Austin Kleon

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Notes on the art of reading books.

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.”

Books that suck you in and books that spin you out

Here is an idea I love that may or may not be true:

Some books have a centripetal force— they suck you in from other books.

Some books have a centrifugal force — they spin you out to other books.

Moby-Dick, for example, is a book whose force seems to me centripetal: after being pointed to it by other books, I found myself returning to it, again and again. It sucks me in.

The Writer’s Map, on the other hand, a glorious current read of mine, is a book whose force feels centrifugal: two chapters in, and I already have a long list of books and to chase down. It spins me out.

Both kinds of books can be extremely valuable to the reader, and I don’t think one kind is necessarily better than the other. I’m also not sure that these forces are objectively observed. One reader’s centripetal book could be another’s centrifugal, and vice versa. It’s also possible that a book can both suck you in and spin you out.

This, by the way, is not an original theory of mine. I first heard it from my friend Matt Thomas, over a decade ago. “Good movies, I find, are centrifugal,” he once tweeted. “That is, they spin you out—to other movies, ideas, art, people.” He’s also tweeted that he finds Facebook centripetal (it sucks you in) and Twitter centrifugal (it spins you out). 

I asked Matt where he got this idea, of media with centripetal and centrifugal forces, and he pointed me to Susan Douglas’s book about radio, Listening In. I searched the whole book and only found this reference:

“Listening, argues one researcher on perception, “is centripetal; it pulls you into the world. Looking is centrifugal; it separates you from the world.”

(This passage speaks to Murray Schafer on sound, but that’s for another blog post.)

Again, I don’t want to place a value judgment on a book based on its centripetal or centrifugal force, but I do think that a centrifugal book can be of lesser quality and still retain its value, as its value is found in the things it spins you out to.

Matt suggested to me that there’s a third category of work: the work that doesn’t spin you at all, the work that doesn’t move you in any direction, the work that barely has any force to it.

These books are to be avoided.

10 good books I read this winter


What a completely bleak winter. Good riddance. Life always feels a little bit more tolerable when you have a good book to read, and here are 10 books that helped me through, listed in the order I read them:

The Biggest Bluff
Maria Konnikova 

A writer who’s never played poker before learns the game and becomes a champion. Maria is a friend of mine, and I could be making this up, but it feels like one of those books where an author is coming into her peak skills while also finding a perfect subject for those skills. The mantra from Maria’s mentor, poker legend Erik Seidel, is perfect for our times: “Less certainty, more inquiry.”

 

“The Plague Year”
Lawrence Wright

Not a book… yet.  30,000 absolutely riveting words in The New Yorker, one of only a handful of times the magazine has devoted so much space to one piece. Wright is the perfect writer for the job, here: he wrote a pandemic novel that came out a month after lockdown began in the U.S. Wright is expanding the material into a book coming out this summer. (His book God Save Texas was on my favorites of 2019 list.)

 

A Theory of Fun for Game Design
Raph Koster 

This was a new experience for me: I don’t think I’ve ever been more turned off by the design of a book (crude drawings and pesky endnotes) while simultaneously devouring it. “Fun is just another word for learning,” Koster writes. His definition of a good game is “one that teaches everything it has to offer before the player stops playing.” (I wonder if we can apply that to books: A good book is one that teaches everything it has to offer before the reader stops reading. I like that.)

 

The Poetics of Space
Gaston Bachelard

“It is better to live in a state of impermanence than in one of finality.” One of those infuriating books that lose you for a few pages and you start skimming and the very second you’re about to put it down and read something else, a sparkling gem of a sentence appears that you double-underline and scribble in your commonplace book, and gets you to start reading again.

 

One Long River of Song: Notes on Wonder
Brian Doyle

A posthumous collection of an author I wish I’d read when he was alive. Maybe my favorite thing I read all winter. I savored a handful of essays each night in bed. If you’re new to his work, try his ode to the heart, “Joyas Voladoras,” or “The Greatest Nature Essay Ever.” There’s a big archive of his at The American Scholar. (Recommended to me by a newsletter reader. Thanks, Cate!)

 

No One Is Talking About This
Patricia Lockwood

“You’ll be nostalgic for this, too, if you make it.” Think about how hard this is to pull off: a poet writes a bestselling memoir and then follows it up with a novel. (Priestdaddy was on my favorites of 2018, and I expect this to be on my favorites of 2021.) One of the most original writers of our generation.  I will be instantly reading whatever she writes next.

 

Too Loud a Solitude
Bohumil Hrabal

The Czech writer Bohumil Hrabal once worked as a trash compactor, and, according to the critic James Wood, he “rescued books from the compacting machine and built a library of them in the garage of his country cottage outside Prague.” He based his wild, short novel on his experiences, giving them to the fictional narrator, Hanta, who says he “can’t quite tell which of my thoughts come from me and which from my books.” (Same.)

 

In Praise of Shadows
Jun’ichiro Tanizaki

The shortest book on this list, coming in at barely 50 pages. Written by a novelist and first published as an essay in Japanese before WWII. My favorite part is when he writes about the aesthetics of Japanese toilets. Seems like it might be a “problematic” text these days, but it gave me a lot to think about. (Recommended to me by an architect friend. Would pair well with Koren’s Wabi-Sabi.)

 

The Perfect Wave: More Essays on Art and Democracy
Dave Hickey

My third-favorite Hickey collection after Air Guitar and Pirates and Farmers. I read an essay for dessert after lunch each day for a few weeks. There are some really excellent essays here, but they’re mostly front-loaded at the beginning of the book. (I picked this up after reading a galley of Far From Respectable: Dave Hickey and His Art.)

 

Parable of the Sower
Octavia Butler

A dark, brilliant page-turner and very hard to read right now, given that it feels like we’re living in the prequel.

“There is no end
To what a living world
Will demand of you.”

(I wrote more about the book here.)

 

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

How to eat a book

The Reader, collage, 2021

“We are fed by what we attend to.”
—Alan Jacobs

After I made this collage, I read Bohumil Hrabal’s Too Loud a Solitude, a novel in which the narrator saves books from the trash compactor:

[W]hen I read, I don’t really read; I pop a beautiful sentence into my mouth and suck it like a fruit drop, or I sip it like a liquer until the thought dissolves in me like alcohol, infusing brain and heart and coursing on through the veins to the root of each blood vessel.”

In Francis Bacon’s essay, “On Studies,” he wrote:

“Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested: that is, some books are to be read only in parts, others to be read, but not curiously, and some few to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention.”

(In The Pleasures of Reading in An Age of Distraction, Alan Jacobs notes that this passage isn’t about being snobby, really, it’s just about the knowledge that you won’t be able to read everything — the buffet is too big! — so sometimes you need to sample or nibble. And while we’re on the subject of eating books, I feel it’s worth noting that Alan also wrote a book called Breaking Bread With The Dead.)

This method reminds me of cracking open a lobster to get out the meat

In Waiting For God, Simone Weil wrote:

…as far as possible I do not read anything except for that which I am hungry in the moment, when I am hungry for it, and then I do not read… I eat.

When I was in middle school, my English teacher had us copy Eve Merriam’s “How to Eat a Poem” into our notebooks (note my misattribution):

Don’t be polite.
Bite in.
Pick it up with your fingers and lick the juice that may run down your chin.
It is ready and ripe now, whenever you are.

You do not need a knife or fork or spoon
or plate or napkin or tablecloth.

For there is no core
or stem
or rind
or pit
or seed
or skin
to throw away.

Later, I found Mark Strand’s “Eating Poetry”:

Ink runs from the corners of my mouth.
There is no happiness like mine.
I have been eating poetry.

In his memoir, Life Itself, Roger Ebert wrote about how he couldn’t eat any more due to his cancer treatment. He said he didn’t miss eating food as much as conversation at the dinner table.

“Maybe that’s why writing has become so important to me. You don’t realize it, but we’re at dinner right now.”

Bon appétit.

M.L. Pike’s bookplate

Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s Poetry as Insurgent Art

Lawrence Ferlinghetti died this week at 101. I can’t remember when I picked up my copy of Poetry as Insurgent Art. The latest copyright in the back is 2007, so that rules out college.

I was ready to claim the title page as an inspiration for the look of Steal Like An Artist, but if I didn’t get the book until my first trip to City Lights in San Francisco, that was in 2012 on the Steal book tour.

(I do think sometimes that artists tend to claim influence apocryphally — you put your work in the world and then you find all the stuff you should’ve looked at before you made the work.)

The thing I remember most about my first visit to City Lights in North Beach — other than the wonderful poetry room with the big dictionary in the corner — was all the hand-painted Ferlinghetti signs everywhere. I think I liked looking at those as much as I liked browsing the books.

One thing to know about Ferlinghetti is that while best known as a poet and a publisher, what he really wanted to be was a painter. He wrote about it in “More Light”:

I never wanted to be a poet. It chose me, I didn’t choose it. One becomes a poet almost against one’s will, certainly against one’s better judgment. I wanted to be a painter but from the age of ten onward these damn poems kept coming. Perhaps one of these days they will leave me alone and I can get back to painting.

There’s a great story on the City Lights website about how he discovered the basement and the signs you see behind him in the photos above:

Ferlinghetti also discovered signs painted on the walls by a Christian sect that had used the basement for prayer meetings, and on the walls today you can still fragments of them: “Remember Lot’s Wife,” “Born in Sin and Shapen in Niquity,” “I and My Father Are One,” and “I Am the Door.” Ferlinghetti made a deal with the landlord, put in a staircase, persuaded the Chinese Dragon to leave, and expanded the store into the basement.

Surely, those signs must’ve inspired him to make his own.

* * *

Every Friday I pull one of my favorite books off the Bookshelf. To see more of my favorite books, check out my reading years.

Ursula K. Le Guin’s translation of the Tao Te Ching

In the introduction to her translation of Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching, Ursula K. Le Guin writes:

The first Tao Te Ching I ever saw was the Paul Carus edition of 1898, bound in yellow clothe stamped with blue and red Chinese designs and characters. It was a venerable object of mystery, which I soon investigated, and found more fascinating inside than out. The book was my father’s; he read in it often. Once I saw him making notes from it and asked what he was doing. He said he was marking which chapters he’d like to have read at his funeral.

A few years ago, when you could actually shop in a bookstore and talk to strangers, an elderly woman walked up to me in a Half Price Books and said she had nothing to read.

“Well, you’re in the right place,” I said.

We got to talking and discovered we both enjoyed poetry. She said a lot of people in her life were dying so she was reading Lao Tzu.

“Lao Tzu?” I said. “I love Lao Tzu.”

We walked together from section to section. I browsed; she talked. At one point she recited some Robert Frost and some Basho:

Eventually we said our goodbyes. I think of this woman now when I pick up the Tao Te Ching, and I wonder how she’s doing.

“It is the most lovable of all the great religious texts,” Le Guin writes. “Funny, keen, kind, modest, indestructibly outrageous, and inexhaustibly refreshing. Of all the deep springs, this is the purest water. To me, it is also the deepest spring.”

Every poem seems to me a subtweet of our crooked world and our lousy, corrupt leaders.

And Le Guin’s footnotes are perfect:

If you read Le Guin after reading this translation, you realize how many lines from her books could’ve been lifted from Lao Tzu.

This sentence from The Left Hand of Darkness, for example:

“To learn which questions are unanswerable, and not to answer them: this skill is most needful in times of stress and darkness.”

Or this one:

“The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next.”

Le Guin’s version of the Tao Te Ching (more excerpts over at Brain Pickings) was a great solace to me for the past four years, so much so that I put it in the recommended reading for Keep Going. And there’s a fairly new reprinting, which means it’s pretty easy to find.

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Every Saturday Friday* I put one of my favorite books on the Bookshelf. To see more of my favorite books, check out my reading years.

* In the interest of preserving my sanity, I’m cutting my daily blogging, and hopefully all my online time, down to Monday-Friday.

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