Big Magic - Elizabeth Gilbert Big Magic is about creativity and inspiration, starting with the idea that ideas themselves, like people and sand and trees and subatomic particles, are actual things that exist in the universe; and ideas are realised when they (because ideas have animacy in Big Magic) find a person to realise them. Does that sound woowoo? But the practical implications are solid. For example, if you want to be inspired, you need to show up - because ideas like to be taken seriously. You should also at least pretend to enjoy your work, because ideas aren’t interested in the miserable artist schtick.
“This is my question, and I think it's a fair one: Why would your creativity not love you? It came to you, didn't it? It drew itself near. It worked itself into you, asking for your attention and your devotion. It filled you with the desire to make and do interesting things. Creativity wanted a relationship with you. That must be for a reason, right? Do you honestly believe that creativity went through all the trouble of breaking into your consciousness only because it wanted to kill you?”But fair warning, you also need to be prepared for massive failure - ask yourself not “what would I do if I knew I couldn’t fail?” but “what would I do even if I failed?” because ideas don’t owe you anything. They love you, but they love themselves more; they’re out to get realised one way or another and you’re just along for the ride. 'Inspiration doesn’t look at you and go, “Well that didn’t work.” Inspiration looks at you and said, "That was fun. Look at what we did!" '
Read this: if you want to read just one more book about creativity before you, you know, get creative.
Quiet - Susan Cain
The book that hailed the revolution. The quiet revolution. The quiet stay-at-home but-we-would-definitely-be-a-force-to-be-reckoned-with-if-we-ever-left-the-house revolution. Look, I don’t know if you’ve even noticed the revolution but it’s there. This book is about introversion and what it means to be introverted in what can feel like an increasingly extroverted world. It’s about what introverts look like as kids - highly reactive, actually, because everything is stimulating to introverts and then as we grow up we learn to withdraw from too much stimulation (it’s the calm kids you have to watch out for - they’re the ones who will be jumping out of planes as adults in an effort to feel something); how introverts can put our introversion on hold and be loud-mouth extroverts in service of things we care deeply about; and why introverts are buzzkills - because whenever we get excited about something, we get hypervigilant and we’re 'constitutionally programmed' to start looking for problems."Extroverts are better than introverts at handling information overload. Introverts' reflectiveness uses up a lot of cognitive capacity, according to Joseph Newman. On any given task, he says, if we have 100 percent cognitive capacity, an introvert may have only 75 percent on task and 25 percent off task, whereas an extrovert may have 90 percent on task." This is because most tasks are goal-directed. Extroverts appear to allocate most of their cognitive capacity to the goal at hand, while introverts use up capacity by monitoring how the task is going."Read this: if you’re an introvert, because introverts like reading things about introversion, because we think we’re special and we find ourselves to be a fascinating object of study (and we usually are).
Deep Work is to (intellectual) work what Christopher McDougall’s Born to Run is to running, which is about the highest praise I can give a non-fiction book. I am so excited about the ideas in this book and I hope you read it and get excited about them too. It will convince you that everything you thought you knew about work is wrong and that there is a better way to do it and that even you can excel at working. Even you can get shit done. Basically, 'deep work' is the intense stuff you do in a distraction-free state that pushes your cognitive abilities to their limits and actually achieves something of value - a kind of work that's becoming increasingly valuable, and increasingly rare. That's Part One of the book, and all of it’s commonsense, of course - the kind of commonsense that years of immersion in a culture of unhelpful work practices will have you believing is uncommon.
"There's also an uneasiness that surrounds any effort to produce the best things you're capable of producing, as this forces you to confront the possibility that your best is not (yet) that good. It's safer to comment on our culture than to step into the Rooseveltian ring and attempt to wrestle it into something better.
But if you're willing to sidestep these comforts and fears, and instead struggle to deploy your mind to its fullest capacity to create things that matter, then you'll discover, as others have before you, that depth generates a life rich with productivity and meaning."Part Two is tips and tricks for training yourself to do deep work better - such as learning to be bored (instead of covering over boredom with distractions), ritualising your work practices, and working fewer hours to decrease the amount of ‘shallow work’ you do around the edges of your deep work.
Read this: if you’re pretty sure the only difference between Leonardo da Vinci’s ability to get things done and yours is that Leonardo da Vinci wasn’t distracted by tumblr (although he would have had an amazing tumblr).
The Future - Al GoreI have to admit that I’ve been reading this book all year and I still haven’t finished it - although on inspection, I’m closer to the end then I thought: it turns out the entire second half of the kindle edition is footnotes and references for the first half of the book, proof that Al Gore loves us and wants us to be happy.
“Eight years ago, when I was on the road, someone asked me: “What are the drivers of global change?” I listed several of the usual suspects and left it at that. Yet the next morning, on the long plane flight home, the question kept pulling me back, demanding that I answer it more precisely and accurately […] I started an outline on my computer and spent several hours listing headings and subheadings, then changing their rank order and relative magnitude, moving them from one category to another and filling in more and more details after reach rereading.”The Future is everything you want from a book by Al Gore - brilliant and intelligent and methodical and dull. The gist of it is that we’ve reached a point in human history where we’re experiencing change - in global communications and connectivity, in the balance of power, in human population growth, in science, and in the climate - “not of degree but of kind”. For better or worse, this change is new change, and thank God we have people like Al Gore thinking about it. If only the rest of us could listen.
Read this: if your dad the famous ornithologist died in a freak bird-watching accident when you were a wee child and you don’t really remember him but sometimes looking over pages upon pages of notes squiggled neatly in his fieldwork books makes you feel closer to him.
I ain't even kidding.
The Babysitters’ Club books were my ‘secret vice’ as a kid, and like a worn-out blanket or the very first CD single you bought (Lo-Tel’s ‘Teenager of the Year’, mine was), the books are still comforting, you know? Even now. Especially now. Ann M Martin recently said in an interview with The New Yorker:
“I wouldn’t say that I had a feminist agenda, but I certainly had a feminist perspective. I think of myself as a feminist. I wanted to portray a very diverse group of characters, not only from different racial backgrounds, but from different kinds of family backgrounds, religions, and perspectives on life. I just really wanted a group of girls who were very different from one another and who became very close friends.”It all seems so wonderfully naive; and look, if you never read the BSC series then I don’t think you’ll get it but I hope you have your own childhood book series that you return to once in a while. (If you did read the BSC, did you know that there are blogs dedicated to BSC recaps, What Claudia Wore, and illustrations of Claudia’s outfits? (Because let’s be honest, none of us had any interest in the actual babysitting.) Who can forget that outfit from Claudia and the Phantom Phonecalls with the purple pants, suspenders, white tights with clocks, and lobster earrings? You're welcome.)
Read this: if your favourite country that you’ve never been to just elected an incompetent fascist demagogue and you want to be reminded of the idyll of your childhood where hardwork and being kind to people was important.
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