Austin Kleon

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Books that suck you in and books that spin you out

Here is an idea I love that may or may not be true:

Some books have a centripetal force— they suck you in from other books.

Some books have a centrifugal force — they spin you out to other books.

Moby-Dick, for example, is a book whose force seems to me centripetal: after being pointed to it by other books, I found myself returning to it, again and again. It sucks me in.

The Writer’s Map, on the other hand, a glorious current read of mine, is a book whose force feels centrifugal: two chapters in, and I already have a long list of books and to chase down. It spins me out.

Both kinds of books can be extremely valuable to the reader, and I don’t think one kind is necessarily better than the other. I’m also not sure that these forces are objectively observed. One reader’s centripetal book could be another’s centrifugal, and vice versa. It’s also possible that a book can both suck you in and spin you out.

This, by the way, is not an original theory of mine. I first heard it from my friend Matt Thomas, over a decade ago. “Good movies, I find, are centrifugal,” he once tweeted. “That is, they spin you out—to other movies, ideas, art, people.” He’s also tweeted that he finds Facebook centripetal (it sucks you in) and Twitter centrifugal (it spins you out). 

I asked Matt where he got this idea, of media with centripetal and centrifugal forces, and he pointed me to Susan Douglas’s book about radio, Listening In. I searched the whole book and only found this reference:

“Listening, argues one researcher on perception, “is centripetal; it pulls you into the world. Looking is centrifugal; it separates you from the world.”

(This passage speaks to Murray Schafer on sound, but that’s for another blog post.)

Again, I don’t want to place a value judgment on a book based on its centripetal or centrifugal force, but I do think that a centrifugal book can be of lesser quality and still retain its value, as its value is found in the things it spins you out to.

Matt suggested to me that there’s a third category of work: the work that doesn’t spin you at all, the work that doesn’t move you in any direction, the work that barely has any force to it.

These books are to be avoided.

How to eat a book

The Reader, collage, 2021

“We are fed by what we attend to.”
—Alan Jacobs

After I made this collage, I read Bohumil Hrabal’s Too Loud a Solitude, a novel in which the narrator saves books from the trash compactor:

[W]hen I read, I don’t really read; I pop a beautiful sentence into my mouth and suck it like a fruit drop, or I sip it like a liquer until the thought dissolves in me like alcohol, infusing brain and heart and coursing on through the veins to the root of each blood vessel.”

In Francis Bacon’s essay, “On Studies,” he wrote:

“Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested: that is, some books are to be read only in parts, others to be read, but not curiously, and some few to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention.”

(In The Pleasures of Reading in An Age of Distraction, Alan Jacobs notes that this passage isn’t about being snobby, really, it’s just about the knowledge that you won’t be able to read everything — the buffet is too big! — so sometimes you need to sample or nibble. And while we’re on the subject of eating books, I feel it’s worth noting that Alan also wrote a book called Breaking Bread With The Dead.)

This method reminds me of cracking open a lobster to get out the meat

In Waiting For God, Simone Weil wrote:

…as far as possible I do not read anything except for that which I am hungry in the moment, when I am hungry for it, and then I do not read… I eat.

When I was in middle school, my English teacher had us copy Eve Merriam’s “How to Eat a Poem” into our notebooks (note my misattribution):

Don’t be polite.
Bite in.
Pick it up with your fingers and lick the juice that may run down your chin.
It is ready and ripe now, whenever you are.

You do not need a knife or fork or spoon
or plate or napkin or tablecloth.

For there is no core
or stem
or rind
or pit
or seed
or skin
to throw away.

Later, I found Mark Strand’s “Eating Poetry”:

Ink runs from the corners of my mouth.
There is no happiness like mine.
I have been eating poetry.

In his memoir, Life Itself, Roger Ebert wrote about how he couldn’t eat any more due to his cancer treatment. He said he didn’t miss eating food as much as conversation at the dinner table.

“Maybe that’s why writing has become so important to me. You don’t realize it, but we’re at dinner right now.”

Bon appétit.

M.L. Pike’s bookplate

Nobody to tell you what not to read

A poster for the ALA’s Banned Books Week, 2013 (I did not make this, btw)

Last month the Wall Street Journal reported that a school in Massachusetts has banned teaching The Odyssey and other “classics.” My friend Alan Jacobs, who wrote a whole book about the importance of connecting to the past through old books (but not a defense of the classics), wrote:

My take on this is simple: It is better for a good book not to be taught at all than be taught by the people quoted in that article. Yes! — do, please, refuse to teach Shakespeare, Homer, Hawthorne, whoever. Wag your admonitory finger at them. Let them be cast aside, let them be scorned and mocked. Let them be samizdat. Let them be forbidden fruit.

They will find their readers. They always have — long, long before anyone thought to teach them in schools — and they always will.

I have this romantic vision of some young, unknown artist, somewhere, either now or in the future, binging on the forbidden fruits of our past — all the taboo books and movies you’re not supposed to read or watch or talk about because they’re not appropriate or correct or they were made by the wrong people  — and stealing all the right moves from them, the stuff that other young artists won’t get exposed to because they don’t teach it in school or put it on reading lists, and mashing those good bits all together into something new that blows our minds. This artist might not even do it intentionally, but rather, out of ignorance — because they don’t know any “better,” and they don’t have anybody telling them what’s worthy of their attention. I don’t know where they’re supposed to find these materials — hopefully in a library — but maybe they’ll discover them in a trash heap like Wall-E.

It’s happened before. Ever since reading his short stories last October, I have thought a lot about Ray Bradbury, who didn’t have anybody telling him what not to read:

Bradbury never went to college — that’s one reason why he was so original. He was not indoctrinated in the mainstream assumption of the superiority of the realist mode. He educated himself. He read the books that he wanted to — from masterpieces to junk. Then he began to write children’s literature, which is to say, pulp science fiction and fantasy. But he mixed in elements from the realist tradition.

Then something amazing happened. In a 10-year period, Bradbury wrote seven books that changed both American literature and popular culture. They were mostly collections of short stories. Only two were true novels. In these books, for the first time in American literature, an author brought the subtlety and psychological insight of literary fiction into science fiction without losing the genre’s imaginative zest. Bradbury also crafted a particular tone, a mix of bitterness and sweetness that the genre had never seen before.

I’m thinking, too, of someone like Patricia Lockwood, one of the more original voices out there, who never went to college.

I have long felt that your own education is as much about the order in which you come into contact with things as anything else:

…it’s not just the holes, but the order you fill them in. For instance, if you read the canon straight through, from Homer to McCarthy (or whoever), how original would the connections in your mind be? Better to start with one author you love, who speaks to you, and move in every direction, backwards, forwards, sideways…the juxtapositions you see and the connections you make in your brain will be more unique.

For example: Did you know that Herman Melville didn’t read Shakespeare until he was 30 years old? That’s why we have Moby-Dick.

And now we try to teach it to 15-year-olds…

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…

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