Book truckin’

10 things worth sharing this week

Hey y’all,

At the moment, Steal Like an Artist is a measly $7 on Amazon. That’s a… steal.

Here are 10 other things I thought were worth sharing this week:

1. Some friends of the newsletter at Demco made my book truck dreams come true and shipped me this yellow beauty. Inspired by the librarians at my local branch who give their book trucks names like “Shelvis Presley” and “Trolley Parton,” I’ve decided my new truck needs a name. The people of Instagram had dozens of great suggestions — now I need you to cast your vote below:

   I will also accept write-in votes in the comments:
   
   

   
   

2. Doesn’t it feel good to cast your vote? Now all y’all in the US should make a plan to do so in the upcoming election.
   
   

3. “I'm called ‘the poorest president’, but I don't feel poor. Poor people are those who only work to try to keep an expensive lifestyle, and always want more and more.” That’s the former president of Uruguay, José “Pepe” Mujica. I learned about him from a blog post by Grant Peterson that featured the inspiring New York Times article, “How to Be Truly Free: Lessons from a Philosopher President.” (Now I want to watch the Netflix documentary, El Pepe: A Supreme Life.)
   
   

4. “The book is the greatest invention of man,” says Pepe Mujica, “It’s a shame that people read so little.” Almost half of America didn’t read a book last year. John Warner has it right: “We need to make more readers.” That’s why I hold public libraries near and dear to me — I think they have the best chance of making a difference to people in all walks of life. As Kurt Vonnegut put it, “The America I love still exists at the front desks of our public libraries.” So I was absolutely delighted to be asked to emcee the upcoming gala at the Austin Public Library. If you live in Austin and you’ve got the dough, come out and support The Library Foundation!
   
   

5. Roland Allen’s The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper feels like a book that was written just for me. So good. (A proud papa moment: a few days ago, my 11-year-old made his first lap in the One Line A Day diary I gave him last October.)
   
   

6. Don’t miss my most recent typewriter interview with Chase Jarvis. I’ve been thinking how much I like the dance between analog and digital in these typewriter interviews and my monthly mixtapes — something Robin Sloan calls the “flip flop.” (Related: Green Day’s Dookie Demastered project, which presents the album’s songs on “obscure, obsolete, and inconvenient formats” like wax cylinder, Fisher Price record, player piano roll, and, my personal favorite, the “Basket Case” Big Mouth Billie Bass.)
   
   

7. “With a bit of humor you can actually get at the serious, tender thing.” That’s from a profile of Oliver Burkeman, who has a new book out this week called Meditations for Mortals. The book is designed to be read daily for 28 days: I read a chapter in my advance copy each day of September. (In case you missed it, here’s my interview with Oliver about his blockbuster book, Four Thousand Weeks.)
   
   

8. Watching with the 9 & 11-year-olds: a lot of baseball games. A surprise pizza night hit was Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds. We love Nate Bargatze in “Washington’s Dream” and “Washington’s Dream 2” on SNL. (“Nobody knows” has become a catchphrase in our house.) At bedtime, I showed them a few videos from this Instagram user named @pc_user_486, who simply records old computers booting up games like Doom 2 and Wolfenstein 3-D. (Yes, boys, this is how papa misspent his youth: making boot disks for shooter games…)
   
   

9. “We need a little bit of structure to get out of bed, to keep going.” RIP writer Robert Coover.
   
   

10. If you’re like me and you have a bunch of writing to do this creative season, take heart: “The creative moment of a writer comes with the autumn,” wrote Cyril Connelly in An Unquiet Grave. “The winter is the time for reading, revision, preparation of the soil; the spring for thawing back to life; the summer is for the open air, for satiating the body with health and action, but from October to Christmas for the release of mental energy, the hard crown of the year.”
    
    

Thank you for reading. This is a hand-rolled, ad-free, AI-free, anti-algorithm, completely reader-supported publication. If you want to help keep it going, buy my books, hire me to speak, or become a paid subscriber:

xoxo,

Austin

PS. Here’s a page from Keep Going for those who need it: