Austin Kleon

You are here: Blog / Archives for reading

Summer reading assignment

I indulge in silly little writer fantasies, like rehearsing my answers for the “By The Book” column in the NYTimes. (“If you could require the president to read one book, what would it be?” Lydia Millet had a good answer: “This president? Yes. One book.”)

On Twitter, Erika Hall asked, “If you could assign every American to read one book over the summer, what would it be?” She got good answers, many of which might be on my list: Amusing Ourselves To Death, A People’s History of the United States, The Fire Next Time, etc.

If I gave a summer reading assignment to every American, here’s what it would be:

  1. Visit your local library and apply for a library card. (Or pay your fines and renew.)
  2. Ask a librarian for a tour of the library building, the online catalog, and the digital holdings. Ask the librarian to show you how to put materials on hold, how to request materials for purchase, and how to use interlibrary loan.
  3. Check out at least one item. (So you have to return.)

That’s it.

The need for readers

A few days ago, my friend Alan Jacobs, author of The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction, quoted philosopher Jürgen Habermas:

The public sphere is crucial to the intellectual, though its fragile structure is undergoing an accelerated process of decay. The nostalgic question, ‘Where have all the intellectuals gone?’ misses the point. You can’t have committed intellectuals if you don’t have the readers to address the ideas to.

Alan writes:

Those who once might have been readers are all shouting at one another on Twitter…. So maybe one of the most important questions we who are concerned about our common culture can ask ourselves is this: How do we bring reading back?

Ironically, it was over on Twitter that I saw my friend Erika Hall, author of Just Enough Research, thinking out loud about how every big tech company in America should house a small independent bookstore that’s also open to the public. (She got to thinking about bookstores, browsing, and what I call “the serendipity of the stacks” when she came across a book about Nazi resistance while browsing a bookstore in Gatwick airport.)

I’ve cut and pasted a few of her tweets, below.

We’ve been talking a lot about the need to infuse more humanities and greater diversity of perspectives and inclusion of underrepresented groups in techbusiness before we build SuperBiased Skynet. In addition to changing hiring practices, we need more bookshops.

If tech companies have space for quinoa bars and rosé taps, they have space for airport-sized bookshops.

I’ve been inside a lot of these very nice buildings and campuses, and it is striking how similar the culture is from one to another for being supposed hubs of innovation.

Any tech company that cares about their employees’ bodies enough to have a chef and a gym, should also offer something for the mind. Imagine how it changes the recruiting conversation to say “we have an onsite independent bookstore” as one of the amenities.

There are different ways to do this: 1) Hire a librarian and have an elementary-school library themed lounge. (with scooter parking) 2) Get someone like Books Inc to set up and send money back out to a local business. More points for putting it on the ground floor for the public.

[A bookshop] is a way to support the local community both monetarily and culturally, and promote intermingling with non-coworkers.

And hey, you want social activities that don’t center alcohol and are maybe even, gasp, family friendly? Have them in the bookstore.

Such an interesting idea. (Erika started a hashtag — #books2tech — if you want to add your thoughts.)

In response, my friend and former co-worker Adam Norwood pointed out the “Institute for Humanistic Studies for Executives” program that Bell System ran in the 1950s:

[A] number of Bell’s top executives, led by W. D. Gillen, then president of Bell Telephone of Pennsylvania, had begun to worry about the education of the managers rising through the company’s hierarchy. Many of these junior executives had technical backgrounds, gained at engineering schools or on the job, and quite a few had no college education at all. They were good at their jobs, but they would eventually rise to positions in which Gillen felt they would need broader views than their backgrounds had so far given them.

The sociologist E. Digby Baltzell explained the Bell leaders’ concerns in an article published in Harper’s magazine in 1955: “A well-trained man knows how to answer questions, they reasoned; an educated man knows what questions are worth asking.” Bell, then one of the largest industrial concerns in the country, needed more employees capable of guiding the company rather than simply following instructions or responding to obvious crises.

They basically came up with a liberal arts program: visits to museums, orchestra concerts, architecture tours, guest lecturers (W.H. Auden! Lewis Mumford!), reading programs, and eight three-hour seminars devoted to James Joyce’s Ulysses.

At the end of the 10-month course, an anonymous questionnaire was circulated among the Bell students; their answers revealed that they were reading more widely than they had before — if they had read at all — and they were more curious about the world around them. At a time when the country was divided by McCarthyism, they tended to see more than one side to any given argument.

What’s more, the graduates were no longer content to let the machinery of business determine the course of their lives. One man told Baltzell that before the program he had been “like a straw floating with the current down the stream” and added: “The stream was the Bell Telephone Company. I don’t think I will ever be that straw again.”

Of course, Bell withdrew their support for such a humanistic education when the executives started to turn, well, more human.

“[W]hile executives came out of the program more confident and more intellectually engaged, they were also less interested in putting the company’s bottom line ahead of their commitments to their families and communities.”

So it goes.

Shelf life

“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.”
—Margaret Atwood

Storing up images

I love reading more than one book at a time and letting the books talk to each other. I love promiscuous reading. Here’s Octavia Butler on her practice:

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.

I’m currently dipping in and out of two books: 1) Harold Gatty’s Finding Your Way Without Map or Compass — a 1958 wayfinding manual and Christmas gift from my wife — and 2) Tom Hart’s How To Say Everything, material Tom’s been working on for the past decade, but just recently published in book form.

They compliment each other beautifully on the subject of storing up images. Here’s Gatty:

There is something which all the greatest artists and writers, naturalists and scientists, voyagers and explorers, poets and pioneers, share. It is an interest in the external world and the ability to contribute something creative to human life in this world by means of taking parts of the world to pieces and putting them all together again. The ability to observe, and the ability to see the little things that seem trivial at first, may become amazingly important and meaningful. Out of little observations huge ideas may grow; and if a mind, made receptive by training in the use of the senses, can store away a mass of observations, the time will come when the whole collection can be unrolled, connected together as a great novel is planned, in a compelling pattern that tells us something new.

And here’s Hart, quoting Stanislavski, in his chapter, “Creating A Store”:

You must be constantly adding to your store. For this purpose you draw… principally upon your own impressions, feelings and experiences. You also acquire material from life around you, real and imaginary, from reminiscences, books, art, science, knowledge of all kinds, from journeys, museums and above all from communication with other human beings.

In both of these contexts the word “store” refers to stocking up or keeping a supply for future use, like a squirrel, but it also conjures retail associations in my brain. I’m reminded of Allen Ginsberg, in “A Supermarket in California,” who, dreaming of Walt Whitman, wandering around, looking at the moon, stops into the neon supermarket, “shopping for images.”

That seems to be so much of what I’m always doing — shopping for images — adding to the store, stocking up for the future…

Top image: Drawing of a brain by Jules (3)

Soup

Yesterday I was not, to put it in Dostoevsky’s terms, worthy of my sufferings. So I went out for ramen. I took Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning with me. My copy is an old paperback that belongs to my father-in-law. I’m borrowing it. I have been borrowing it for over a decade.

The first time I read the book was 8 years ago on lunch breaks in the library at the law school I worked for. I loved it then, not just for the words or the message, but for my father-in-law’s teenage underlines and perfect cursive marginalia. I knew my wife when she was young had read the same copy, and I wished that she had made her own underlines, maybe with a red pencil, to differentiate them from her dad’s, and then I would’ve added my own, maybe with a blue pencil. Instead, I took notes on a few index cards and left them as bookmarks.

I was about to crack it again yesterday, when my bowl of ramen came out quicker than I expected. So I let the paperback sit there on the counter as I slurped soup.

Frankl writes a lot about soup. In the concentration camp, soup was life. A cigarette could be traded for a bowl. Cooks would favor some prisoners by ladling from the bottom of the pot for bits of potato or peas, while shorting others by skimming off the top broth. The men told jokes about how they envisioned attending dinner parties in the future where they would suddenly forget themselves and beg the hostess to serve the soup “from the bottom!”

I took my time with the ramen. It was so delicious that at the end I lifted the bowl with two hands and swallowed the very last drop. I felt my spirits lift immediately.

I re-read the book at home this morning, adding my own notes and underlines this time, but in that moment back at the restaurant, I decided I didn’t really need the book. What I needed was the soup.

Recent posts

Follow me elsewhere

This site participates in the Amazon Affiliates program, the proceeds of which keep it free for anyone to read.