9 Essential Books on Reading and Writing | Brain Pickings

07/09/13 02:389 Essential Books on Reading and Writing | Brain Pickings

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9 Books on Reading and Writingby Maria Popova

Dancing with the absurdity of life, or what symbolismhas to do with the osmosis of trash and treasure.

Hardly anything does ones mental, spiritual, and

creative health more good than resolving to read more

and write better. Todays reading list addresses these

parallel aspirations. And since the number of books

written about reading and writing likely far exceeds the

reading capacity of a single human lifetime, this

omnibus couldnt be shouldnt be an exhaustive list.

It is, instead, a collection of timeless texts bound to

radically improve your relationship with the written

word, from whichever side of the equation you approach it.

THE ELEMENTS OF STYLE

If anyone can make grammar fun, its

Maira Kalman The Elements of StyleIllustrated marries Kalmans signature

whimsy with Strunk and Whites indispensable style

guide to create an instant classic.

The original Elements of Style was published in 1919

in-house at Cornell University for teaching use and

reprinted in 1959 to become cultural canon, and

Kalmans inimitable version is one of our 10 favorite

masterpieces of graphic nonfiction.



labors of love

On a related unmissable note, let the Elements of Style Rap make your day.

BIRD BY BIRD



must-reads

Anne Lamott might be best known as a nonfiction

writer, but Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writingand Life affirms her as a formidable modernphilosopher as well. The 1994 classic is as much a

practical guide to the writers life as it is a profound

wisdom-trove on the life of the heart and mind, with

insight on everything from overcoming self-doubt to

navigating the osmotic balance of intuition and

rationality.

On the itch of writing, Lamott banters:

We are a species that needs andwants to understand who we are. Sheep lice do not seem toshare this longing, which is one reason why they write so little.But we do. We have so much we want to say and figure out.

And on the grit that commits mind to paper, she counsels:

You begin to string words together like beads to tell a story.You are desperate to communicate, to edify or entertain, topreserve moments of grace or joy or transcendence, to makereal or imagined events come alive. But you cannot will this tohappen. It is a matter of persistence and faith and hard work.So you might as well just go ahead and get started.

On why we read and write:

Writing and reading decrease our sense of isolation. Theydeepen and widen and expand our sense of life: they feed thesoul. When writers make us shake our heads with theexactness of their prose and their truths, and even make uslaugh about ourselves or life, our buoyancy is restored. Weare given a shot at dancing with, or at least clapping alongwith, the absurdity of life, instead of being squashed by it overand over again. Its like singing on a boat during a terriblestorm at sea. You cant stop the raging storm, but singing canchange the hearts and spirits of the people who are togetheron that ship.

ON WRITING



HOW TO FIND YOUR PURPOSE AND DOWHAT YOU LOVE

FAIL SAFE: COURAGE AND THE CREATIVELIFE

FAMOUS WRITERS ON WRITING

HOW TO STAY SANE

CULTURAL ICONS ON THE MEANING OF LIFE

Hailed as one of the most successful writers alive,

Stephen King has hundreds of books under his belt,

most of which bestsellers. On Writing: A Memoir ofthe Craft is part master-blueprint, part memoir,part meditation on the writers life, filtered through

the lens of his near-fatal car crash and the newfound

understanding of living it precipitated.

Though some have voiced skepticism regarding the

capacity of a popular writer to be taken seriously

as an oracle of good writing, Roger Ebert put it

best: After finding that his book On Writing had

more useful and observant things to say about the

craft than any book since Strunk and Whites The Elements of Style, I have gotten

over my own snobbery.

A few favorites from the book follow.

On open-endedness:

Description begins in the writers imagination, but should finishin the readers.

On feedback:

Write with the door closed, rewrite with the door open.

On the lifeblood of writing:

It starts with this: put your desk in the corner, and every timeyou sit down there to write, remind yourself why it isnt in themiddle of the room. Life isnt a support system for art. Its theother way around.

On the relationship between reading and writing, which I wholeheartedly

second:

Can I be blunt on this subject? If you dont have time to read,you dont have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.

ZEN IN THE ART OF WRITING



ALBERT EINSTEIN ON THE SECRET TOLEARNING ANYTHING

THE BEST BOOKS OF 2012

THE DAILY ROUTINES OF FAMOUSWRITERS

5 ESSENTIAL BOOKS ON FEAR AND THECREATIVE PROCESS

10 TIPS ON WRITING FROM DAVID OGILVY

In Zen in the Art of Writing: Releasing the CreativeGenius Within You, Ray Bradbury acclaimedauthor, dystopian novelist, hater of symbolism

shares not only his wisdom and experience in

writing, but also his contagious excitement for the

craft. Blending practical how-tos on everything

from finding your voice to negotiating with editors

with snippets and glimpses of the authors own

career, the book is at once a manual and a

manifesto, imbued with equal parts insight and

enthusiasm.

On the key to creativity (cue in Elizabeth Gilberts

TED talk):

Thats the great secret of creativity. You treat ideas like cats:you make them follow you.

On what to read:

In your reading, find books to improve your color sense, yoursense of shape and size in the world.

On art and truth:

We have our Arts so we wont die of Truth.

On signal and noise, with an embedded message that you are a mashup of what

you let into your life:

Ours is a culture and a time immensely rich in trash as it is intreasures.

THE WAR OF ART

Steven Pressfield is a prolific

champion of the creative process,

with all its trials and tribulations,

best-known for The War of Art: Break Through theBlocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles apersonal defense system of sorts against our

greatest forms of resistance. Resistance with a

capital R, that is.

Are you paralyzed with fear? Thats a good sign. Fear is good.Like self-doubt, fear is an indicator. Fear tells us what we have



9 BOOKS TO HELP YOU READ MORE ANDWRITE BETTER

JOHN CLEESE ON THE 5 FACTORS TOMAKE YOUR LIFE MORE CREATIVE

JOAN DIDION ON KEEPING A NOTEBOOK

100 IDEAS THAT CHANGED GRAPHICDESIGN

7 MUST-READ BOOKS ON THE ART &SCIENCE OF HAPPINESS

to do. Remember our rule of thumb:The more scared we are of a workor calling, the more sure we can bethat we have to do it.

Resistance is experienced as fear;the degree of fear equates thestrength of Resistance. Therefore,the more fear we feel about aspecific enterprise, the more certainwe can be that that enterprise isimportant to us and to the growthof our soul.

Also of note: Pressfields recent companion guide to the text, Do The Work, one

of our 5 favorite manifestos for the creative life.

ADVICE TO WRITERS

Advice to Writers is a compendiumof quotes, anecdotes, and writerly

wisdom from a dazzling array of

literary lights, originally published in 1999. From

how to find a good agent to what makes characters

compelling, it spans the entire spectrum of the

aspirational and the utilitarian, covering grammar,

genres, material, money, plot, plagiarism, and, of

course, encouragement.

Here are a few favorites:

Finish each day before you begin thenext, and interpose a solid wall of sleep between the two. Thisyou cannot do without temperance. ~ Ralph WaldoEmerson

Dont ever write a novel unless it hurts like a hot turd comingout. ~ Charles Bukowski

Breathe in experience, breathe out poetry. ~ MurielRukeyser

Begin with an individual and you find that you have created atype; begin with a type and you find that you have created nothing. ~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

You never have to change anything you got up in the middle



RICHARD DAWKINS ON EVIDENCE INSCIENCE, LIFE AND LOVE: A LETTER TOHIS 10-YEAR-OLD DAUGHTER

CREATIVE CARTOGRAPHY: 7 MUST-READBOOKS ON MAPS

CARL SAGAN ON SCIENCE ANDSPIRITUALITY

JOHN STEINBECK ON FALLING IN LOVE: A1958 LETTER

7 OBSCURE CHILDRENS BOOKS BYFAMOUS AUTHORS OF ADULT LITERATURE

of the night to write. ~ Saul Bellow

Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal. ~ T. S. Eliot

Fiction is a lie, and good fiction is the truth inside the lie. ~Stephen King

Good fiction is made of what is real, and reality is difficult tocome by. ~ Ralph Ellison

Listen, then make up your own mind. ~ Gay Talese

Find a subject you care about and which you in your heartfeel others should care about. It is this genuine caring, notyour games with language, which will be the most compellingand seductive element in your style. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

Write without pay until somebody offers pay; if nobody offerswithin three years, sawing wood is what you were intendedfor. ~ Mark Twain

Originally featured, with more quotes, last December.

HOW TO WRITE A SENTENCE

Humbly titled yet incredibly

ambitious, How to Write a Sentence:And How to Read One by Stanley

Fish isnt merely a prescriptive guide to the craft ofwriting its also a rich and layered exploration of

language as an evolving cultural organism. It

belongs not on the shelf of your home library but in

your brains most deep-seated amphibian

sensemaking underbelly an insightful, rigorous

manual on the art of language that may just be one

of the best such tools since The Elements of Style.

In fact, Fish offers an intelligent rebuttal of some of

the cultish mandates of Strunk and Whites bible, most notably the blind

insistence on brevity and sentence minimalism. To argue his case, he picks apart

some of historys most powerful sentences, from Shakespeare to Dickens to

Lewis Carroll, using a kind of literary forensics to excavate the essence of

beautiful language. As Adam Haslett eloquently observes in his excellent FT



WHY WE LOVE: 5 BOOKS ON THEPSYCHOLOGY OF LOVE

7 MUST-READ BOOKS ON MUSIC,EMOTION & THE BRAIN

BERTRAND RUSSELL'S 10COMMANDMENTS OF TEACHING

5 TIMELESS COMMENCEMENT SPEECHESTO TEACH YOU TO DEFINE YOUR OWNSUCCESS

explore

activism advertising

animation artbooks children'sbooks collaborationcreativity

review:

[Pared-down prose] is a real loss, not because we necessarilyneed more Jamesian novels but because too often theinstruction to omit needless words (Rule 17) leads youngwriters to be cautious and dull; minimalist style becomesminimalist thought, and that is a problem.

To dissect the Tetris-like quality of words, Fish examines the following Anthony

Burgess sentence from his 1968 novel Enderby Outside:

And the words slide into the slots ordained by syntax, and glitteras with atmospheric dust with those impurities which we callmeaning.

Before the words slide into their slots, they are just discreteitems, pointing everywhere and nowhere. Once the words arenested in the places ordained for them ordained is awonderful word that points to the inexorable logic of syntacticstructures they are tied by ligatures of relationships to oneanother. They are subjects or objects or actions ordescriptives or indications of manner, and as such theycombine into a statement about the world, that is, into ameaning that one can contemplate, admire, reject, or refine.

Originally featured here last January.

ERNEST HEMINGWAY ON WRITING

Ernest Hemingway famously

maintained that it was bad luck to

talk about writing. Yet, over the

course of his career, he frequently wrote about

writing in his novels and short stories, his letters to

editors, friends, critics, and lovers, in interviews,

and even in articles specifically commissioned on

the subject. In Ernest Hemingway on Writing, editorLarry W. Phillips culls the finest, wittiest, mostprofound of Hemingways reflections on writing,

the nature of the writer, and the elements of the

writers life. The slender volume packs insights on

everything from work habits to mood management

to discipline to knowing what to leave out, delivered with Hemingways

unmistakable personality and his signature zeal for integrity.

On what makes a great book:

All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they hadreally happened and after you are finished reading one you willfeel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs



culture datavisualization designdiaries documentaryeducation film foodhappiness historyillustrationinnovation interviewknowledge lettersliterature love musicneuroscience omnibusphilosophyphotography poetrypoliticspsychology remixscience social webSoundCloud sustainabilitytechnology TEDvideo vintage vintagechildren's books world writing

to you: the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse andsorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was. Ifyou can get so that you can give that to people, then you area writer.

On symbolism:

There isnt any symbolysm [sic]. The sea is the sea. The oldman is an old man. The boy is a boy and the fish is a fish. Thesharks are all sharks no better and no worse. All thesymbolism that people say is shit. What goes beyond is whatyou see beyond when you know.

(Cue in other famous writers on symbolism, from Jack Kerouac to Ray Bradbury

to Ayn Rand.)

On the qualities of a writer:

All my life Ive looked at words as though I were seeing themfor the first time.

First, there must be talent, much talent. Talent such as Kiplinghad. Then there must be discipline. The discipline of Flaubert.Then there must be the conception of what it can be and anabsolute conscience as unchanging as the standard meter inParis, to prevent faking. Then the writer must be intelligentand disinterested and above all he must survive. Try to get allthese things in one person and have him come through all theinfluences that press on a writer. The hardest thing, becausetime is so short, is for him to survive and get his work done.

The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in,shockproof shit detector. This is the writers radar and all greatwriters have had it.

HOW TO READ A BOOK



How to Read a Book, originally written byMortimer Adler in 1940 and revised with Charles

van Doren in 1972, is the kind of book often

described as a living classic classic because

it deals with the fundamental and unchanging

mesmerism of the written word, and living

because it does so in a way that divorces this

mesmerism from its hard medium, allowing the

essence to evolve as our culture has evolved over

the decades. From basic reading to systematic

skimming and inspectional reading to speed

reading, Adlers how-tos apply as efficiently to

practical textbooks and science books as they do

to poetry and fiction.

One of the books finest points deals with the fundamental yin-yang of how ideas

travel and permeate minds the intertwined acts of reading and writing.

Marginalia those fragments of thought and seeds of insight we scribble in the

margins of a book have a social life all their own: just ask The New York Times

Sam Anderson, who recently shared his years worth of marginalia in a

wonderful interactive feature. Hardly anything captures both the utilitarian

necessity and creative allure of marginalia better than this excerpt from Adlers

classic:

When you buy a book, you establish a property right in it, justas you do in clothes or furniture when you buy and pay forthem. But the act of purchase is actually only the prelude topossession in the case of a book. Full ownership of a bookonly comes when you have made it a part of yourself, and thebest way to make yourself a part of it which comes to thesame thing is by writing in it.

Why is marking a book indispensable to reading it? First, itkeeps you awake not merely conscious, but wide awake.Second, reading, if it is active, is thinking, and thinking tendsto express itself in words, spoken or written. The person whosays he knows what he thinks but cannot express it usuallydoes not know what he thinks. Third, writing your reactionsdown helps you to remember the thoughts of the author.

Reading a book should be a conversation between you andthe author. Presumably he knows more about the subjectthan you do; if not, you probably should not be bothering withhis book. But understanding is a two-way operation; thelearner has to question himself and question the teacher, oncehe understands what the teacher is saying. Marking a book isliterally an expression of your differences or your agreementswith the author. It is the highest respect you can pay him.

First featured here, along with a meditation on modern marginalia, in



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