26 books I picked up (and put down) this spring

What my reading life really looked like for the past 3 months

Hey y’all,

I always love when my friends make big lists of everything they read — including the books they don’t finish! I’m usually too chicken to do that publicly, but since we’re all friends here, I thought I’d give it a go.

Here’s every book I picked up (and put down) this spring. Ones I put down are marked with DNF — “Did Not Finish.” Though I can’t wholeheartedly recommend them all, the fact that I bothered to give them a go is, in itself, a kind of recommendation…

1. The Wheels of Chance by H.G. Wells (DNF)
   An 1896 comic novel about bicycling. Picked it up after devouring Grant Petersen’s Just Ride: A Radically Practical Guide to Riding Your Bike. Didn’t get very far in.
   
   

2. It’s All About The Bike by Robert Penn (DNF)
   Penn builds himself a bike while exploring the history of the bicycle. I liked the small portion of this I read, and will probably come back to it. (Jody Rosen quotes from it a few times in Two Wheels Good.)
   
   

3. Spring Cannot Be Cancelled: David Hockney in Normandy by Martin Gayford
   A wonderful portrait of Hockney in lockdown and all his thoughts about art. Bought it last year and saved it for the next spring. Right book, right time. Loved this.
   
   

4. The Andy Warhol Diaries (edited by Pat Hackett)
   I pulled out my copy after watching The Andy Warhol Diaries on Netflix. One of my favorite books. I like the paper edition to browse, and the ebook to search for things like “Dolly Parton” and see what comes up.
   
   

5. Old in Art School: A Memoir of Starting Over by Nell Painter
   I picked this without reading it first for our Read Like an Artist book club. I thought it’d be fun to read fresh, along with everyone else. Ironically, it wasn’t quite my cup of tea. (I wanted her to be more critical, in general, about the idea of going to art school.)
   
   

6. Pilot Impostor by James Hannaham
   A very strange but compelling book I picked up solely based on the cover being displayed on the library’s NEW shelf. Inspired by air disasters and Richard Zenith’s translations of Fernando Pessoa and Co.
   
   

7. Pessoa: A Biography by Richard Zenith (DNF)
   Picked up after Pilot Impostor. Seems very cool, but also 500+ pages, so I’m going to read his translations of the poems and The Book of Disquiet first.
   
   

8. Thinking in Pictures: My Life with Autism by Temple Grandin (DNF)
   I have read the first chapter of this book a few times (on ebook, in bed) and somehow haven’t made it past that point. I bought the paperback so I can get further.