Books are made out of books

10 things worth sharing this week

My son Jules (8) drew me reading

Hey y’all,

Today is my 40th birthday. I’m a tremendously lucky guy and I’m very grateful to have such family and friends and readers to write for — thank you all very much!

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

1. “Books are made out books.” RIP Cormac McCarthy. To me, he was a great mashup artist, like if you put Hemingway, Faulkner, Moby-Dick, and The King James Bible in a blender. I enjoyed many of his books but the one I’m closest to is probably No Country For Old Men. I read it when it came out and thought, “This will make an amazing movie,” and it did. (It actually started as a screenplay.) There are lines in that story I quote often, like, “you never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from.”
   
   

2. RIP Robert Gottlieb, another literary giant, who edited Toni Morrison and Robert Caro, amongst others. Perhaps most notably for me, he edited 4 out of 5 of Charles Portis’s novels. Portis said the advice he heard the most from Gottlieb was, “Charlie, make them turn the page.” (His daughter’s documentary about him is called Turn Every Page.) The Paris Review has pulled down the paywall on “The Art of Editing,” featuring him and some of his writers, including Michael Crichton, who says one of the best things I’ve ever read about the value of a good editor.
   
   

3. On a whim, I started listening to an old audiobook of David Case reading Don Quixote, and I just fell in love with it. Case does Don Quixote’s voice like Peter Ustinov doing Prince John in Disney’s Robin Hood, and it’s so, so funny to me. A 400-year-old book about a guy that reads so many books he goes crazy! I spent at least a dozen hours this week listening to it. (I’m trading back and forth between listening and reading Edith Grossman’s translation on my Kindle.) I’ve already decided I’m naming my next bicycle Rocinante a la Dervla Murphy and John Steinbeck.
   
   

4. “I bought the only physical encyclopedia still in print, and I regret nothing.” Would love to see print reference make a comeback — I treasure my paper dictionaries and paper thesauruses!
   
   

5. “Old magazines are cheap time machines, archaeologies of collective desire.” I still regret not buying these Interview magazines from the 90s. It’s not the same as print, but if you have a nice monitor, you can find huge archives of old magazines online, like Interview, Life, and Esquire. (Feel free to send me your favorites.)
   
   

6. I wrote about the value of having an artistic nemesis and y’all sent me some fun stuff, like these excellent Kate Beaton cartoons, which make me think of one of my favorite movies: Ridley Scott’s first feature, The Duellists.
   
   

7. Pizza night blockbuster: We enjoyed Treasure Island, Disney’s first live-action feature in 1950. I couldn't get enough of Robert Newton as Long John Silver — I had no idea that by leaning into his West Country dialect he basically invented pirate talk!
   
   

8. TV: I really like The Other Two, an HBO show that is raunchy and funny and stupid, but also has some things to say about the emptiness of fame and social media.
   
   

9. Rubik’s Cube: Max Park broke his world record for speed cubing. If you haven’t seen the short documentary, The Speed Cubers, it’s great. (I’ve written about my love for The Cube a few times.)
   
   

10. “If there’s anything I know about practicing it’s that it isn’t about rules or consistency or scarcity or god forbid optimizing: it’s about coming back. A practice is built on the movement of return.”

Thanks again for reading and for returning.

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xoxo,

Austin