Austin Kleon

3 tips for a better museum visit

Owen (7) drawing a Bosch at the Blanton

I was intrigued by Gretchen Rubin’s Met Museum Experiment, in which she plans to visit the Met every day of this year that she’s in NYC. (She lives within walking distance.)

Her experiment and her goals — to waken her senses, to learn about art, to explore the building space, to see more clearly, though she doesn’t feel she’s a visual person — got me thinking about how I like to visit museums.

Here are 3 things I do that make my museum experiences much richer:

1. Draw, draw, draw! When you try to draw something, even with just a rough sketch, you really have to look at it, and you notice all kinds of things you don’t by just standing around gawking at it. I always have a pocket notebook and a pencil or two with me. (Many museums don’t let you use pen or marker in the galleries.) I stand and copy the art I like, often just swiping a detail here and there from different pieces. (I write more about drawing and “slow looking” in chapter 5 of Keep Going.)

2. Enlist a small child to guide you through the museum. Kids are alive to the world in ways we aren’t as adults. They’re also lower to the ground, so their perspective is literally different. (More on this: “The 5-year-old docent” and “Borrow a kid.”)

3. Don’t read the label before you look at the art. Watch people the next time you’re in a museum gallery. They almost always look at the labels first! Don’t do this. Use your own eyes first. Let yourself be drawn towards what is genuinely interesting to you. Spend time looking at a piece without having someone else’s words messing with your looking. (More on this in Edward Tufte’s essay, “Seeing Around.”)

Owen (at age 5) exploring the edges of the museum

The portal

This morning a spotlight appeared in the ivy on our back fence. It looked like the rising sun was burning through, opening up some kind of portal. (It was really just a reflection off the window of the house across the street.) I walked out and stuck my hand into the beam to make a shadow puppet.

I wished I could stick my head in and see what was on the other side. Then, just a few minutes later, the sun rose high enough that the portal disappeared.

Here is a book Jules (4) was working on a few days ago:

I think all the time about how much your relationship with your children can be a two-way street — intellectually, emotionally, artistically.

The images you show them in the world enter their minds and come out through their fingers, but, like all artists, the images they make with their fingers also enter your mind and open your eyes to new images out in the world.

Update: I showed the photo at the top of this post to Jules and he dismissed it completely. “That doesn’t look like a portal, that looks like a fence.” HA.

A brief appreciation of John Baldessari

John Baldessari died.

Last night I played my 7-year-old Supermarché’s short documentary about him, “A Brief History of John Baldessari.” (Wonderfully narrated by Tom Waits!) Owen laughed the whole way through it, pronounced it “the funniest video I’ve ever seen,” and requested that we watch it again.

Watch it, it’s great:

Off the top of my head, here are seven things in John Baldessari’s work that I think about a lot:

1. Pictures and words together to make a third thing.

“I’ve often thought of myself as a frustrated writer. I consider a word and an image of equal weight, and a lot of my work comes out of that kind of thinking.”

2. Bringing a sense of lightness and humor to art.

He said he didn’t try to be funny, but he was. “I’m blessed with a well-developed sense of absurdity—it’s what saved me.”

(I love that he had a drawing of Spongebob and a note from Stephen Hillenburg hanging in his studio.)

3. Teaching as making a space for learning to happen.

John Baldessari, “Four Rules,” 1978

“I taught because I needed the money,” he said, “but I tried to keep it interesting by making teaching as much like art as I could.”

(See his brilliant list of assignments in the book Draw It With Your Eyes Closed.)

“I found out that you can’t really teach art, you can just sort of set the stage for it.”

One of my favorite stories about his teaching: he’d have a student throw a dart at a map of LA and they’d all go to the spot and hang out all day for inspiration, taking pictures and videos.

“When I think I’m teaching, I’m probably not,” he said. “When I don’t think I’m teaching, I probably am.”

4. Learning about art from little kids.

“I learned so much about art from watching a kid draw. I taught at the grade-school level. Kids don’t call it art when they’re throwing things around, drawing—they’re just doing stuff.”

5. Salvaging from the mess.

“I’m just messy, I don’t put things away,” he said. “I don’t throw things away in my mind, either; I keep them there.”

From his NYTimes obit:

His father was a salvage dealer, and the family grew its own fruits and vegetables, raised chickens and rabbits, and practiced composting waste. Mr. Baldessari often cited his childhood as a reason he had a hard time throwing anything away.

“It’s hard for me to throw anything away without thinking about how it can become part of some work I’m doing,” he said in an interview for this obituary in 2008. “I just stare at something and say: Why isn’t that art? Why couldn’t that be art?”

“Maybe because I’m tall and gangly, I’ve always considered myself an assembly of parts.”

6. Los Angeles. (Or: how “ugly” cities can be inspiring.)

Palm Trees (Near)” by John Baldessari, 1975

“I live here because L.A. is ugly… If I lived in a great beautiful city, why would I do art?” he said. “I always have to be slightly angry to do art and L.A. provides that.”

7. Subtraction

“Nam June Paik said, ‘What I love about your work is what you leave out’—that was a really nice compliment.”

He even once had all of his work cremated so he could start afresh.

RIP.

PS. After writing this all up, I realized all 7 of these are also things I love about Corita Kent.

Circular time vs. linear time

“Time,” by David Shrigley

In her latest newsletter, Ann Friedman linked to a twitter thread about how people see the passage of time, an essay about calendar synaesthesia, and this passage from Olga Tokarczuk’s 2018 novel Flights:

Once we’re on the bus, she sets out her theory of time. She says that sedentary peoples, farmers, prefer the pleasures of circular time, in which every object and event must return to its own beginning, curl back up into an embryo and repeat the process of maturation and death. But nomads and merchants, as they set off on journeys, had to think up a different type of time for themselves, one that would better respond to the needs of their travels. That time is linear time, more practical because it was able to measure progress toward a goal or destination, rises in percentages. Every moment is unique, no moment can ever be repeated. This idea favors risk-taking, living life to the fullest, seizing the day. And yet the innovation is a profoundly bitter one: when change over time is irreversible, loss and mourning become daily things.

John Baldessari (RIP), from the Goya series

In Keep Going, I advocate for a return to circular time — thinking of the creative life as more of a loop, or a spiral:

The creative life is not linear. It’s not a straight line from point A to point B. It’s more like a loop, or a spiral, in which you keep coming back to a new starting point after every project. No matter how successful you get, no matter what level of achievement you reach, you will never really “arrive.”

100 things that made my year (2019)

  1. Moving back to Texas.
  2. Publishing a book that genuinely felt like the best I could do.
  3. Surviving book tour. Filling seats. Meeting so many lovely people at readings. How many people brought their kids—or their parents! Having a portable routine. Sending the kids postcards. Writing in diners. Art at the airport. My Yeti Rambler. Noise-cancelling headphones. A Tupperware for Tacodeli. Ziplocs for a pastrami from Katz’s Deli. The hearse I spotted in Portland, Oregon. Walking Lake Michigan in Chicago. Watching dudes surf Lake Michigan in Milwaukee. Amtrak! (The Coast Starlight from Seattle to San Francisco — snow in the mountains, meeting kooky people in the dining car and on the observation deck!) Listening to the Magnetic Fields’ Charm of the Highway Strip and watching the Maysles Brothers’ documentary about Bible salesmen for moral support. The Jonas Wood show at the DMA. Walking to an open mic night at a comedy club after my talk in Atlanta. Finding out the Mississippi starts in Minnesota. Dairy Queen with Matt and Jennifer in Iowa after a tornado. The sad gallery of photos I took of my hotel room number. Getting picked up from the airport by the whole family.
  4. Walker Percy’s “problems of re-entry.”
  5. How cheap wine tastes better if you drink it out of a juice glass.
  6. Pansy Luchadores!
  7. My Gritty mug.
  8. Living down the street from a great thrift store.
  9. Buying used CDs until hipsters like me make them expensive again.
  10. $5 crave boxes from Taco Bell and $5 sushi from the grocery store.
  11. Suppressing the internal voices of our Midwestern upbringing and learning to accept hospitality from others.
  12. Playing Gerren’s Wurlitzer while watching the inflatable T-Rex float around his pool.
  13. Gas fireplaces that ignite with the flip of a switch.
  14. All the members of our household being potty-trained!
  15. The color of the sky in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
  16. Driving through the desert from LA to Las Vegas. A tour of The Neon Museum boneyard with Steve Siwinski. The Cocteau Twins’ Heaven or Las Vegas.
  17. The smell of my wife baking sourdough bread. Watching the kids devour it.
  18. Loving what we do in front of the kids. Showing them an alternate world. Giving them the time, space, and materials to make their own. Trying not to give them too much advice. Trying to help them understand we don’t know everything, we just usually know where to look for it.
  19. Tomi Ungerer’s The Three Robbers. Edward Gorey’s The West Wing.
  20. Owls. Goats. Chickens. Big wolf energy.
  21. Vitamin D.
  22. My new office. Keeping sketchbooks in drawers. My old trusty brush pen.
  23. Backing up.
  24. Getting in bed at 9PM.
  25. The Kids section of The New York Times.
  26. Watching Phantom Thread for the sixth time. (And chasing it with Hitchcock’s Rebecca.)
  27. Sandy Cheeks singing about Texas. Buying my wife so many stocking stuffers from Texas Humor.
  28. Watching Gourmet Makes on YouTube with Meg. Getting drunk and making fun of old clips of Jacques Pépin and Julia Child on PBS.
  29. The Red Hand Files. The return of POME. The “Just trust me” links in Anne Helen Petersen’s newsletter.
  30. Our trip to upstate New York. Visiting John Unger’s studio. (Keeping a notebook handy when he’s talking.) The drive from Hudson to Manhattan. How good New York City can be with kids. Sitting in a hotel room in with Meg, drinking, eating pizza, and watching a crane in the street lift gigantic concrete blocks up 50 stories. Seeing Joe Brainard’s collages in person at Tibor de Nagy.
  31. The kids slurping ramen noodles.
  32. California. Driving the outskirts of San Francisco with Ted in the purple limousine. Sunsets over the ocean. Waking up in the Presido. The smell of Eucalyptus. Rodeo beach. Sushi Ran in Sausalito. Mission burritos. Purisma Creek preserve. Grace Cathedral. The moon over the Sutro tower. Los Angeles. Shenkrila. Finding Christoph Niemann’s Hopes and Dreams on my sister-in-law’s coffee table. Watching a seagull on a beach playground in Encinitas pick up a whole In-N-Out drink carrier in its beak and fly away. (And assuming this happens every day.)
  33. Driving the length of Kentucky with my mom. Stopping at Keeneland for BLTs. Seeing a handprinted sign that read: “INDOOR YARD SALE.”
  34. Buc-ees!!!
  35. Remembering that everybody just got here. Remembering that you do not have to be good, you just have to be kind.
  36. A cherry coke and loaded fries at the Alamo Drafthouse.
  37. Taking my pocket notebook to the playground and doodling while my kids play.
  38. Watching two of my favorite writers share their drawings on Twitter: @marykarrlit and @nicholsonbaker8.
  39. Giving up on pourover and just buying a freaking coffeemaker. (My favorite coffee drink: Discovering there’s still coffee in the carafe 3 hours later and adding ice cubes and a splash of Oatly!)
  40. Saint-Saëns’ “The Swan” in Severance Hall.
  41. Owen’s first concert: Carly Rae Jepsen from the opera box at the House of Blues in Cleveland.
  42. Nachos for dinner.
  43. Talking on the phone.
  44. Cherishing every one of your old friends because you’re now at the age when it’s really hard to make new ones.
  45. Bill Callahan at Scholz Garden with Christy.
  46. The monarch butterflies making their way through Austin.
  47. Input and output. Eno’s idea of “import and export.”
  48. Edinburgh, Scotland. Walking the Water of Leith path. Climbing to Arthur’s Seat. The collage show at the Modern. Discovering the work of Eduardo Paolozzi.
  49. Joni Mitchell singing “Coyote” in Rolling Thunder Review.
  50. Walking along the water in Vancouver.
  51. Making a collage or drawing in my diary before I write in it.
  52. Finally understanding the moon phases.
  53. Worrying about lineage instead of legacy.
  54. Thinking about two homeschooled kids named Billie and Finneas making the most-streamed album of the year in their bedrooms.
  55. Prismacolor Ebony pencils and Art Gum erasers.
  56. Watching California Typewriter and later finding a 1980s Smith-Corona at Goodwill for $14.
  57. The week after we moved, when we didn’t have furniture or internet, but we were so happy to be back home we didn’t care. Sleeping on air mattresses. Typing on the typewriter. Sitting on milk crates and playing Uno and checkers. Drinking beer. (The closest these indoorspeople will probably get to camping.)
  58. Bunk beds!
  59. Date days while the boys are at school. Clam chowder at Clarks. Van’s Bahn Mi trailer. Bubble tea and shopping at Kinokuniya.
  60. Getting beyond survival mode.
  61. Staying married for 13 years.
  62. Picking Owen up from school and letting him DJ on the ride home.
  63. Going to the movies when everybody else is at work. (Highlights: riding the #5 bus to Once Upon A Time in Hollywood, a 10 a.m. showing of Knives Out with Meg followed by a sushi lunch, and John Wick 3 with Meg in an old school sticky floor Cleveland suburbs movie theater with popcorn and a Dr. Pepper.)
  64. Going to see movies I don’t even care about just for the company. (Terminator: Dark Fate with Gerren. Star Wars with Hawk. Downton Abbey at the Drafthouse with my mom.)
  65. Good movies at home. Booksmart. Sorcerer. The Favourite. The Worricker Trilogy. Destination Wedding. Herzog’s Nosferatu. The Andy Goldsworthy documentaries, Rivers and Tides and Leaning Into The Wind. Penelope Spheeris’s The Decline of Western Civilization. John Wick 2 in Spanish on Telemundo.
  66. Taking a chance because you’re stuck on an airplane and the movies turning out to be really good: Free Solo. Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse. 
  67. Ignoring baseball all year but watching the World Series, no matter who is playing. (Is that like only going to church on Christmas?)
  68. Overnight road trip to Detroit without the kids. A stop for window shopping and lunch at Zingerman’s in Ann Arbor. Bill Callahan at the Museum of Contemporary Art. Saying hi to Brian Beattie and hoping the next time I said hi to him it would be back in Austin. (It was.) Champagne sent up from the front desk. Hearing “Sticky” in the elevator. Actually sleeping in together.
  69. Downloading MIDI files of symphonies and dumping them into Garageband so Owen can make electronic versions.
  70. Moonlight on my bedsheets.
  71. “The Emperor’s New Clothes.”
  72. Practicing the religion of walking. Walking to Friendsgiving. Walking in cemeteries. Believing that “everything is within walking distance… if you have the time.”
  73. Spending October evenings reading Japanese Ghost Stories and watching spooky old school black and white movies, like The Black Cat and The Old Dark House and stuff from the Universal Monsters set.
  74. Thinking about grace. The Aretha Franklin documentary Amazing Grace. Jeffrey Gibson’s “Amazing Grace.” Leonard Cohen’s state of grace.
  75. Not hoarding art supplies. Filling a notebook or using up a glue stick and going to the store and buying a new one.
  76. Bagels from Nervous Charlie’s.
  77. The opening line of How to Talk So Kids Will Listen & Listen So Kids Will Talk: “I was a wonderful parent before I had children.”
  78. Hanging out with the boys. Taking them to good museums. The Cleveland Museum of Art. The Cleveland Museum of Natural History. The Blanton. Griffith Observatory in LA. Drawing in our sketchbooks. Watching Roadrunner and Spongebob. Laughing at Cinderblock. Running outside to check out the morning moon. Making marble runs. Kicking the soccer ball. Knocking down dominos while filming in slow-motion. Shooting stomp rockets. Wishing on stars. Swim lessons. Listening patiently to my stuttering son while talks about Minecraft because I’m trying to be a good listener and a curious elder. The kids getting into poetry. Making art together. Having Owen letter my book trailer. How mad Jules got when I added the wrong words to his drawings. Block prints. Wearing masks. Making zines. Comics jams. Putting scabs on a banana. (Shudders.) Recording on my old 4-track. Owen naming our band “Song Disease.” His Soundcloud. Trick or treating. (It was actually fun?) Watching Jules draw. Jules singing “Away in a Manger” in the sweetest voice you ever heard. Teaching him how to play the first four notes of the 5th symphony. Jules teaching himself to read. How they get me unstuck.
  79. Screen Time. Kanopy kids.
  80. Having an active library card from 3 different library systems.
  81. Drawing plants.
  82. Leftover Torchy’s queso on a baked potato.
  83. Looking around and asking myself, “Who’s having fun?”
  84. Recording another KUTX DJ set with Art Levy.
  85. Great books. Reading what I want to read. Re-reading all of Charles Portis’s novels. Trusting the simple act of turning pages. Keeping my phone off and reading books we’ve bought for the kids at the breakfast table. Falling asleep to library ebooks on my Kindle Paperwhite.
  86. Keeping a Peanuts desk calendar on the kitchen table for us all to read.
  87. Songs that got me through bad days: Lizzo’s “Juice.” Robyn’s “Honey.” Kacey Musgraves’ “Neon Moon.” New Order’s “Your Silent Face.” The Animals’ “It’s My Life.” Brittany Howard’s “Stay High.” Prince’s “Erotic City.” Prince’s “Xtralovable” in the car.
  88. Less feed, more search.
  89. Good albums. Bill and Billie. Purple Mountains. Working to Neu! ’75 and Cate le Bon’s Reward. Plane rides with Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works Volume II, Kate Bush’s The Sensual World, Harald Grosskopf’s Synthesist, and Deerhunter’s Why Hasn’t Everything Already Disappeared? as the soundtrack. Walking around in the frozen winter to Frank Ocean’s Blonde. Jonathan Richman’s I, Jonathan in the car. Stomping around to Idles’ Joy as an Act of Resistance. The 1999 super deluxe box set.
  90. Being cool with being known for writing about making art more than my actual art.
  91. Mechanics who hate cars.
  92. Kintsugi. Gordon Matta-Clark’s “anarchitecture.”
  93. David Shrigley’s Instagram narrating my life.
  94. Good poems. Stevie Smith’s “Not Waving But Drowning.” “Poem” by Joe Brainard. “Berryman” by W.S. Merwin. “Haiku” by Ron Padgett. “The Best of It” by Kay Ryan. A haiku by Mizuta Masahide. Faith Shearin’s “Scurvy.” Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself, 4.” Jane Kenyon’s “Taking Down The Tree.” Owen reciting Philip Larkin’s “Next, Please.”
  95. Reading about my father-in-law in The New Yorker.
  96. Lynda Barry finally getting a MacArthur.
  97. Amanda Petrusich in The New Yorker. Stephanie Zacharek in Time. Sam Anderson’s profile of Rick Steves. Jody Rosen on the Universal fire. Emma Hunsinger’s “How to draw a horse.” Sean T. Collins’ 365 days of Road House. Malaka Gharib’s mini zines. Tim Kreider’s pieces on Medium. “The Miracle of the Mundane” and “A Scourge of Gurus” from Heather Havrilesky’s What If This Were Enough?
  98. Watching too much TV. The perfect second season of Fleabag. The “Juan Loves Chicken and Rice” episode of Documentary Now! Catastrophe. Derry Girls. Billions. The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. Sex Education. What We Do in the Shadows. Letterkenny. The Righteous Gemstones. Schitt’s Creek. The Crown. Tuca & Bertie. Barry. Rick and Morty.
  99. Adopting a mantra for travel and creative work: “Who cares if I get anywhere?” Accepting that the toughest route is often the best route, that utopia is not a destination, it’s a direction, and that if you’re facing the wrong way, you can always turn around.
  100. These words from Naguib Mahfouz: “Home is not where you are born; home is where all your attempts to escape cease.”

Read my top 100 lists from previous years here.

See you next year

Taking a break. Hope y’all have a safe and happy New Year’s. I’ll be back Jan. 1, 2019 with my annual top 100. (PS. I took some liberties with the La Mancha sign — they actually open back up tomorrow.)

My reading year, 2019

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

The Labyrinth
Saul Steinberg

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

 

Bowlaway
Elizabeth McCracken

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

 

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

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

 

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

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

 

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

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

 

The Library Book
Susan Orlean

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

 

Less
Andrew Sean Greer

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

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

 

How To Do Nothing
Jenny Odell

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

 

The Three Robbers
Tomi Ungerer

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

 

The Love Bunglers
Jaime Hernandez

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

 

Essays After Eighty
Donald Hall

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

 

Gringos
Charles Portis

When children are going through transitional periods, they’ll pull out old toys, old books, old stuffed animals. I do the same. This summer I re-read all of Portis’s novels, which is somewhat easy to do because there are only five of them. (If you’ve never read him, go ahead and start with True Grit, his masterpiece.) Gringos was the biggest surprise, and maybe the most underrated of all of his books? Such an interesting world and so many great sentences. I would love for another novel of his to turn up, but I also sort of hope he’s just kicking back on a porch somewhere in Arkansas, sipping bourbon, and enjoying his life.

 

Good Talk
Mira Jacob

Real talk: I was initially turned off by this book, because at a first glance I thought the clip-art drawings and photo backgrounds were out of laziness. (This is, by the way, the trouble with comics: our initial response as readers is an aesthetic one, and if you only read comics you’re aesthetically attracted to, you will miss out.) But no, this is a smart and heartfelt and well-executed book that wouldn’t work the way it does if it was drawn “better.” The book is great evidence for the cartoonist Seth’s equation that comics = poetry + graphic design.( Other good comic debuts I read this summer: Ebony Flowers’ Hot Comb and Malaka Gharib’s I Was Their American Dream.)

 

Range
David Epstein

This book is both a validation of how I’ve chosen to go about my work and a kick in the pants to not get complacent, stretch out, and go down weird paths. (My friend Ryan Holiday, who finally got his well-deserved #1 NYTimes bestseller this year with Stillness is the Key, suggested, rightly, I think, that it’s a parenting book in disguise.)

 

America
Andy Warhol

A book of Warhol’s photographs matched with his thoughts about the country. “We all came here from somewhere else, and everybody who wants to live in America and obey the law should be able to come too, and there’s no such thing as being more or less American, just American.”

 

The Word Pretty
Elisa Gabbert

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

 

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

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

 

Heidi’s Horse
Sylvia Fein

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

 

The River at Night
Kevin Huizenga

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

 

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

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

* * *

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

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

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