(Roughly) Daily

With the kids in the house all day I am finding it terribly hard to concentrate when reading. Hopefully you’re the opposite, and having a fine time, tackling Moby-Dick or War and Peace or Ducks, Newburyport or whatever. But, if not, here, copy and pasted from an old newsletter, are some of my favorite short books:

Novellas:

• Tove Jansson, The Summer Book 
• Denis Johnson, Train Dreams 
• Nathanael West, Miss Lonelyhearts
• Jenny Offill, Dept. of Speculation
  

Short stories:

• Joy Williams, Ninety-Nine Stories of God 
• David Eagleman, Sum: Forty Tales of the Afterlives

Lectures:

• Ursula Franklin, The Real World of Technology 
• Italo Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium.

Memoir:

• Eve Babitz, Slow Days, Fast Company
• Joe Brainard, I Remember
• Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts

Poetry:

• T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets
• Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching (Ursula K Le Guin translation)
• A.R. Ammons, Tape for the Turn of the Year

Comics:

• Eleanor Davis, You & a Bike & a Road 
• James Sturm, Market Day

Art:

• John Berger, Ways of Seeing
• Walter Murch, In The Blink of an Eye

Staying sane:

• Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves To Death
• Alan Jacobs, How To Think
• Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

Biography:

• Stefan Zweig, Montaigne
• Nathaniel Philbrick, Why Read Moby-Dick?

Essays:

• Sarah Manguso, 300 Arguments
• Donald Hall, Essays Over Eighty
• Robert Louis Stevenson, An Apology for Idlers
• Montaigne, On Solitude
• Elisa Gabbert, The Word Pretty

You could read many of these in a single afternoon. Happy reading!

(Buy from your local bookstore or Bookshop if you can.)

Characteristically-good advice from the estimable Austin Kleon (@austinkleon): “Short was good in a book.”

* Charles Portis, Gringo

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As we concentrate on the compact, we might send charming birthday greetings to Ludwig Bemelmans; he was born on this date in 1898.  An author, illustrator, and artist, he is best known for his six Madeline picture books.

In an old house in Paris, that was covered with vines, lived twelve little girls in two straight lines… the smallest one was Madeline…

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