Austin Kleon

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Short was good in a book

“Short was good in a book.”
—Charles Portis, Gringos

With the kids in the house all day I am finding it terribly hard to concentrate when reading. Hopefully you’re the opposite, and having a fine time, tackling Moby-Dick or War and Peace or Ducks, Newburyport or whatever. But, if not, here, copy and pasted from an old newsletter, are some of my favorite short books:

Novellas:

Short stories:

Lectures:

Memoir:

Poetry:

Comics:

Art:

Staying sane:

Biography:

Essays:

You could read many of these in a single afternoon. Happy reading!

(Buy from your local bookstore or Bookshop if you can.)

The best distance learning is reading a book

With all the talk of educational technology in this era of social distancing, I am reminded of Neil Postman, who said, “The act of reading a book is the best example of ‘distance learning’ ever invented.”

He put it this way in Building a Bridge to the 18th Century:

To use the term “distance learning” to refer to students and a teacher sending e-mail messages to each other may have some value, but it obscures the fact that the act of reading a book is the best example of distance learning possible, for reading not only triumphs over the limitations of space and co-presence but of time as well.

Crack open a book and you can not only learn from someone who’s several thousand miles away, you can learn from someone who’s several thousand years away.

(And even though I love the convenience of my Kindle, I try not to forget that paper is a wonderful technology.)

5 good books I read this winter


It was a light, lovely winter for me (well, most of it) and I spent it reading at whim.

Here are five books that stand out:

A Little History of the World 
E.H. Gombrich

Gombrich is probably best known for his art history survey, The Story of Art, but he wrote this book before, in pre-Nazi Germany. When a textbook publisher hired him to translate a history book for kids, he thought it was so bad he could write a better one himself. So he read all day and wrote a chapter each night until the book was done. I love the way he starts and begins the book with visual metaphors to help kids picture history. [Buy indie]

 

Boom Town
Sam Anderson

Sam is one of my favorite working writers, but I didn’t really care much about Oklahoma City or basketball when I picked it up. And yet, I loved this book. While reading it I was like, “Is this as good as I think it is or is Sam nuts in the same way I am nuts or have I been driven nuts by reading it?” One thing I cannot get enough of is the sense when you’re reading a book that the author had a blast writing it — that they let themselves get carried away and went for the ride and wrangled the thing in just the right way so you could strap in, too. [Buy indie]

 

Normal People
Sally Rooney

Every year I try to read a bestseller that everybody’s talking about. Last year it was Educated, this year it was Normal People. It’s easy to see why Educated was a hit — it’s written well, it has an Oprah-style arc de triumph, and it confirms the dominant cultural narrative about the importance of formal education. But this book? The whole time I read this book, I was thinking, “Why am I so into this?” I think it’s the way Rooney manages to describe contemporary emotions (ew), but, like Educated,  I also think there’s magic in the pacing and the chunking. Hey man, no need to overthink it: If you’re turning the pages, it’s good. [Buy indie]

 

Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead
Olga Tokarczuk

Combination detective story and fairy tale with a huge dose of astrology  and William Blake thrown in. (It gets its title from Proverbs of Hell.) A great winter’s tale. Definitely picking up her novel Flights soon — loved this excerpt. [Buy indie]

 


Mystery Train
Greil Marcus

If I had read this book when I was 19, it would probably hold a super high place in my personal canon. The thing that holds me back from outright adoration is my (perhaps unreasonably) low opinion of Elvis. I love the parts about the tension between artist and audience. I will probably go back and try to get through Lipstick Traces again this year. [Buy indie]

It strikes me, looking at this list, that every single one of these books was read on my Kindle. I think this is the first time this has happened and I don’t know how to feel about it. On the one hand, I much prefer reading on paper, with a pencil, but on the other, ebooks are so convenient, they allow me to flit and flirt and read promiscuously.

By the way, here are 5 other good books I read this winter:

More of my reading years here.

More books I wrote (that I can’t read)

Keep Going was released in Italian this week. I love the form factor, which is just slightly slimmer than the original.

Meanwhile, the Russians continue to produce amazing, gigantic hardcover editions:

I was delighted to see that when you remove the dust jacket of the Japanese edition, it reveals one of Owen’s robots from chapter 4:

As I’ve mentioned before, I don’t really have anything to do with foreign editions, so not only am I sometimes surprised by the results, I often don’t even know when a new edition comes out!

Others on my radar: the Dutch edition (love their trailer), Sigue Adelante, and Sigue Avanzando.

Have you thought about writing a book for parents?


In this week’s mailbag, Nitzan asks: “Have you thought about writing a book for parents? About raising creative kids? I would buy it!”

Yes, and to be 100% honest, I could probably sell that book tomorrow for a bunch of money.

I’ve toyed with writing a book called Parent Like A Librarian, which would have a very simple premise: Most parents conceive of themselves as teachers when they would be much better off thinking of themselves as librarians who provide their children with the time, space, materials, and resources to grow into whatever they want to become.

But, oh, I am so loathe to write about parenting!

For one thing, I’m suspicious of “parent” as a verb and I wonder if it does more harm than good.

I also worry that by writing about parenting, I exclude people without kids, whereas, if I write about what I’ve learned about creative work by being around my kids, people in my audience without kids can learn something, too.

Besides, what I’ve learned about parenting from my boys can be summarized by the late Tibor Kalman in Perverse Optimist: “Your children will smash your understanding, knowledge and reality. You will be better off.” (Although, honestly, I’m not so sure about the second sentence.)

Or, here’s Sarah Ruhl, in 100 Essays I Don’t Have Time To Write:

There were times when it felt as though my children were annihilating me… and finally I came to the thought, All right, then, annihilate me; that other self was a fiction anyhow. And then I could breathe. I could investigate the pauses.

Or Jonathan Coulton:

I compare the process to becoming a vampire, your old self dies in a sad and painful way, but then you come out the other side with immortality, super strength and a taste for human blood. At least that’s how it was for me. At any rate, it’s complicated.

What I’m convinced of: Rather than being “the enemy of art,” your children can inspire you to go new places in your art. Hanging around a four-year-old can get you unstuck. And having to be responsible for the creative atmosphere in which your kids grow up can make you re-think your own creative atmosphere. (After all, the atmosphere you create for them is the one you’re creating for yourself.)

Becoming a parent is an opportunity to think about who you’ve become, who you wanted to be, and, if you need to, course-correct. This is what’s so fucking hard about it: You not only have to take a cold look at yourself in the mirror and become the kind of person you want your kids to be, if you have biological children, you spend all day around little people who are living mirrors. And they don’t necessarily reflect back at you the parts of you want to see! (There have been several nights where I’ve turned to my wife and said, “Do you ever feel like they got our worst parts?”) Lou Reed’s song could be about a child instead of a lover: “I’ll be your mirror / reflect what you / in case you don’t know.”

Becoming a parent is also an opportunity to treat yourself more tenderly, to forgive yourself, to forgive your own parents, and move on: Live your own life, love what you love, care what you genuinely care about, and give yourself the freedom and opportunity to go about your days in a way that unlocks who you really are.

Oh god, I’m writing about parenting.

—Austin

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