A dozen good books I read this summer (more in my newsletter):

  1. Kyle Buchanan’s Blood, Sweat & Chrome: The Wild and True Story of Mad Max: Fury Road was really excellent. I’d put it on the shelf with my other favorite moviemaking books, like Sidney Lumet’s Making Movies and Walter Murch’s In The Blink of an Eye. I also enjoyed Aljean Harmetz’s 1977 book, The Making of the Wizard of Oz, which paired really well with the documentary Light & Magic, and Matt Zoller Seitz’s The Wes Anderson Collection, a deluxe art book that covers the filmmaker’s first seven movies and has a bunch of interviews and behind-the-scenes stuff.
     
  2. A great surprise of the summer was when my 9-year-old and I started playing chess together. David Shenk’s The Immortal Game: A History of Chess is constructed rather brilliantly, alternating chapters of history with the moves of a famous chess game. A perfect introduction for someone like me. I also loved working through the classic Bobby Fischer Teaches Chess, which has a reallyintriguing design: on the right-side spread of the pages, you’re presented with chess problems and then you turn the page for the answer. When you get to the end of the book, you flip it around and the prompts continue. Very clever, almost like a Choose Your Own Adventure book, and I marvel at how it was laid out without desktop software in the late 60s. (I’d love to know more about that era of paperback publishing — I probably should re-read The Electronic Information Age Paperback.)
     
  3. I was a little surprised how much I liked Chuck Klosterman’s The Nineties: A Book. Another heavy dose of nostalgia was Ander Monson’s Predator: A Memoir, A Movie, An Obsession. It made me think a lot about the value of studying something you love in depth.
     
  4. I finally finished Iain McGilchrist’s massive, two-volume 1,400+ page book, The Matter With Things. It was a very centrifugal book, which spun me out to books like Mary Midgley’s The Myths We Live By, and got me interested in creative tensions. But for a much funnier take on scientific reductionism, see cartoonist Zach Weinersmith’s very brief book, Science: Abridged Beyond the Point of Uselessness.
     
  5. Anni Albers’ On Weaving is a gorgeous, singular book, almost centripetal in force. It inspired me to write about the creative tension of “warp and weft.”
     
  6. Julie Phillips’ The Baby on the Fire Escape: Creativity, Motherhood, and the Mind-Baby Problem shot to the top of my list of great books about art and motherhood. Good structure and great sentences.
     
  7. My comfort reading is music books, and I loved Craig Brown’s 150 Glimpses of the Beatles. As someone who considers himself a pretty big Beatles fan, I’m surprised how many of these stories I didn’t know, and the ending was just brilliant. God bless books that stick the landing.
     
  8. Barry M. Prizant’s Uniquely Human: A Different Way of Seeing Autism is a really helpful and hopeful book — even people with neurotypical kids in their life will get a lot out of it. (The book was written with friend of the newsletter, Tom Fields-Meyer, who also wrote Following Ezra, a memoir about raising his autistic son.)
     
  9. Edward Carey’s Plagues and Pencils: A Year of Pandemic Sketches is a collection of Carey’s pandemic drawings, but what really moved me were the mini-essays on drawing and being stuck inside and what it’s like to live in a place you’re ambivalent about living in. (Another good mix of pictures and words: cartoonist Kate Beaton’s memoir, Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands. The book is getting a lot of deserved acclaim, but it is driving me a little nuts how people are positioning this as a “serious” work in opposition to her “lighter” cartoons. The thing I most admired about the book was the way Beaton was able to tackle such serious subject matter while keeping the lightness and looseness of her line.)
     
  10. I finally read Steven Pressfield’s classic The War of Art, which I avoided for years because I don’t like war metaphors. I enjoyed it, and perhaps paradoxically, I enjoyed it in part because it is so unashamedly macho and Boomer-ish? (For example, at one point Pressfield writes, “Can you stand another Tiger Woods story?” ?) It is a mistake to make too much of generations, but The War of Artmade me think about how many of the classic creativity books were written by baby boomers, like Anne Lamott’s Bird By Bird and Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way. (Twyla Tharp’s The Creative Habit, on the other hand, is an outlier. Tharp is from the older “silent generation.”)
     
  11. Iris Murdoch’s The Sea, The Sea tested my patience in a way no book has in quite a while. I got swept away at the beginning, and I went through several of the potential reactions, but I was somehow unable to take my own number one piece of reading advice. These are the most maddening books, the ones that get their hooks in you while also torturing you. My final verdict: I would have liked it more if there was less of it!
     
  12. I finally finished David Toop’s Ocean of Sound. For a collection of writing about some of my favorite music — Brian Eno, Erik Satie, Sun Ra, Kate Bush, Kraftwerk, Aphex Twin, etc. — it took me quite a while to get through. (I started it in the spring.) Maybe because it’s a non-linear book, very collage-like, it’s probably best digested in snippets. Worth a look, though, especially if you love ambient.
     

Filed under: my reading year 2022

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