Austin Kleon's Top Book Recommendations

Austin KleonWhile re-reading Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s wonderful book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, I came across this passage on working crossword puzzles. I think he could just as well be talking about making blackout poems: "There is much to be said in favor of this popular pastime, which in its best form resembles the ancient riddle contests. It is inexpensive and portable, its challenges... (Source)

Tom ChatfieldThe notion of flow is the idea that there is a state that is characterised by complete immersion in an activity, by a constant response to stimuli, and a perfect match between your ability and the challenge in front of you. (Source)

Austin KleonUnsolicited, but here’s my advice for visual thinkers (and others) who want to be better writers: [...] Cartoonists, because their work demands work from two disciplines (writing/art, poetry/design, words/pictures), are highly instructive when it comes to visual people learning to write, writers learning to make art, etc. (Check out Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics for more.) (Source)

Will BrookerUnderstanding Comics is a book about how comics work, told in comic form. It’s very accessible, it’s for the general reader and is about comics in general, not just superhero comics. It explores areas like pacing and editing – how motion can be created through static panels on a page, and how arranging those panels in different ways, or drawing in different styles, or combining text and image,... (Source)

Charlamagne Tha GodThis is one of my favorite authors on the planet @ryanholiday one of his many books is titled “Ego Is The Enemy.” So if you want more from him on the subject of ego than what’s in this 60 second clip that’s the book… https://t.co/0QDe9V69KV (Source)

Robert GreeneInspiring yet practical... teaches us how to manage and tame this beast within us so that we can focus on what really matters - producing the best work possible. (Source)

Marvin LiaoMy list would be (besides the ones I mentioned in answer to the previous question) both business & Fiction/Sci-Fi and ones I personally found helpful to myself. The business books explain just exactly how business, work & investing are in reality & how to think properly & differentiate yourself. On the non-business side, a mix of History & classic fiction to understand people, philosophy to make... (Source)

Austin KleonI’m not so sure that Julavitz and I would get along together at a party, but dang, I liked her book. (Source)

Tim O'ReillyThe Way of Life According to Lao Tzu (Tao Te Ching), translated by Witter Bynner. My personal religious philosophy, stressing the rightness of what is, if only we can accept it. Most people who know me have heard me quote from this book. "Seeing as how nothing is outside the vast, wide-meshed net of heaven, who is there to say just how it is cast?" (Source)

Naval RavikantIn the philosophy side, I’ve been rereading the Tao Te Ching. (Source)

Jack DorseyQ: What are the books that had a major influence on you? Or simply the ones you like the most. : Tao te Ching, score takes care of itself, between the world and me, the four agreements, the old man and the sea...I love reading! (Source)

Austin KleonEarlier this year Postman’s son Andrew wrote an op-ed with the title, “My dad predicted Trump in 1985 — it’s not Orwell, he warned, it’s Brave New World.” Postman wrote: “What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one.” (Source)

Steve LanceNeil Postman took the work of Marshall McLuhan – who was putting out early theories on media – and built on them. However, Postman was far more observant and empirical about the trends occurring in the media landscape. The trends which he identifies in Amusing Ourselves to Death, written in the 1980s, have since all come true. For example, he predicted that if you make news entertaining, then... (Source)

Kara Nortman@andrewchen Also a great book on the topic - Amusing Ourselves to Death https://t.co/yWLBxKumLQ (Source)

Marc AndreessenHow to get along with people, how to deal with violence, how to adjust to losing someone you love—All versions of a bigger question: How do you live? (Source)

Ryan HolidayMontaigne is one of humanities greatest treasures. If you've not read any of his essays or Sarah Bakewell's magnificent book How To Live [...] you are missing out. (Source)

Austin KleonBook that introduced me to one of my new favorite thinkers: Sarah Bakewell’s How To Live: Or A Life Of Montaigne. (Source)

Austin KleonI’m not really sure what to say about this book. It just kind of re-affirmed a lot of what I’ve been thinking about making art: that it’s important for me to have a day job, so I can separate work from play, and that the more generous you are with your audience (through blogging, teaching, sharing, etc.) the better off you’ll be as an artist—spiritually and financially. (Source)

Armina SirbuIt's amazing to realize how gifts have impacted and influenced the human race. (Source)

Lucy NewlynThe Gift is not a book about Wordsworth. The subtitle of the UK edition is “How the Creative Spirit Transforms the World”. Lewis Hyde looks at creativity not as the route to celebrity, but rather in terms of a “gift economy”. He plays off the great Marcel Mauss’s 1923 anthropological essay The Gift, building on Mauss’s idea that there’s no such thing as a free gift – when you give something, you... (Source)

Austin KleonAll of Jansson’s work makes me want to move to Finland and live on an island. Less fanciful than my beloved Moomin comics, these stories have an undercurrent of sorrow to them. Really gorgeous book. (Source)

Zoe Kazan@nanzhda I love this book. I’ve given it away so many times I no longer have a copy x (Source)

Jean WebbOn the island the grandmother, who is an artist, creates a whole world—a forest with animals made from pieces of wood for the granddaughter. The book explores ways in which they engage with each other. (Source)

Austin KleonI started the book on December 6 of last year, and followed along with each entry until January 10th. (Source)

Austin KleonTakes a look at Bach’s work through the recordings of his works throughout the years. I especially liked reading about Glenn Gould and Pablo Casals. (Source)

Austin KleonA day-by-day play-by-play of Prince in the recording studio at the height of his powers. I did a lot of skimming and skipping around, but really enjoyed it. (Source)

Austin KleonA sausage-fest, but a good sausage-fest. (Source)

Austin KleonVery much worth reading. (Source)

Austin KleonHow much you enjoy it will probably depend on your familiarity with the music — I was eighteen and a freshman in college when I saw The Strokes in Newport, KY, in 2001, so it made me pretty danged nostalgic. (Source)

Austin KleonI was a year late to this, but it’s as advertised: Smart, smutty, and laugh-out-loud funny. (Source)

Austin KleonI loved this book, which was edited from Hannah’s actual diaries that he kept as a young man in 70s NYC. My only gripe is that the book doesn’t include images of the actual notebooks, which are wonderfully visual. (Source)

Austin KleonDevoured this one, and afterwards, was surprised it took me so long to pick it up. Glass writes about so many of my favorite topics: creativity, day jobs, parenting, lineage, etc. Totally accessible, and made me want to listen to more of his music. (Source)

Austin KleonA comic diary of Davis’s bike across the south. I love her work so much. If I had to pick, this might be my favorite book I read this year. She’s on fire, and I can’t wait to read what’s next. (Source)

Barack ObamaAs 2018 draws to a close, I’m continuing a favorite tradition of mine and sharing my year-end lists. It gives me a moment to pause and reflect on the year through the books I found most thought-provoking, inspiring, or just plain loved. It also gives me a chance to highlight talented authors – some who are household names and others who you may not have heard of before. Here’s my best of 2018... (Source)

Austin KleonBeautiful stories. A perfect swan song. (Source)

Austin KleonI love reading and thinking about Los Angeles, and I love writing that’s smart and trashy, so I liked this a lot. (Source)

Austin KleonI read this one, then I read his collected diaries, Theft By Finding, and then I read the visual compendium, which might have even been the most interesting of the three books, but I’m listing this one because it’s hilarious, although with the interstitial fiction bits, it’s sort of like one of those classic 90s hip-hop albums where you skip the “skit” tracks. (Source)

Austin KleonI learned about this 1937 bestseller while reading Will Schwalbe’s Books For Living. It’s basically a book about the ancient Chinese art of chilling out and living a good life. (One thing: If you pick it up, just skip chapter 8 and Lin Yutang’s sexist views.) The book celebrates other writers who got me through the year — Thoreau, Whitman, Lao Tzu. I find it fitting that the only other person I... (Source)

Austin KleonThis is not only a beautifully produced illustrated history of Friedrich Froebel’s institution, it also presents a compelling case that kindergarten influenced the origins of abstract art and modern architecture. (The juxtaposition of children’s art with paintings and blueprints reminds me of David Hockney’s Secret Knowledge.) (Source)

Austin KleonA short, brilliant book about film editing that has quite a few lessons for writers, too. (It would make an excellent companion to Sidney Lumet’s Making Movies.) I first read about Murch in Lawrence Weschler’s book about his adventures in astrophysics, Waves Passing In The Night, which I picked randomly off my local library’s New Arrivals shelf. (Source)

Austin KleonI’ve been watching The Room for years, and I first read Bissell on the subject in Magic Hours. This was a total behind-the-scenes trip, and it is no surprise to me that the movie based on it has gotten great reviews. (I still haven’t seen it.) (Source)

Frank BlakeBounces around with different observations, some of which you go, god, that’s brilliant and some of it, eh. (Source)

Austin KleonI had a couple of magical Manguso readings this year: On a summer trip to San Francisco, I bought this in the morning at Christopher’s Books in Potrero, and then read most of it later that afternoon in the Yerba Buena Gardens. Later in the year, I found a used copy of Ongoingness: The End of A Diary in a market in Antigua, Guatemala, and read that in one sitting, too. (Source)

Andrew HuiSarah Manguso is a contemporary American author, and I think she is the 21st-century La Rochefoucauld! She is an astute and profound observer of our digital lives today, and how much of our lives are mediated in electronic forms. (Source)

Austin KleonI read this book twice: first, when Alan asked for a blurb, and second, when I offered to interview him at Bookpeople upon its publication. It’s a brisk, 150-page plea for sanity. Alan is a rare writer: one who not only genuinely loves to write books, but also genuinely loves teaching. (Source)

Austin KleonCertainly my favorite book cover of the year, the graphic designer’s memoir drops you right into a kid’s eye view of 1970s Greenwich Village. With it’s chunked sections and hand-drawn illustrations, it gave me the same kind of quick, skippy joy I get when reading Vonnegut. (Source)

Austin KleonThere’s been a lot of anti-Thoreau sentiment in the past years (heck, Kathryn Schulz published an article in the New Yorker called “Pond Scum”), and I didn’t even think I liked Thoreau, but Walls does a beautiful job of painting a portrait of a writer who was deeply rooted in and connected to his place, who tried his best to carve out a “deliberate” life for himself. (Pair it with NYRB’s reader... (Source)

Austin KleonAn imaginative, extremely readable book of short stories. I read at the very beginning of the year and it has stuck with me. (I think about these two afterlives a lot.) (Source)

Derek SiversAwesomely creative think-piece. 40 very short fictional stories about what happens when you die. (Source)

Ryan HolidayIf you’ve been struggling with the onslaught of negative news and political turmoil, start with Montaigne. Why? It’s the biography of man who retreated from the chaos of 16th century France to study himself, written by a man fleeing the chaos of 20th century Europe. [...] This book helped me get through 2017, no question. (Source)

Austin KleonZweig wrote this before his suicide, while exiled in Brazil during World War II. To get Montaigne, Zweig said, “you should not be too young, too deprived of experience and life’s deceptions, and it is precisely a generation like ours, cast by fate into the cataract of the world’s turmoil, to whom the freedom and consistency of his thought conveys the most precious aid.” (Source)

Austin KleonI only came to Ed Emberley’s Ed Emberley’s Drawing Book: Make A World last year, but it’s quickly become the #1 book I recommend to people I meet who say, “I can’t draw.” In it, Ed Emberley shows you how to “make a world” with just a few simple shapes, step-by-step. I love the emphasis on simplicity: if you can draw a triangle, a square, a circle, and a line, you’re good to go. (Source)

Austin KleonUnsolicited, but here’s my advice for visual thinkers (and others) who want to be better writers: Get Lynda Barry’s What It Is and do the exercises every day in a private notebook. (Source)