Austin Kleon

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If you are having trouble reading…

The stack of books on my wife’s nightstand

If you are having trouble reading right now, here is what works for me:

1. Keep a book at the breakfast table and read it in the morning instead of looking at the news on your phone.

2. Be promiscuous. Read more than one book at a time until one pulls you into monogamy.

3. Quit more books than you finish. Read lots of short books until you work up the concentration for longer ones.

4. Read poetry! First thing in the morning! It’s perfect with a cup of coffee.

5. Read trash! No guilty pleasures!

6.  Read old books! Read old favorites! (Every time you re-read a book you’re reading a new book.)

7. Read to your kids! If you don’t have kids, FaceTime someone else’s kids and read to them! (Optional: Steal books from your kids and read them.)

8. STOP READING BOOKS THAT AREN’T DOING IT FOR YOU. SERIOUSLY. STOP.

9. Try writing a book. It’ll make you want to quit and read instead. (“Read more than you write, live more than you read.”)

10. If you can’t read a book right now give yourself a break and just watch TV.

Circling the airport

John Waters called Anne Truitt’s Daybook “an intelligent, simple and moving record of what an artist’s day-to-day life is really like,” but when I started reading it last week it wasn’t really doing it for me.

My friend Julien has a rule that if a book/movie/etc. is “supposed” to be good but no one he personally knows has ever talked about it, he retains a certain amount of healthy skepticism.

So, as I often do, I did a “People You Follow” search to see if anybody I follow had written anything about it.

My search turned up this lovely thread by game designer Frank Lantz, who was a student of Truitt’s:

One of the things Anne taught me that I’ll never forget is the idea that you don’t need to immediately pass judgment on every new artist you encounter. You can let them “circle the airport”. You don’t have to bring them in for a landing or send them away, just let them circle.

And there you have it. Same goes for books: No need to rush to judgment right away. Just set it aside for a bit and pick up something else. A book that isn’t for you right now might be for you tomorrow.

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.)

How to read like Rossellini

José Guadalupe Posada

In the latest edition of his new newsletter, Subtle Maneuvers, Mason Currey details filmmaker Roberto Rossellini’s nighttime reading habit:

I don’t sleep much at night. I read in bed, always a number of books at the same time, often six or seven. I find it tiring to concentrate on a single book, to wait for the end… .

While reading, I have the courage to note on the books’ margin the ideas that come to me. Later, before shelving the books, I make up some bibliographic cards. I make signs with different colors so I know what’s most important, less important, what’s complementary, what’s basic, et cetera. And I also write down the thoughts that come to me, impressions absolutely virgin. I reread my notes on the books’ pages and I write them down in notebooks under headings divided by letters A, B, C, D. Then I write ‘human,’ ‘education,’ ‘thievery,’ et cetera. These cards, later on when I need them, will permit me to reconstruct a certain type of person.

The filmmaker claimed he annotated over 9000 books and that his nighttime reading — gathering “an extraordinary amount of information” — gave him the freedom to be improvisational on set during the day.

Rossellini practiced at least 3 of my favorite methods for turning reading into writing:

1. Promiscuous reading, or reading more than one book at a time.

2. Marginalia, or reading with a pencil.

3. Revisiting your notes and copying them for later use.

It occurs to me that I would read a whole Daily Rituals-style book called Reading Rituals, about how great minds read. (Then again, that’s probably what I’m doing with this reading category.)

On reading more than one book at a time

Books on my breakfast table

There are many different ways to read, and many different ways of reading that generate new writing. (For example, reading with a pencil.) One of my favorite ways is to have 3 or 4 books going at the same time and let them talk to each other.

Here’s Octavia Butler:

I generally have four or five books open around the house—I live alone; I can do this—and they are not books on the same subject. They don’t relate to each other in any particular way, and the ideas they present bounce off one another. And I like this effect. I also listen to audio-books, and I’ll go out for my morning walk with tapes from two very different audio-books, and let those ideas bounce off each other, simmer, reproduce in some odd way, so that I come up with ideas that I might not have come up with if I had simply stuck to one book until I was done with it and then gone and picked up another.

Here’s Richard Powers:

I like to keep one work of fiction and one of nonfiction going at once, and I’ll use them to triangulate against each other to conjure up some third space.

Reading this way is a form of input as collage.

Like walking through the city all day, you’re bombing your brain with lots of different inputs, recognizing patters, and pulling a thread of meaning out of it all.

My kids do this naturally, by the way. They’re very promiscuous with their books, flitting from one to the next and sometimes back again. (I heard from one reader who said she was admonished in elementary school for reading this way. Her teacher told her parents she should have no more than two…)

This method is easily transferred to listening, watching, etc.

More: “Storing up images”

Towards a fuller picture of the reading life

I’ve been thinking lately about how only sharing the books you’ve finished or the books you recommend is not the full picture of your reading life.

There’s the reading you actually get done, and then there’s the reading you want to do. The books you check out of the library. The books you buy that pile into stacks on your nightstand.

The books you threw across the room!

I always enjoyed how Nick Hornby listed BOOKS READ and BOOKS BOUGHT in his “Stuff I’ve Been Reading” column for The Believer.

(One thing I think Kate Bingaman-Burt’s Daily Drawings do so well is show how purchases can add up to a picture of a person.)

Because there are so many more books I want to point to other than the ones I myself have read, I’m thinking about whether I can steal this read/bought format for the newsletter…

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.

Read old books

A page from chapter 7 of Keep Going, in which I make the case for reading old books and stealing old stuff.

“I find the annual celebration of contemporary writing, the Xmas lists of 2019 books, quite offensive,” said Lucy Ellmann, author of the prize-winning Ducks, Newburyport, in a recent interview. “It seems so arrogant. These lists suggest that the most relevant books must be the ones most recently published. That’s daft.”

In fact, Ellmann takes things to the extreme and says she only reads books before World War II:

Some time ago I pretty much decided to read only books written before the atom bomb was dropped, when everything changed for all life on Earth. The industrial revolution’s bad enough, but nuclear weapons really are party-poopers.

I don’t stick strictly to this policy, but I often find it more rewarding to read what people thought about, and what they did with literature, before we were reduced by war and capitalism to mere monetary units, bomb fodder and password generators. And before the natural world became a depository for plastics and nuclear waste.

Anger and alienation have resulted, and they’re fine subjects, but there are times when you’d like to remember some of the higher points in the history of civilisation as well, and the natural world before we learned to view it all as tainted. The intense humour, innocence, sexiness and play of The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, for instance – could this have been written after Hiroshima? Could Gargantua and Pantagruel? Don Quixote? Emma? I don’t see how. Thanks to the offences of patriarchy, a lot of the fun has gone out of being human, and I like books that look at life in less constricted ways.

This idea of stealing from the deep past is one of my favorites, but Lydia Davis is a bit less extreme in her reading advice (from Essays):

How should you read? What should the diet of your reading be? Read the best writers from all different periods; keep your reading of contemporaries in proportion—you do not want a steady diet of contemporary literature. You already belong to your time.

I was disappointed to discover this year when putting together my year-end book list that the only two books I read published before WWII were Carlo Collodi’s Pinocchio (1883) and the Japanese Ghost Stories of Lafcadio Hearn, who died in 1901. (Thoreau’s journals end in the year 1861, but it feels like cheating to include them, since I read pretty much read them on a loop.)

I’ve threatened for years to read nothing but books 150 years old or older, but, like other reading restrictions, it goes against my “Read at whim!” beliefs. Still, I want to spend a little more time in the past next year.

In case you’d like to beef up your own reading list, here’s a list of old stuff recommended to me from Twitter followers a few years back:

Related reading: Steal old stuff.

The right book

If a book makes me want to keep reading, it’s the right book.

If a book makes me want to start writing, it’s the right book.

Any other book is not the right book. (Right now.)

Diary entry from last September

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