As Jon Klassen put it, “Ruth Krauss just giving it away” in a page from How To Make an Earthquake (1954). Drawings by her husband, Crockett Johnson.
Letting books talk to each other
A few years ago, I wrote a post about reading more than one book at a time. I wrote, “One of my favorite ways [to generate new writing] is to have 3 or 4 books going at the same time and let them talk to each other.”
Someone recently asked me what it looks like in practice. I am loathe to muddy it any further with explanation, but here goes.
A mundane and far-from-perfect example: I was reading Tree Abraham’s Cyclettes and she mentioned the brain’s “default mode network,” something I don’t know anything about. I may or may not have paid much attention to it, but I had just finished John Higgs’ William Blake vs. The World and remembered that he wrote about it, too.
Now, if I’d just read about default network mode in either of those books, solo, I might’ve just ignored it and moved on with my life, but the fact that two books in succession mentioned it made me think I needed to investigate it further.
Lo and behold, Steven Johnson wrote about it for the NYTimes several years ago and also in his book Farsighted. Now I have another book to dip into, and three books on different subjects talking about the same thing. That’s enough for a blog post, at the very least.
In this case, it was chance and happenstance, but you can sort of tweak your reading life in such a way that these sort of things happen more often. If you read books on different topics and different genres and different formats at the same time, your brain can’t help but find weird connections between them.
This is so obvious to me that it hardly seems worth going into, but I realize it might not be so obvious to others.
Reading this way is a form of “input as collage,” and of course, you can take a multi-media approach to it: I remember last year I watched Kenneth Branaugh’s Much Ado About Nothing while I was reading Iris Murdoch’s The Sea, The Sea, and I can’t identify exactly how, but they spoke to each other in some way that glued them together in my mind. (Later, I found out that Murdoch was a big Shakespeare freak.)
Another example: Yesterday’s blog post on Simic and Steinberg exists simply because Charles Simic died and I was going around the house trying to find all the books in the house of his I could find.
On the back cover of The Monster Loves His Labyrinth: Notebooks I noticed that Simic’s portrait was drawn by Saul Steinberg. A quick google of “Charles Simic” and “Saul Steinberg” made me remember that I have a catalog of Steinberg’s with an intro by Simic. So I pull that book out and read the intro and find out they were friends. A few more googles and I have everything Simic wrote about his friend (I think) at my fingertips.
As I read those pieces, they started talking to each other, and suddenly I had something to write about.
Buy books for the holidays
Heads up that tomorrow, Dec. 7th is the last day to order signed and personalized copies of my books from Bookpeople.
I’ll be signing all the orders this weekend and I’ll sign as many as you buy! Get a whole set for the office, if you want. (Please be sure to follow their instructions and include personalization details in the comments of the order.)
If you don’t care about personalizations but still want to place a bulk order, try Porchlight.
My books make great gifts, but sometimes people want to know which books they should buy for whom, so here’s a little guide.
- My most popular book overall is Steal Like an Artist, and it’s good for everybody, teenager and older. The 10th anniversary hardcover edition is perfect as a gift.)
- For people trying to get their work out there, there’s my book about self-promotion for people who hate self-promotion, Show Your Work!
- For readers who are struggling or further along on their path, Keep Going.
- The Steal Like an Artist Journal is a notebook of creative prompts that pairs well with any of my books.
- For the more artsy or lit’ry folks, there’s my “deep cut” and first book, Newspaper Blackout.
If you have a local indie bookstore you can support, that’s always the best place to buy. (The Painted Porch in Bastrop, TX also has signed copies.)
For something extra special, give a gift subscription to my newsletter.
Happy holidays!
Mapping your books
A list is one thing, but making a map of the books you’ve read often reveals connections between them that you might have missed. (More in Tuesday’s newsletter: “A cluster map of books.”)
Fore-edge painting and indexing
The outside edge of a book’s pages opposite of the spine is called the “fore-edge.” Like many things that are neglected or overlooked, it’s a place of great creative potential. Check out this video with fore-edge painter Martin Frost:
I don’t usually do all that much with the fore-edges of my books, except for my notebooks, which I sometimes index by rubbing ink or pencil over the page edges of some sections and labelling them. (See the logbook above.)
Most recently it occurred to me that I could use fore-edge indexing as a way to track the structure of a book. I was reading a book and it was going splendidly and then all the sudden I got bogged down. I suspected it had something to do with pacing and chapter length. So I did a fore-edge index and soon I had visual evidence of my suspicion: swelling chapters broke up the flow. (I could probably find similar evidence based on where I happened to dog-ear a page.)
This might be a good exercise for writers: make a fore-edge index of some of your favorite books, and see how they are structured and paced. For books that alternate narratives or subjects, you can use different colors. (See above.)
Filed under: marginalia
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