Austin Kleon

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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 Lufcadio 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

5 good books I read this spring

Why wait until the end of the year? I shared 5 good books I read this winter, so here are 5 good books I read this spring (and bonus reads):

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. (Another great novel, one I re-read: Charles Portis’s True Grit.)

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 it even more than I thought it would. (Another book about attention I knew was going to be good based on the original Medium post: Rob Walker’s The Art of Noticing. I’d also throw in Bruno Munari’s Drawing a Tree, which I loved even more upon re-reading.)

The Three Robbers
Tomi Ungerer

My 4-year-old got obsessed with this book, and I got obsessed with it and with Ungerer. (Other great graphic tales [but not for kids]: Tillie Walden’s On A Sunbeam and Jaime Hernandez’s excellent comic, The Love Bunglers and the followup, Is This How You See Me?)

Essays Over 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.

Okay, back to reading. Get more reading recommendations in my weekly newsletter, or browse the past decade of my favorite books.

Want quick knowledge? Visit the children’s section

Here’s a unposed stack of books I found on our coffee table over the weekend. (When we have obsessions around here, we give in to them, completely, and feed them many, many books.)

I often think about how the kids’ books do a better job of informing and entertaining on various subjects, so I got a kick out of this bit from Jeopardy champion James Holzhauer, who admits he was “never a diligent student”:

I have a strategy of reading children’s books to gain knowledge. I’ve found that in an adult reference book, if it’s not a subject I’m interested in, I just can’t get into it.

I was thinking, what is the place in the library I can go to to get books tailored to make things interesting for uninterested readers? Boom. The children’s section.

Another Jeopardy connection: the Ken Jennings books illustrated by Mike Lowery are a big hit with our nonfiction-loving six-year-old.

(via @mattthomas)

How to read more

“I always read a lot. I read the same amount, no matter what season it is. I read every night. When I’m on book tour, I’m on airplanes all the time, so I’m always reading. People say, ‘How do you have time to read?’ Oh, come on, it’s simple! You’re single and you don’t watch television.”
—John Waters

“How do you make time for that?” can almost always be answered with, “I make time for that.”

Still, here are 5 things that have helped me read more, and might help you, too:

1. Quit reading books you don’t like.

“I believe that the phrase ‘obligatory reading’ is a contradiction in terms; reading should not be obligatory… If a book bores you, leave it; don’t read it because it is famous, don’t read it because it is modern, don’t read a book because it is old…. If a book is tedious to you, don’t read it; that book was not written for you.”
—Jorge Luis Borges

“Nobody is going to get any points in heaven by slogging their way through a book they aren’t enjoying but think they ought to read.”
—Nancy Pearl

“There is only one way to read, which is to browse in libraries and bookshops, picking up books that attract you, reading only those, dropping them when they bore you, skipping the parts that drag — and never, never reading anything because you feel you ought, or because it is part of a trend or a movement. Remember that the book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty — and vice-versa. Don’t read a book out of its right time for you.”
—Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook

If you aren’t getting anything out of a book, put it down, and pick up another book.

Every hour you spend inching through a boring book is an hour you could’ve spent plowing through a brilliant one.

When it comes to books, quitters finish more.

Sometimes a book just isn’t for you, or it’s not for you yet.

It helps if you choose the right books in the first place. Stop reading what you think you should be reading and just read what you genuinely want to read. Read what you love and read at whim.

2. Carry a book with you at all times.

“Because I was carrying the book around all the time, I pulled it out all the time: On the subway, walking down the block to get groceries…”
—Clive Thompson, “Reading War and Peace on my iPhone”

Get used to carrying a book around with you wherever you go and reaching for it in all the spare moments you’d usually pull out your phone. (Commutes, lunch breaks, grocery store lines, etc.)

Go to bed early and bring your book with you. If you fall asleep while reading, pick it back up when you wake and read for a bit before you get out of bed.

Always have a book queued next in line for when you finish the current book you’re reading.

Feel free to read promiscuously — date 3 or 4 books at the same time until one makes you want to settle down with it.

I am partial to carrying paper books and reading with a pencil, but I also love my e-reader, and a smartphone is undeniably handy, if you can avoid social media and the internet.

Which brings us to our next point.

3. Keep your phone in airplane mode.

“Reading is socially accepted disassociation. You flip a switch and you’re not there anymore. It’s better than heroin. More effective and cheaper and legal.”
—Mary Karr

A big part of reading is visiting other worlds, and you can’t visit another world if you’re constantly distracted by this one.

If you’re gonna read on your phone, switch it into airplane mode so you’re not even tempted to go online.

When you sit down to read a paper book, either put your phone in airplane mode, or plug your phone in across the room so you’re not tempted to reach for it.

Get a paper dictionary, so when you read at home or in the office, you don’t have to pull out your phone to look up words.

4. Make regular trips to your local library and/or bookstore.

“You must go to the library and fall in love.”
—Ray Bradbury

I find a lot of great books through friends and online and through my own reading, but there’s nothing quite like the “serendipity of the stacks,” the magical discoveries that often happen when you’re browsing in a library or a bookstore.

If distraction is terrible for book reading, it’s great for book discovering. You never know what you’ll bump into in the stacks. You go hunting for a book and you find an even better book shelved a few books down from it.

I frequent the “New” and “Recently Returned” shelves at my local library and sometimes I’ll even snoop to see what people have on hold on the reserve shelves.

Nothing beats a well-curated selection in a great indie bookstore. It’s glorious to spend an afternoon shopping at Bookpeople or Powell’s or The Strand or any number of the great stores I’ve had the pleasure to visit on book tour.

5. Share books you love with others. (They’ll give you more books to read.)

“Read the books you love, tell people about authors you like, and don’t worry about it.”
—Neil Gaiman

Keep track of what you read, whether it’s in a private notebook or on a site like Goodreads. (Take inspiration from Art Garfunkel, who has a list of every book he’s read since 1968.)

Share the books you love in whatever way you can. (Every week, I share what I’m reading in my weekly newsletter, and every year, I make a list of my favorite reads.)

The great thing about sharing your favorite books is that you meet other people who love those books, and they’ll share with you even more books to love.

Take notes, and let the books stack up. Gigantic book piles aren’t a sign you’re doing it wrong, they’re a sign that you’re doing it right.

* * *

If you need something to read, check out my newest book, Keep Going.

5 good books I’ve read this winter

Why wait until the end of the year? Here are 5 really good books I’ve read so far this winter:

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. Except for the “aw shucks, can’t believe I’m writin’ a book” intro (come on, man), I found it really warm and smart. 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”)

Okay, back to reading. Get more reading recommendations in my weekly newsletter, or browse the past decade of my favorite books.

Werner Herzog on reading and writing

I picked up Werner Herzog: A Guide for the Perplexed a week or so ago, and it’s taking me forever to read because 1) it’s 500 pages long and I’m slow, and 2) it’s so dense with insane stories and great wisdom about creative work that I’m constantly stopping to underline sentences.

He describes himself as an autodidact, who “never felt comfortable in school” and “never trusted teachers”:

I’ve always been more interested in teaching myself. If I want to explore something, I never think about attending a class; I do the reading on my own or seek out experts for conversations. Everything we’re forced to learn at school we quickly forget, but the things we set out to learn ourselves — to quench a thirst — are never forgotten, and inevitably become an important part of our existence.

“When he was in school,” his mother says, “Werner never learned anything. He never read the books he was supposed to read, he never studied, he never knew what he was supposed to know, it seemed.”

But over and over, in the book, and in other interviews, he has one unwavering piece of advice for filmmakers: “Read.”

Read, read, read, read, read. Those who read own the world; those who immerse themselves in the Internet or watch too much television lose it. If you don’t read, you will never be a filmmaker. Our civilization is suffering profound wounds because of the wholesale abandonment of reading by contemporary society.

He gives his Rogue Film School students a “mandatory” reading list and he brings two books with him on film shoots: Martin Luther’s translation of the Bible and Livy’s account of the Second Punic War. (“The Book of Job acts as consolation, Livy gives me courage.”)

He talks a lot about approaching his screenplays with a literary sensibility, often abandoning traditional structure for prose descriptions of scenes. He’s convinced that Conquest of the Useless, his diary of making Fitzcarraldo, will outlive all of his films. “I suspect that my true voice emerges more clearly through prose than cinema,” he says. “I might be a better writer than I am a filmmaker.”

It is a really terrific book.

The Yamaha

For the first time since my first son was born, I am living in a house without a piano. What I have now is a Yamaha “electronic piano,” a decades-old leftover from my pre-piano, pre-children days. The Yamaha is a hefty plank of plastic with “weighted” keys that make a sad thunky plastic sound when you play them. Unlike the vegan cashew queso my wife made for dinner the other night, it is a poor substitute for the real thing.

But The Yamaha, for now, is what I have, so I am making the best of it. The Yamaha has ten different voices: 2 pianos, 2 electric pianos, 2 organs, strings, 2 harpsichords, and a vibraphone. I hate the two pianos and never play them. The organs make the room sound like church.  The other voices I can work with. As with many things in life, I like it more the less it tries to pretend to be something it’s not.

Can you have a moment of transcendence on such a sub-par instrument? I got close the other night. I was practicing some Bach, and I felt something like, I am putting my fingers on the same keys as Bach. He wrote these notes down 250 years ago, and now I am playing them. I may be doing a clumsy job, but I am making him come alive again.

I thought of Margaret Atwood’s “frozen music”:

Books are frozen voices, in the same way that musical scores are frozen music. The score is a way of transmitting the music to someone who can play it, releasing it into the air where it can once more be heard. And the black alphabet marks on the page represent words that were once spoken, if only in the writer’s head. They lie there inert until a reader comes along and transforms the letters into living sounds. The reader is the musician of the book: each reader may read the same text, just as each violinist plays the same piece, but each interpretation is different.

And I thought of my friend Alan Jacobs, who is writing a book called Breaking Bread With The Dead. The title comes from a lecture by W.H. Auden, who said:

…one of the greatest blessings conferred on our lives by the Arts is that they are our chief means of breaking bread with the dead, and I think that, without communication with the dead, a fully human life is not possible.

I suppose you break bread with the dead using whatever tools you have on hand. Sometimes it’s a fine, dusty hardback, and sometimes it’s a free ebook on your Kindle. Sometimes it’s an old wooden piano, and sometimes it’s The Yamaha.

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