Always have a book with you

On leaving books around the house

Dani Shapiro’s Still Writing on my desk in the studio

Hey y’all,

A few years ago I posted my zine, Read Like an Artist, with my 10 tips for a better life with books.

One of my favorites is #2:

Carry a book with you at all times. Get used to carrying a book around with you wherever you go and reaching for it in all the spare moments you’d usually pull out your phone….

Another favorite is #7:

Be promiscuous. Date a lot of books until you find one you want to settle down with. Read more than one book and more than one kind of book at a time. Let the authors talk to each other.

Here’s the great Octavia Butler on reading more than one book at a time:

I generally have four or five books open around the house—I live alone; I can do this—and they are not books on the same subject. They don’t relate to each other in any particular way, and the ideas they present bounce off one another. And I like this effect.

I do not live alone, but I also do this, and I do it in a weird combination of #2 and #7: I leave different books at different spots in the house, and whenever I find myself in that spot, the book catches my eye and I pick it up and read a little bit of it.

So here’s Adam Moss’s The Work of Art on the kitchen table — I decided I wasn’t going to be able to read the whole thing straight through, so every night at dinner I read one of the interviews. (Breakfast is for writing in my diary and I usually eat a small lunch in the kitchen or at my desk out in the studio.)

My wife and kids keep a small stack of reading material next to their place settings, too. Some people lose their minds when I say we all read quietly at the dinner table, but we’re a family that spends all day together in the summer and we often do our talking after dinner, when everybody’s hopped up on food. (Trust me, there is plenty of talking happening in our house. Maybe too much!)

Here’s a snapshot of the bookshelf in our bathroom. For the past month or two, I’ve been reading a few pages of G.C. Lichtenberg’s The Waste Books in there every day. Here’s how Lichtenberg himself described a “waste book”: