austin kleon – ricardo reading

August was my birthday month. I reached my Memento Mori Goodreads Reading Challenge goal of 37 books just as I turned 37, which was very apt. That it also turned out to be one of the best reading months I’ve had in a while was just a nice little bonus. I got through a fair bit, so let’s dive in.

The Anthropocene Reviewed by John Green. The Green brothers have shaped and influenced my life in immeasurable ways. I love them both, but have always had a soft spot for John. Partly because, as a fellow anxious and bookish older brother who is often dealing with one existential crisis or another, I relate to him a lot. Mostly though, I’ve just always admired how he consistently chooses to tell his stories — from his books to the best of his video essays — through the fractured lenses of humanism and hope. The “Thoughts from Places” videos, which were my favorites during their Brotherhood 2.0 era, are excellent representations of John’s reflective style, and this collection of essays is essentially a continuation and expansion of that format. I took my time with this one — I started it back in January — and it’s been a delightful companion throughout this stressful, hectic year. I give The Anthropocene Reviewed five out of five stars.

Keep Going by Austin Kleon. A re-read. I first picked this up during the pandemic, and it made that oppressive year feel a little less heavy. This book’s focus is on the creative life, but I find that it’s infinitely more helpful to my personal life. A lovely book that I think everyone should read. Kleon, by the way, is one of the most interesting people you could ever follow online.

It Came from the Trees by Ally Russell. Already wrote about this one, of course. Let’s hear it for rad friends doing rad things.

The Good Neighbor: The Life and Work of Fred Rogers by Maxwell King. To be perfectly candid I picked this up because I was tired of reading about disappointing men. I wanted to read about someone decent, who did infinitely more good than harm, and I couldn’t think of anyone better and more appropriate than Mister Rogers. But also I just wanted to read more about this amazing man, particularly after watching A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood at the start of the year. I didn’t grow up with Mister Rogers (to be perfectly honest, I think my younger self would have found him perfectly boring), but he’s someone who I’ve come to deeply admire the more I’ve learned about him through the years. The man was practically a saint, yes, but he was also a flawed individual who, through rigorous discipline and profound courage, tried his damnedest to be a force for good in the world. This expansive, engaging biography does an admirable job portraying this most human of humans.

I also read a bunch of short stories.

“Judge Dee and the Mystery of the Missing Manuscript” / “The Locked Coffin: A Judge Dee Mystery” by Lavie Tidhar. I really enjoy these clever, irreverent short stories. “The Mystery of the Missing Manuscript” is set in an ancient library, and Tidhar has a blast affectionately mocking obsessive bookish types. And I think “The Locked Coffin” might just be my favorite of the Judge Dee stories so far? It’s certainly the funniest — I laughed out loud multiple times. It just felt like a livelier story, with Dee himself seeming downright whimsical. Delightful stuff.

“Randomize” by Andy Weir. Super interesting premise and fun execution. Like a lot of these Kindle Single stories, though, it reads very much like the beginning of a larger, far more interesting story, rather than a thing that stands on its own.

“Emergency Skin” by N.K. Jemisin. Now this was far more like it. Much more complete and infinitely more narratively satisfying than Weir’s effort for this collection of Kindle Singles. Not necessarily the most original concept, but it was perfectly compelling and executed in an effortlessly stylish way, which goes a long way in terms of my enjoyment of a thing.

“The Penthouse” by Helen Phillips. Very effective piece of flash fiction. Enjoyed how downright sinister it felt. The closing line is a veritable banger.

“The Year Without Sunshine” / “Better Living Through Algorithms” by Naomi Kritzer. Kritzer may have turned into one of my favorite short story writers with these two offerings. Both absolutely wonderful in their own unique ways. “The Year Without Sunshine” in particular is one of those stories that fill you with hope and leave you thinking that, contrary to all current evidence, humanity’s going to be just fine, in the end. She deserves every damn Hugo she gets.

“The Particles of Order” by Yiyun Li. Loved the atmosphere and writing here, but found the ending entirely unsatisfactory.

“A Pretty Place” by E.M. Carroll. I was looking to see if Carroll had any new work coming out. As big a fan as I am of their work, I still somehow managed to miss not only the name and pronoun change, but also this utterly unsettling and gorgeous story from last year. Obscenely good, as per usual.

“Obituary for a Quiet Life” / “The Coded Life of William Thomas Prestwood” by Jeremy B. Jones. These are narrative essays, which I never cover in these wrap-ups, but I was so struck by Jones’s writing that I had to include them. “Obituary for a Quiet Life” is a beautifully poignant piece, and “The Coded Life of William Thomas Prestwood” is just a stunning story that’s simply staggering in scope and so unlike anything I’ve read before. Wonderful, wonderful writer.

The world has changed since last I wrote about a week ago, something that feels more uncanny than it does anything else. Needless to say, we’re going through wild, uncertain times, and I can only hope that you are safe, doing your part in flattening the curve.

I have not left my house since Saturday. And Sunday, my office sent out a message saying we would be closed until the end of the month. This is, technically speaking, the first time off I’ve had in over a year, and I wanted to take advantage of it as best I could. I would read all of the books, for one. I would write. I would do this and that and also this.

But, like a lot of others right now, anxiety has gotten the best of me these last couple of days, completely shot my focus, and just making it difficult for me to enjoy the things I generally love.

Which is where Keep Going comes in.

Austin Kleon has made a name for himself writing motivational books about being a more creative person in the modern, digital age. His first book of this kind, Steal Like an Artist, was all about channeling your influences (my nicer way of saying “just straight up steal from your idols”) in order to create something that may not be entirely new and unique, but that is entirely and uniquely yours. Show Your Work! was more business-like in nature, expounding advice and industry knowledge on how to share your stuff with the world and making a space for yourself within it.

Keep Going feels like a natural progression from those themes, but its central message is perhaps less tangible in nature. It is a book about being creative, yes, and it is also full of useful, practical information — but it is also a book that is less interested with the external side of things than it is with the internal. Less concerned with the how than it is the why of making art. Where the first two books deal with the more physical, material aspects of creating art, Keep Going is about what it feels to create said art. Specifically how it feels to create art when things aren’t going that well.

If the past handful of years have shown us anything, it’s that we live in tumultuous times. One glance at any recent headline is enough to fill anyone with dread and dismay. With so many cheerless and complicated things going on in the world it can be easy to feel as if doing anything artful and creative is a trivial endeavor at best, or actively selfish at worst. How can you sit there, frivolously frolicking away while the world crumbles around us?

With Keep Going, however, Austin Kleon reminds us that art is not a gratuitous, self-indulgent thing. That it is important and necessary. And especially so during times of strife, where it acquires even greater significance. “To any creators who feel guilty making art when the house is on fire,” author V.E. Schwab wrote recently, “please remember: you make the doorways out.” And here’s Kleon quoting the late, great Toni Morrison:

This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.

I know the world is bruised and bleeding, and though it is important not to ignore its pain, it is also critical to refuse to succumb to its malevolence.

It should be noted, however, that at no point does this book imply that you have this obligation to be creative in spite of the difficulties around you. Everyone deals with hardship in their own way, after all.

Here’s writer Robin Sloan, in a recent edition of his newsletter:

In 1816, the gloomy “Year Without a Summer,” Mary Shelley stayed indoors at a lakeside hotel; not quarantine, but maybe quarantine-adjacent. There, bored and haunted, she conceived the story that would grow into her novel Frankenstein, the foundation stone of the genre we now call science fiction.

It’s moderately annoying when people invoke work like that, because it feels like the implication is, if you’re not writing Frankenstein what are you even DOING? That’s not what I mean. It’s just that the big, bright examples help us see it clearly: toil in the shadow of calamity will have its day.

Toil in the shadow of calamity WILL have its day.

A crack in everything; that’s how the art gets in.

Keep Going acts more like a permission slip. You can create art, it says, if you want to. If you are able. If you must.

Go easy on yourself and take your time. Worry less about getting things done. Worry more about things worth doing. Worry less about being a great artist. Worry more about being a good human being who makes art. Worry less about making a mark. Worry more about leaving things better than you found them.

The world can only benefit from your contribution, ultimately, if you just keep going.

Tag: austin kleon

AUGUST 2024

KEEP GOING by Austin Kleon