Books I Like - Austin Kleon

Love Goes to Buildings on Fire: Five Years in New York That...

Wed, 29 Feb 2012 21:06:35 -0500

Love Goes to Buildings on Fire: Five Years in New York That Changed Music Forever

Will Hermes

The Ecstasy of Influence: Nonfictions, Etc. Jonathan Lethem

Wed, 29 Feb 2012 21:06:17 -0500

The Ecstasy of Influence: Nonfictions, Etc.

Jonathan Lethem

And So It Goes: Kurt Vonnegut: A Life Charles J. Shields

Wed, 29 Feb 2012 21:05:49 -0500

And So It Goes: Kurt Vonnegut: A Life

Charles J. Shields

Super Sad True Love Story: A Novel Gary Shteyngart

Wed, 29 Feb 2012 21:04:33 -0500

Super Sad True Love Story: A Novel

Gary Shteyngart

Slaughterhouse-Five Kurt Vonnegut Slaughterhous-Five is one of...

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 16:03:21 -0500

Slaughterhouse-Five

Kurt Vonnegut

Slaughterhous-Five is one of the world’s great anti-war books. Centering on the infamous fire-bombing of Dresden, Billy Pilgrim’s odyssey through time reflects the mythic journey of our own fractured lives as we search for meaning in what we are afraid to know.

The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood James...

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 15:50:30 -0500

The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood

James Gleick

James Gleick, the author of the best sellers Chaos and Genius, now brings us a work just as astonishing and masterly: a revelatory chronicle and meditation that shows how information has become the modern era’s defining quality—the blood, the fuel, the vital principle of our world.

The story of information begins in a time profoundly unlike our own, when every thought and utterance vanishes as soon as it is born. From the invention of scripts and alphabets to the long-misunderstood talking drums of Africa, Gleick tells the story of information technologies that changed the very nature of human consciousness. He provides portraits of the key figures contributing to the inexorable development of our modern understanding of information: Charles Babbage, the idiosyncratic inventor of the first great mechanical computer; Ada Byron, the brilliant and doomed daughter of the poet, who became the first true programmer; pivotal figures like Samuel Morse and Alan Turing; and Claude Shannon, the creator of information theory itself.

And then the information age arrives. Citizens of this world become experts willy-nilly: aficionados of bits and bytes. And we sometimes feel we are drowning, swept by a deluge of signs and signals, news and images, blogs and tweets. The Information is the story of how we got here and where we are heading.

A Visit from the Goon Squad Jennifer Egan Jennifer Egan’s...

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 15:49:53 -0500

A Visit from the Goon Squad

Jennifer Egan

Jennifer Egan’s spellbinding interlocking narratives circle the lives of Bennie Salazar, an aging former punk rocker and record executive, and Sasha, the passionate, troubled young woman he employs. Although Bennie and Sasha never discover each other’s pasts, the reader does, in intimate detail, along with the secret lives of a host of other characters whose paths intersect with theirs, over many years, in locales as varied as New York, San Francisco, Naples, and Africa.

We first meet Sasha in her mid-thirties, on her therapist’s couch in New York City, confronting her long-standing compulsion to steal. Later, we learn the genesis of her turmoil when we see her as the child of a violent marriage, then as a runaway living in Naples, then as a college student trying to avert the suicidal impulses of her best friend. We plunge into the hidden yearnings and disappointments of her uncle, an art historian stuck in a dead marriage, who travels to Naples to extract Sasha from the city’s demimonde and experiences an epiphany of his own while staring at a sculpture of Orpheus and Eurydice in the Museo Nazionale. We meet Bennie Salazar at the melancholy nadir of his adult life—divorced, struggling to connect with his nine-year-old son, listening to a washed-up band in the basement of a suburban house—and then revisit him in 1979, at the height of his youth, shy and tender, reveling in San Francisco’s punk scene as he discovers his ardor for rock and roll and his gift for spotting talent. We learn what became of his high school gang—who thrived and who faltered—and we encounter Lou Kline, Bennie’s catastrophically careless mentor, along with the lovers and children left behind in the wake of Lou’s far-flung sexual conquests and meteoric rise and fall.
*
A Visit from the Goon Squad* is a book about the interplay of time and music, about survival, about the stirrings and transformations set inexorably in motion by even the most passing conjunction of our fates. In a breathtaking array of styles and tones ranging from tragedy to satire to PowerPoint, Egan captures the undertow of self-destruction that we all must either master or succumb to; the basic human hunger for redemption; and the universal tendency to reach for both—and escape the merciless progress of time—in the transporting realms of art and music. Sly, startling, exhilarating work from one of our boldest writers.

And So It Goes: Kurt Vonnegut: A Life Charles J. Shields A New...

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 15:49:26 -0500

And So It Goes: Kurt Vonnegut: A Life

Charles J. Shields

A New York Times Notable Book for 2011

A Washington Post Notable Nonfiction Book for 2011

The first authoritative biography of Kurt Vonnegut Jr., a writer who changed the conversation of American literature.
In 2006, Charles Shields reached out to Kurt Vonnegut in a letter, asking for his endorsement for a planned biography. The first response was no (“A most respectful demurring by me for the excellent writer Charles J. Shields, who offered to be my biographer”). Unwilling to take no for an answer, propelled by a passion for his subject, and already deep into his research, Shields wrote again and this time, to his delight, the answer came back: “O.K.” For the next year—a year that ended up being Vonnegut’s last—Shields had access to Vonnegut and his letters.

And So It Goes is the culmination of five years of research and writing—the first-ever biography of the life of Kurt Vonnegut. Vonnegut resonates with readers of all generations from the baby boomers who grew up with him to high-school and college students who are discovering his work for the first time. Vonnegut’s concise collection of personal essays, Man Without a Country, published in 2006, spent fifteen weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and has sold more than 300,000 copies to date. The twenty-first century has seen interest in and scholarship about Vonnegut’s works grow even stronger, and this is the first book to examine in full the life of one of the most influential iconoclasts of his time.

The Book of Gossage Howard Luck Gossage Thought provoking...

Tue, 20 Dec 2011 12:19:25 -0500

The Book of Gossage

Howard Luck Gossage

Thought provoking writings from The Socrates of San Francisco. With Stan Freberg and Jeff Goodby.

Believing Is Seeing: Observations on the Mysteries of...

Sun, 11 Dec 2011 13:02:45 -0500

Believing Is Seeing: Observations on the Mysteries of Photography

Errol Morris

**Academy Award-winning filmmaker Errol Morris investigates the hidden truths behind a series of documentary photographs. **

In Believing is Seeing Academy Award-winning director Errol Morris turns his eye to the nature of truth in photography. In his inimitable style, Morris untangles the mysteries behind an eclectic range of documentary photographs, from the ambrotype of three children found clasped in the hands of an unknown soldier at Gettysburg to the indelible portraits of the WPA photography project. Each essay in the book presents the reader with a conundrum and investigates the relationship between photographs and the real world they supposedly record.

During the Crimean War, Roger Fenton took two nearly identical photographs of the Valley of the Shadow of Death-one of a road covered with cannonballs, the other of the same road without cannonballs. Susan Sontag later claimed that Fenton posed the first photograph, prompting Morris to return to Crimea to investigate. Can we recover the truth behind Fenton’s intentions in a photograph taken 150 years ago?

In the midst of the Great Depression and one of the worst droughts on record, FDR’s Farm Service Administration sent several photographers, including Arthur Rothstein, Dorothea Lange, and Walker Evans, to document rural poverty. When Rothstein was discovered to have moved the cow skull in his now-iconic photograph, fiscal conservatives-furious over taxpayer money funding an artistic project-claimed the photographs were liberal propaganda. What is the difference between journalistic evidence, fine art, and staged propaganda?

During the Israeli-Lebanese war in 2006, no fewer than four different photojournalists took photographs in Beirut of toys lying in the rubble of bombings, provoking accusations of posing and anti-Israeli bias at the news organizations. Why were there so many similar photographs? And were the accusers objecting to the photos themselves or to the conclusions readers drew from them?

With his keen sense of irony, skepticism, and humor, Morris reveals in these and many other investigations how photographs can obscure as much as they reveal and how what we see is often determined by our beliefs. Part detective story, part philosophical meditation, Believing Is Seeing is a highly original exploration of photography and perception from one of America’s most provocative observers.

After the Apocalypse: Stories Maureen F. McHugh ...

Mon, 05 Dec 2011 12:41:13 -0500

After the Apocalypse: Stories

Maureen F. McHugh

Publishers Weekly Top 10 Best of the Year

In her new collection, Story Prize finalist Maureen F. McHugh delves into the dark heart of contemporary life and life five minutes from now and how easy it is to mix up one with the other. Her stories are post-bird flu, in the middle of medical trials, wondering if our computers are smarter than us, wondering when our jobs are going to be outsourced overseas, wondering if we are who we say we are, and not sure what we’d do to survive the coming zombie plague.

Praise for Maureen F. McHugh:

“Gorgeously crafted stories.”—Nancy Pearl, NPR

“Hauntingly beautiful.”—Booklist

“Unpredictable and poetic work.”—The Plain Dealer

Maureen F. McHugh has lived in New York; Shijiazhuang, China; Ohio; Austin, Texas; and now lives in Los Angeles, California. She is the author of a Story Prize finalist collection, Mothers & Other Monsters, and four novels, including Tiptree Award-winner China Mountain Zhang and New York Times editor’s choice Nekropolis. McHugh has also worked on alternate reality games for Halo 2, The Watchmen, and Nine Inch Nails, among others.

Moby-Dick Herman Melville When Ishmael sets sail on...

Mon, 24 Oct 2011 17:05:54 -0400

Moby-Dick

Herman Melville

When Ishmael sets sail on the whaling ship Pequod one cold Christmas Day, he is clueless to the horrors that await him on the vast and merciless ocean. The ship’s strange captain, Ahab, is in the grip of an obsession to hunt down the famous white whale, Moby Dick, and will stop at nothing on his quest to annihilate his nemesis. Considered a failure during Melville’s lifetime but now hailed as a classic American novel, Ishmael’s story combines symbolism and philosophical debate with gripping adventure narrative in an uncanny and unforgettable fashion. An extract from Narrative of the Most Extraordinary and Distressing Shipwreck of the Whale-ship Essex by Owen Chase—which inspired Melville’s own story—is also included.

Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of...

Sat, 15 Oct 2011 18:58:00 -0400

Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation

Steven Johnson

One of our most innovative, popular thinkers takes on-in exhilarating style-one of our key questions: Where do good ideas come from?

With Where Good Ideas Come From, Steven Johnson pairs the insight of his bestselling Everything Bad Is Good for You and the dazzling erudition of The Ghost Map and The Invention of Air to address an urgent and universal question: What sparks the flash of brilliance? How does groundbreaking innovation happen? Answering in his infectious, culturally omnivorous style, using his fluency in fields from neurobiology to popular culture, Johnson provides the complete, exciting, and encouraging story of how we generate the ideas that push our careers, our lives, our society, and our culture forward.

Beginning with Charles Darwin’s first encounter with the teeming ecosystem of the coral reef and drawing connections to the intellectual hyperproductivity of modern megacities and to the instant success of YouTube, Johnson shows us that the question we need to ask is, What kind of environment fosters the development of good ideas? His answers are never less than revelatory, convincing, and inspiring as Johnson identifies the seven key principles to the genesis of such ideas, and traces them across time and disciplines.

Most exhilarating is Johnson’s conclusion that with today’s tools and environment, radical innovation is extraordinarily accessible to those who know how to cultivate it. Where Good Ideas Come From is essential reading for anyone who wants to know how to come up with tomorrow’s great ideas.

Snow Crash Neal Stephenson One of Time magazine’s 100 all-time...

Sat, 15 Oct 2011 18:58:00 -0400

Snow Crash

Neal Stephenson

One of Time magazine’s 100 all-time best English-language novels.

Only once in a great while does a writer come along who defies comparison—a writer so original he redefines the way we look at the world. Neal Stephenson is such a writer and Snow Crash is such a novel, weaving virtual reality, Sumerian myth, and just about everything in between with a cool, hip cybersensibility to bring us the gigathriller of the information age.
**
**In reality, Hiro Protagonist delivers pizza for Uncle Enzo’s CosoNostra Pizza Inc., but in the Metaverse he’s a warrior prince. Plunging headlong into the enigma of a new computer virus that’s striking down hackers everywhere, he races along the neon-lit streets on a search-and-destroy mission for the shadowy virtual villain threatening to bring about infocalypse. **Snow Crash **is a mind-altering romp through a future America so bizarre, so outrageous…you’ll recognize it immediately.

The Art of Fielding: A Novel Chad Harbach At Westish College,...

Sat, 15 Oct 2011 18:53:57 -0400

The Art of Fielding: A Novel

Chad Harbach

At Westish College, a small school on the shore of Lake Michigan, baseball star Henry Skrimshander seems destined for big league stardom. But when a routine throw goes disastrously off course, the fates of five people are upended.

Henry’s fight against self-doubt threatens to ruin his future. College president Guert Affenlight, a longtime bachelor, has fallen unexpectedly and helplessly in love. Owen Dunne, Henry’s gay roommate and teammate, becomes caught up in a dangerous affair. Mike Schwartz, the Harpooners’ team captain and Henry’s best friend, realizes he has guided Henry’s career at the expense of his own. And Pella Affenlight, Guert’s daughter, returns to Westish after escaping an ill-fated marriage, determined to start a new life.

As the season counts down to its climactic final game, these five are forced to confront their deepest hopes, anxieties, and secrets. In the process they forge new bonds, and help one another find their true paths. Written with boundless intelligence and filled with the tenderness of youth, *The Art of Fielding *is an expansive, warmhearted novel about ambition and its limits, about family and friendship and love, and about commitment—to oneself and to others.

Reflections and Shadows Saul Steinberg A short book full of...

Thu, 25 Aug 2011 13:21:00 -0400

Reflections and Shadows

Saul Steinberg

A short book full of little gems. Summary from Steinberg himself:

“This book is the fruit of tape-recorded conversations held in my country house in Springs, East Hampton, during the summer of 1974 and the autumn of 1977, with my friend Aldo Buzzi, who later made a careful selection of all the transcriptions and arranged them in four chapters.”

Cartooning: Philosophy and Practice Ivan Brunetti Love this...

Wed, 24 Aug 2011 10:30:00 -0400

Cartooning: Philosophy and Practice

Ivan Brunetti

Love this book. If you have $10 and any interest in cartooning, you should buy it.

The Medium is the Massage Marshall McLuhan First published in...

Sun, 14 Aug 2011 18:27:15 -0400

The Medium is the Massage

Marshall McLuhan

First published in 1967, this text is now more relevant than ever, as McLuhan’s foresights about the impact of new media is actualized at unprecedented speeds via the Internet. It portrays technologies as an extension of man, illustrating how our senses are massaged and our preceptions altered as these devices become integral parts of our lives.

The Dog of the South Charles Portis Ray Midge is waiting for...

Thu, 04 Aug 2011 16:59:54 -0400

The Dog of the South

Charles Portis

Ray Midge is waiting for his credit card bill to arrive. His wife, Norma, has run off with her ex-husband, taking Ray’s cards, shotgun and car. But from the receipts, Ray can track where they’ve gone. He takes off after them, as does an irritatingly tenacious bail bondsman, both following the romantic couple’s spending as far as Mexico. There Ray meets Dr Reo Symes, the seemingly down-on-his-luck and rather eccentric owner of a beaten up and broken down bus, who needs a ride to Belize. The further they drive, in a car held together by coat-hangers and excesses of oil, the wilder their journey gets. But they’re not going to give up easily.

The Art of the Possible!: Comics Mainly Without...

Thu, 04 Aug 2011 16:14:58 -0400

The Art of the Possible!: Comics Mainly Without Pictures

Kenneth Koch

This unusual mix of art and words is infused with the same energetic wordplay, humor, and tenderness as Kenneth Koch’s best poems. Illustrated and lettered in his own hand and studded with visual puns and jokes, Koch’s sweetly absurd milieu is peopled by Miles Davis, John Cage, Virgil Thomson, Aaron Copland, Lillian Hellman, Twiggy, and a host of others. Part journal, part sketchbook, and wholly original, The Art of the Possible offers a window into the world and art of one of America’s most treasured poets and teachers.