Search Results for: log book

Reading recklessly

Monday, January 30, 2023

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 3: When critical consensus and your personal proclivities align, act.

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.

Fire and focus

Thursday, January 26, 2023

One purpose of good writing is to make you not take the things in your life for granted. Two of my favorite writers have recently written about fireplaces.

Elisa Gabbert wrote an essay about wanting a house with a fireplace, a longing she says is “a form of homesickness.”

I love looking at a fire. If there’s a TV on in a bar, I’ve noticed, and there almost always is, the movement pulls your eye to it, no matter how boring what’s on is. A fire is the same, but a fire is never boring. It’s mysterious that it isn’t. Or maybe it’s not mysterious. It’s this miracle life-giving thing you can build in your house, the same thing cave people built in their caves.

Alan Jacobs wrote about the fireplace as a focusing point in a home: “Focus is a Latin word that means hearth — the fireplace that was both literally and metaphorically the center of the Roman household.”

The novelist Kim Stanley Robinson often says that our evolutionary descent predisposes us to be fond of certain actions, like throwing objects at other objects and sitting around a fire telling tales. The latter impulse, he believes, draws us to the movie theater, where we gather in the darkness facing a bright light and enjoy stories — but while that provides a certain form (or simulacrum) of communal connection, it’s the television that becomes the replacement for the family hearth….

When I decided to put our TV over the fireplace, I didn’t realize the symbolic heft of my decision. But one evening, when I mused that it would be easier to show a fireplace video from YouTube than actually build a fire, all the ironies suddenly came home to me.

While I love our pizza and a movie Friday night ritual in front of the TV, there is nothing like a good, real fire.

Our two places for fires: our fireplace and our firebowl

January has been full of cold(er) weather and grandparent visits, and one of my very favorite parts of each visit was building a fire and sitting around it.

As Elisa writes, it is never boring. It somehow brings out the best I everyone. One night my 10-year-old and spent a whole hour carefully rolling up newspaper into long tubes and throwing them on the fire and watching them burn.

One time when we were sitting around a campfire out in west Texas with the clear star-filled sky above us, Jules, then five years old, exclaimed, “It looks like the fire is trying to tell us a story!”

Whether you tell stories around it or not, every fire is a kind of story — there’s a beginning, a middle, and an end.

At the beginning: the anticipation, the starting, the possibility. (See: Nicholson Baker’s A Box of Matches, about a man who starts a fire every morning and sits and thinks.)

In the middle: the excitement of the crack and whip of the flames.

At the end: I love how fire gets really good when the logs burn up and the flames die down and what’s left is the hot coals, perfect for s’mores. (In his book In Praise of Shadows, Jun’ichiro Tanizaki writes, “Without the red glow of the coals, the whole mood of winter is lost and with it the pleasure of family gatherings round the fire.”)

We love fire and we love using fire as a metaphor. (Most recently: Fire of Love.)

We speak of “the fire inside.” I have had trouble focusing lately, and it occurs to me just now, at this very moment, that maybe the reason I haven’t been able to focus is that I don’t have a fire inside.

Sometimes a fire is forced on us from the outside, as with a housefire or a wildfire. (In the writer’s life: a personal tragedy or triumph, a chance encounter, or merely the need for sustenance will light a fire under one’s ass, so to speak.)

But more often than not, our fires inside have to be built. They have to be started, and fed, and maintained.

And you can’t just dump wood in a big pile and expect it to burn. You have to be mindful of the structure of the pieces, to give them proper space and air.

Perhaps, instead of worrying about focusing, I need to worry about building a good fire.

I suspect if the fire is there, the focus will come.

(Input and output.)

Simic and Steinberg

Tuesday, January 10, 2023

The poet Charles Simic died. Here is the author portrait on the back of his book, The Monster Loves His Labyrinth: Notebooks, drawn by Saul Steinberg in 1993.

Simic said walking around New York with Steinberg was as delightful as looking at one of his drawings. They became friends towards the end of Steinberg’s life. (Steinberg died in 1999.)

Simic wrote at least 3 pieces about his friend, all of which shed good light on both the subject and the author: in 2005, a brief review of Steinberg at The New Yorker; in 2006, his introduction for Saul Steinberg: Illuminations, the catalog for a wonderful show I saw on my honeymoon; and in 2012, a long review of Deidre Bair’s biography, “The Loves of Saul Steinberg.”

I get the sense that when Simic wrote about Steinberg he was also writing about himself. (I mean, when isn’t this true? But still.) Simic and Steinberg were both post-war immigrants — from Belgrade and Bucharest, respectively — who came from cultures where west and east collided and the old world clashed with the new.

“Saul said that the reason we understood each other perfectly was that we were both reared in what he called ‘the Turkish delight manner.’” Simic writes about his home in Belgrade, where “in every room, the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian Empires still fought their battles,” and how his native city was surrounded by countryside in which “one could literally take a pick in what century one wanted to spend one’s holidays.”

So they were both artists unstuck in time and place. In Simic’s obituary, Dwight Garner writes that his “work combined a melancholy old-world sensibility with a sensual and witty sense of modern life,” and Simic basically said the same of Steinberg:

He was between worlds, in more ways than one, which is not a bad place to be for someone who wants to elude being classified as this or that. With a lightness of touch that concealed his keen intellect, the depth and complexity of his ideas, he reminds us that the fantastic and the natural, the comic and the serious all belong together. Since most immigrants’ lives, as a matter of course, resemble the Theater of the Absurd, taking such contradictions in stride was perfectly understandable on his part. For many of us, the story of exile ended up being a philosophy of laughter.

Simic said “America appealed to Steinberg as a collage of styles,” which suited him because he already came from a place “so rich in contradictions.” Simic thought of Steinberg as a “comic philosopher,” whose work showed us that “only a comic sensibility can grasp the character of our country and our national myths.”

Simic also said if you couldn’t place Steinberg as an artist, “a look at the writings of Rabelais, Cervantes, Gogol, and Mark Twain may provide a better answer than a visit to an art museum.” (Steinberg himself called himself a “writer who draws,” and even made a piece called Library, which includes a wooden copy of Gogol’s Nose.)

Simic highlighted another thing that about Steinberg the Immigrant: how his displacement made him see the world with fresh eyes.

“He walked out of his front door with eyes wide open as if he had just arrived from a foreign country, rediscovering the street and the city where he lived for many years.”

Being an immigrant made one into a child again, Steinberg said. A child who talked funny and noticed things natives never did. Beauty in America came as a surprise; it seemed to be an accident, and was unlike any experience of beauty he’d had before.

Steinberg did what all great artists do: he made the familiar strange, gave you a new way to look at the everyday.

In his essay, “How To Write a Charles Simic Poem,” in Equipment for Living, the poet Michael Robbins says Simic did the same, “taking Viktor Shklovsky’s concept of defamiliarization (ostranenie) literally.”

Robbins then quotes the first lines of “Fork,” a poem he teaches his students “as an example of the work poetry must do”:

This strange thing must have crept
Right out of hell.
It resembles a bird’s foot
Worn around the cannibal’s neck.

“Forget about self-expression, kid,” Robbins writes. “Learn to see the monster on the dinner table.”

I need to stop at some point, so I’ll end with a quote from the end of Simic’s Paris Review interview when he was asked about how his poetry reminds the reader of the pleasure of the ordinary:

Sausages sautéed with potatoes and onions! It’s also highly advisable to have a philosopher or two on hand. A few pages of Plato while working on a baked ham. Wittgenstein’s Tractatus over a bowl of spaghetti with littleneck clams. We think best when we bring opposites together, when we realize that all these realities, one inside the other, are somehow connected. That’s how the wonder and amazement that are so necessary to both poetry and philosophy come about. A “truth” detached and purified of pleasures of ordinary life is not worth a damn in my view. Every grand theory and noble sentiment ought to be first tested in the kitchen—and then in bed, of course.

Emphasis mine. RIP.

100 things that made my year (2022)

Thursday, December 29, 2022

Disneyland with the family. Dole Whip. Hotel room lightsaber battles. Best vacation ever.
Getting my studio built. Graffiting the inside of the walls with the boys before they blew in insulation. The deadbolt lock on the studio bathroom door. Panicking about ever being able to actually make things in there, but then settling in.
Buying a bicycle with my friend Christy and falling in love with riding. Logging over 2,000 miles since February. How social it turns out to be. Getting a biker gang together. (Shout-out to Hank, Greg, Marty, and Gerren.) Getting overtaken by a fixie gang who shouted, “Lend us one of those gears, bro!” How bikers look out for each other when somebody is broken down or has a flat. How riding my bike is a creative act that re-enchants my world. Biking to Bookpeople and Black Pearl for Indie Bookstore Day. Riding downtown on the Shoal Creek trail through Pease. The Hike and Bike trail around Town Lake. The “EMBRACE BEWILDERMENT” sign on the Johnson Creek Greenbelt trail. Braking for armadillos on Walnut Creek. Turtles and gigantic snakes in the 183 retention pond. Teaching myself to draw a bicycle from memory. Learning to fix flat tires and clean chains. Clive Thomspon’s writing on biking. Grant Petersen’s Just Ride and his “Bicycle Sentences” illustrated by Betsy Streeter. (Just made into a journal.) David Byrne’s Bicycle Diaries. All the metaphors biking provides: how you need to look where you want to go and how riding up a hill is easier than riding into the wind. A tree I saw growing through an engine block. The hawk on top of the bike sign. How the bike is a machine that makes you feel more human.
Driving the Pacific Coast Highway from San Francisco through Big Sur and down to LA.
Releasing the 10th anniversary edition of Steal Like An Artist.
The incredible newsletter community we’re building.
Pool season. The zen of pool maintenance. Anne Enright reading John Cheever’s “The Swimmer.” Dragonflies landing on my pencil while I’m marking up a book. Changing music, sending texts, and answering phone calls on my Apple Watch while floating. Even the racoons partying on the sun shelf in the night.
The owls in our back yard. Watching Merlin’s box and Minerva and the owlets. Being on Facebook solely so I can check in with my Central Texas Screech Owl group. Our “two owl” Christmas.
Giuseppe the cactus.
Long walks with Meghan. Doing a loop or a circuit instead of straight out and back.
Driving to Florida in February for our first real vacation since the pandemic. The long bridge that goes over the wild swamps in Louisiana. Staying the night in New Orleans. City Park and the Sculpture Garden. Coffee and Beignets. Soft shell po-boys in Slidell. Buying the kids a new Casio keyboard to play. Swimming in the heated pool. Sunsets over the Gulf of Mexico. (And how most everybody on the beach leaves just after the sun goes down and misses the really beautiful color changing in the sky.) Florida pines.
Drawing and writing with my brush pens in my diary. Mixing inks and making custom CMYK brushes.
A fall trip to Pennsylvania. How good a mood Philly was in after game one of the World Series. Riding an elevator with John Fetterman. Rittenhouse Square. The art museum. Kelly Drive and the foliage. Driving to Lancaster with two hours of Iggy Pop and Brian Eno. The central market and record shopping. An incredible day at Longwood Gardens. How it was so autumnal a leaf fell in my salad. Stopping into the Brandywine Museum of Art and signing all my books they sell in the gift shop. How at the Philly airport rental return, waiting with a huge group of people for the shuttle, I realized I could simply cross the street and enter the terminal.
Taking the kids to see Kraftwerk.
Setting up the music room in my old office, a room I previously hated, which now I love. A full drum set! Amps! Guitars! Keyboards! Jam sessions.
Buying a telecaster.
Trying out a bidet seat, and then asking Meg to install one on every toilet in the house.
Helping Meg build garden beds in the side yard. Watering the garden. Looking for new growth. Proplifting and how “stolen plants always grow.” Going to nurseries, which are often as pretty as a park. Gardening signs. Lots of trips to Lowes. Finding ideas in notebooks like sifting potatoes out of dirt. Thinking about the creative seasons. Judy Mowatt, “The Gardener.” The compost signs in the community garden. The purple cabbages at Shoal Creek Nursery.
The zen of yard work.
“Comfort work”: work you do when you don’t know what else to do.
As your body starts falling apart, the deep satisfaction of repairing things.
Fixing a shower valve with Thor Harris. His albums Bonnie Rides With Us and Doom Dub II.
The absolute rush you get these days from being around someone who’s competent.
Going to my first Austin FC game with Julien. (On sports fandom, see: Roger Angell on “the business of caring.”)
The Snow Cone machine my kids got me for my birthday.
Thinking about my grandmothers and how they let me know who they were.
Doing gigs again. Being out in the world. Meeting people in the signing line again.
Playing chess with Owen. Reading David Shenk’s The Immortal Game: A History of Chess and paging through Bobby Fischer Teaches Chess.
Thinking about how the two hobbies I got into this year — bikes and chess — were hobbies that kept my favorite artists from making art — Kraftwerk and Duchamp, respectively. (Also: How easy it is to mistake “riding” and “writing.”)
Pizza night and a movie with the family. Godzilla! King Kong! Toy Story 2. Pixar’s “Your Friend The Rat.” Mickey Mouse shorts. Angry Birds movies. Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. One Hundred and One Dalmations. The Little Mermaid. Tron. Creature from the Black Lagoon. Monsters, Inc. Turning Red. Luca. Coco. Moana. Destroy all Monsters! Ponyo. Beauty and the Beast. Aladdin. The Wizard of Oz. (The autistic boy in Uniquely Human who asks everyone he meets, “Are you a good witch or a bad witch?”) Owen’s film criticism: “I hate movies with a lesson.”
Watching Bluey and SpongeBob and Gravity Falls with the boys. Jules’ Dipper Hat.
Drawing exquisite corpses with the kids.
Playing Wordle with the kids.
Legos. Jenga.
Duets at the piano. “Lost Woods” and “We Don’t Talk About Bruno.”
Jamming with Owen on drums.
How it’s easier to read what you don’t want to read to them if you do it in a silly accent.
All the funny things my family members say. How I said, “I don’t have a girlfriend, either, so you and I have something in common,” and Owen replied, “I HATE that we have something in common.” How I told Jules I used to be a librarian and he asked, “Before you got fired?” When Meg said, “I don’t want to wear what I wore in the 90s, I want to wear what I couldn’t get my parents to buy for me to wear in the 90s!”
How Owen reads the NYtimes kids section religiously on the last Sunday of every month.
Khalil Gibran, “On Children.”
The blessing and the curse of school. The total chaos of being a lunch monitor. The adorable valentines the kids brought home from their classmates. How helpful occupational therapy was for Jules. Teaching zine workshops to my sons’ classes: “How to judge a book by its cover” for the fourth graders, and Thanksgiving zines for the second graders. The tenderness of school drop-off. How luxurious it is to have a quiet house, but how good it is to have them safe at home at the end of the day.
Halloween. Watching spooky movies. Rebecca. The Mystery of the Wax Museum. The kids’ inflatable Godzilla and Among Us costumes.
iOS’s “Live Text” function, which seems like magic to me. Discovering the timeline function on Google Street View.
The old Ukrainian woman who offered a Russian soldier sunflower seeds to put in his pockets so flowers would grow when they put him in the ground.
Burnet Road delights. T-Loc’s burritos. Burgers at Billy’s. The bento boxes and onigiri and Aerial cheddar cheese corn snacks I get at the Asahi Japanese grocery. Choo Sando. Bahn mi and crawfish from Le Bleu. The chicken sandwich at Fat City Stacks. The little paper cars the kids’ meals come in at Top Notch. More P. Terry’s than I care to admit. The ever-reliable Taco Deli.
Securing takeout bags on the passenger side with a seatbelt.
Trilobites!
Music, music, music. Big Thief, “Time Escaping.” The Everly Brothers. Steve Lacy, Gemini Rights. Sturgill Simpson, “I Don’t Mind.” Cass McCombs, Heartmind. Phyllis Dillon. Cate Le Bon, Pompeii. Walter Martin, “New Green.” Oren Ambarchi’s Shebang. Patricia Wolf, See-Through. Low, “What Part of Me?” Lou Reed, American Poet. Lower Dens, Nootropics. Bobby Parker, “Watch Your Step.” Prince and the Revolution: The Purple Rain Tour. The Rick James documentary, Bitchin‘. Some Girls: The Stones live in Dallas. Ibibio Sound Machine, Electricity. Albert King, Born Under A Bad Sign. Band of Gypsys. The phaser pedal on 70s country songs. Leonard Cohen on ACL in 1989. Music theory videos on YouTube. Bogdanovich’s 4-hour Tom Petty documentary. Songs for Drella. Thinking about David Berman and songs as shelters in time. My Purple Mountains hat. The best song of 2022: Nadja and Lazlo’s “Who’ll Come First on the Wedding Night?”
Listening to the radio. KUTX. KOOP’s “Jamaican Gold.” How Britt Daniel says he has a room in his house with the radio always on.
Napping to music, letting it sink in subconsciously.
Falling asleep in the hammock.
Staying up too late watching the free music video channels on our TV. How Meg knows all the words to 90s hip-hop. Dying laughing at this performance of “Come On Eileen.”
Going to bed at 9:30.
Playing Minecraft on the Switch with the kids. Mario Kart. Return to Monkey Island.
Reading books in the bathtub.
The Libby app and ebooks from the library.
TV. White Lotus. South Side. Slow Horses. Bad Sisters. Winning Time. Reservation Dogs. Barry. (“You don’t want to be the real you in the wrong way.”) How To With John Wilson. Hacks. Atlanta. Mo. Severance. Tokyo Vice. (“Tell me whyyyy!”) The Righteous Gemstones. Somebody Somewhere. The Offer. The Andy Warhol Diaries. The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. (Fictional Lenny Bruce’s advice: “Don’t plan! Work! Just work and keep working.”) George Carlin’s American Dream. What We Do in the Shadows. The Beavis and Butt-Head reboot. The Bear. The Old Man. All Creatures Great and Small. Our Flag Means Death. Dickinson. Better Call Saul. Better Things. Light and Magic. Derry Girls. Grand Designs.
Getting a cheap surround system from Costco.
Movies. Repo Man. (“The two hemispheres are fundamentally at odds.”) Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday. Cocteau’s La Belle et le Bete. Prey. Top Gun 2. Tony Hawk: Until The Wheels Fall Off. Bones Brigade: An Autobiography. Beavis and Butt-Head Do The Universe. Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping. Much Ado About Nothing. Gremlins. Lessons of Darkness. Fire of Love. Roadrunner. Jackass Forever. The Automat. The Wolf of Wall Street. Everything Everywhere All The Time.
Rubbernecking whenever we heard a fender bender at the end of our street. Kids getting stickers from the firefighters.
Taking Jules to the Texas Book Festival, meeting Mac Barnett and Jon Klassen, then walking to the skate park to draw.
Mixing cocktails with Campari and Averna. The faux-scientific beakers Ted bought us to freeze/gift cocktails.
Codeine.
Hanging out with my mom and playing Scrabble, drinking whiskey sours, her teaching me how to mend.
Knowing dad shit like how to jump a car, but also how much dad shit you can learn in 5 minutes on YouTube.
Visiting Aaron Pratt at the Ransom Center. The TV/VCR combo and vintage VHS tapes — including Repo Man! — in his office.
When Matt Bucher brought me a big bag of stationery goodies that included Musgrave 600 NEWS pencils.
Owen turning 10. Meg turning 40. Mom turning 70.
Taking Meg to Clark’s for her 40th birthday and stumbling onto a Lance Lescher show at Stephen Clark Gallery.
My elder millennial friends who like to talk on the phone and my boomer friend who only wants to text.
Looking for better questions instead of easy answers: “And then what?” “Why am I talking?” “Would I do it tomorrow?” “Are you helping?” Editing my books down to only the questions.
Thinking about creative tensions. How resistance is necessary for creative work. Finding energy in the gap between who you are and who you want to be. William James’ idea of “inner heterogeny.” How the writer must be (at least) four people.
Juxtaposing two quotes in my commonplace diary. “The simplest cut.” Lawrence Weschler’s “Taxonomy of Convergences.”
Learning more about Mexican culture. Ex-voto paintings.“Tecnicos y Rudos.” Lourdes Grobet’s Lucha Libre: Masked Superstars of Mexican Wrestling.
Anni Albers’ On Weaving. Warp and weft. Making weavings out of Hershey Kisses flumes.
Despite everyone saying that Austin sucks now, finding great little pockets in the city, keeping your friends close, and enjoying how often people you know come through town or visit.
Having your spots. Taking pretty much everyone who visits to Mi Madre’s.
How great the city is on holidays, when everybody clears out, and it’s so quiet.
Thinking about how money can be a stabilizing or a de-stabilizing agent, depending on how much you do or don’t have. How a sign of new wealth coming into a neighborhood is constant ruins. Avoiding affluenza. Stepping off the hedonic treadmill. Being okay with (more than) enough. Re-naming Teslas “Musk Mobiles.”
Trying to get better at interviewing. Interviewing Oliver Burkeman. Sarah Ruhl. Tim Kreider. Grace Farris. Edward Carey.
Kevin Kelly’s advice: “Copying others is a good way to start. Copying yourself is a disappointing way to end.”
Celebrating my favorite writers’ birthdays, like Montaigne and Thoreau.
Splooting squirrels. Squirrels dropping pecans on our metal roof louder than bombs. The mean white squirrel who bullies the other squirrels.
The trilling toads around the house that come out when it rains.
Making collages. Starting from scraps. Letting materials lead. Not knowing what you’re doing. How one thing leads to another.
Being okay with the fact that being a writer is like “having homework every night for the rest of your life.”
A phrase I saw on a vintage can of tomatoes: “Labor and wait.”
Coming to the edge of my map. Knowing that the map is not the territory.
How easy it is not to have an opinion or a comment. How Hanif Abdurraqib says, “My superpower is that I mind my own business.”
Saving my spiraling out for my diary.
Stopping to smell the Mountain Laurel.
Finding new ways to answer the question, “How are you?” Such as: “I’m feeling like a cheeseburger with no cheese” (Owen made that up) or “I am riding in the bike lane on trash day.”
Embracing “dead week” — the no man’s land on the calendar between Christmas and New Year’s Eve.
Making a fire in the fireplace. Spending an hour with Owen watching how newspaper burns.
Advice from Mel Brooks: “Say yes and never do it.”
Gossiping with neighbors.
Surviving COVID.
Passing my kidney stone.
Walking away from things that aren’t right.
A clear calendar.

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Read my top 100 lists from previous years here.

My reading year, 2022

Wednesday, December 28, 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.