What I’ve Learned So Far

“The problem of availability is something that seems increasingly to have been solved. To view or to read well is another kind of problem.”

–From “Slow Reading” at if:book.
~

(Image by rana ossama, used under a CC-Share Alike license.)

It’s an idea that hatched from a Twitter conversation with Tamsen McMahon and Amber Austen, based on their replies to my CareOne post about reading books to improve your attention span. Here’s the idea:

1. I use a blog post — this one, in fact — to tell you what I’m reading.
2. If you decide to read any of those same books, you let me know.
3. When we’re both/all done with the book, we discuss as much or as little as we please — via e-mail, Facebook, Twitter, blog comment threads, whatever.

That’s it — no big whoop, no big commitment, no set meetings, no hurt feelings, nothing.

The point is to reinforce our love of good books, but without creating yet another obligation to overload our already busy days. (If my count is correct, Tamsen, Amber, and I have a total of seven children, with another — Tamsen’s second — on the way. We’re busy enough already.)

So, here’s what’s on my nightstand, more or less in the order that I intend to finish them:

• Leviathan by Scott Westerfeld
• The Snowball (biography of Warren Buffett) by Alice Schroeder
• Mort by Terry Pratchett
• To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis
• Delivered from Distraction by Hallowell and Ratey
• The Emigrants by W. G. Sebald
• Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie
• Plus several back issues of Esquire and The Threepenny Review.

Care to join me?

~

(Photo by Nicholas Laughlin, used under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license.)

“I wish this was real, only without the wars and bloodshed and stuff.”

Well, yeah. Welcome to the club, kid.

Or, you know, your openly flaunted comic book geek, if that’s your thing.

Behold . . . Cover Browser.

The short version: images of more than 450,000 covers — like the one above, which is etched in my memory from adolescence — of comic books, magazines, and books.

The long version . . . Wait, who needs a long version? Go! View! Bathe in nostalgia as you view the comic book covers of your youth!

Be warned that the site is arrestingly complete, and if it strikes a chord with you, browsing there could take up the rest of your day.

Oh, to spend my days in an old library like this one . . .

My academic life has taken me to some great libraries: the St. Andrews rare books section, the Harry Ransom Center, the Bodleian (at least for one day), the Butler, and that bibliographic holy of holies at Union Theological Seminary.

I still read voluminously, seemingly all day every day, but as I look back at the record of my reading for the year — and the past few years — it’s clear to me that I’ve let my online intake of words overwhelm my printed-book intake of words.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m glad to make my living as an online writer, and I’m well aware of the trove of good stuff available online. But I also know that most of the very best stuff I’ve ever read has come in book form, and that I do my best thinking about what I read when the computer is turned off. Besides all that, it would seem to make eminent sense to up my intake of books if I want to up my output of books.

So, an early resolution for 2010, one that I’ve already started on: read more books.

How about you? How’s your book reading these days?

~

Related post by Austin Kleon: MY READING YEAR, 2009.
~

(Image from Hannah Swithinbank, used under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license.)

And WHY?

Because I have a preview copy of Chris Barton’s next book . . .

. . . Shark vs. Train on my desk — and you don’t.

;)

P.S. It’s awesome!

I don’t know whether I have ADD. I’ve been reading the excellent Delivered from Distraction by Edward Hallowell and John Ratey, and I see a lot of myself in their description of ADDers . . . but then, I’m also not like a lot of the ADD cases they describe.

(If your Tim Walker radar is set to “Stalker,” you’ll recall that I liked Hallowell’s book CrazyBusy enough that I reviewed it not once but twice.)

Anyway, whether I technically have ADD doesn’t concern me. What does concern me is to use my brain better than I have been. Which leads me to the simple insight foreshadowed in the heading of this post:

I need to work in shorter timeframes.

Distractions kill me. Giant multi-part projects stymie me, even though, as you’ll recall, my career ambition is to write books. (Irony much?) But I can crank out great work when I can do it quickly and then switch to something else.

Or, to quote one of the great lines from the Rocky oeuvre, “Stick, and move.”

What do you do to improve your work output?

~

(Photo by Arturo Donate.)

Here’s a nifty thing: my friend Chris Barton’s debut book, The Day-Glo Brothers, published by Charlesbridge and available now from Amazon, even though the official release date isn’t until next week, which means you can conspire with Amazon to participate in the day-glo awesomeness early.

Early awesomeness = yes, people.

Related: Chris’s author site.

Related: Chris’s blog, Bartography, which he’s been writing for ages and which is excellent.

Related: Wired Magazine blurbed The Day-Glo Brothers. Woo-hoo!

Gimmicky though they are, I’m a sucker for “all-time best” lists like these:

• TIME Magazine: All-Time 100 Novels
• TIME Magazine: All-Time 100 Movies

Of the novels — and they actually just mean novels written in English since 1923 — I’m sure I’ve read these 19 in their entirety:

American Pastoral, Animal Farm, Appointment in Samarra, The Bridge of San Luis Rey, The Catcher in the Rye, The Grapes of Wrath, The Great Gatsby, The Heart of the Matter, Lord of the Flies, The Lord of the Rings, Mrs. Dalloway, Native Son, 1984, A Passage to India, Slaughterhouse-Five, Snow Crash, The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, To Kill a Mockingbird, To the Lighthouse

Of the movies, I’m sure I’ve seen these 40:

The Awful Truth, Blade Runner, Bonnie and Clyde, Brazil, Bride of Frankenstein, Camille, Casablanca, Charade, Chinatown, Citizen Kane, Double Indemnity, Dr. Strangelove, E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial, Farewell My Concubine, Finding Nemo, The Fly [though it doesn’t belong this list], The Godfather, The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, Goodfellas, A Hard Day’s Night [??], His Girl Friday [one of my all-time faves], It’s A Wonderful Life, King Kong, The Lady Eve, Lawrence of Arabia, The Lord of the Rings, Meet Me in St. Louis, Notorious, On the Waterfront, Once Upon a Time in the West, Pinocchio, Psycho, Pulp Fiction, Schindler’s List, Singin’ in the Rain, Some Like It Hot, Star Wars, A Streetcar Named Desire, Taxi Driver, Unforgiven

How about you?

I am fortunate, especially in this economy, to have an excellent salaried job. I’d like to keep it for a good many years yet. Keep that firmly in mind as you read the next bit.

What I’m after in my career is writing lots of books. That’s it.

Now, I enjoy teaching and public speaking and research and working on marketing projects and helping customers and attending conferences and “other duties as assigned.” I also enjoy exercising and listening to music and spending time with my family and having long conversations with friends. Hey, I enjoy life.

But the thing that’s been waiting for me for as long as I can remember is writing books. Part of the reason I restarted this blog is to make sure my writing chops are where they should be — like Jerry Rice running sprints in the off-season. Some of the books I want to write dovetail beautifully with my day job, so I’m laying groundwork in that direction. And my academic work has already pointed me toward a couple of books that could do something more than show up in other academics’ footnotes.

What isn’t going to work is for me to do things the same way I’ve done them. Why? Because I’ve tried that . . . and no books were forthcoming.

So, what am I doing differently now?

• Setting aside the idea that books come after projects A and B and C and D et cetera. Items A through D likely will get done long before Walker’s First Work hits the shelves at your local bookstore, but they have to happen in parallel — interwoven — with the writing of the books.
• Rebuilding my to-do list from the ground up.
• In general, showing more chutzpah, which mostly means being audacious whenever I’m feeling aversive about writing.

Your life is like your house: you can put the furniture wherever you want it to go. So there’s no sense in complaining if it’s not situated as you’d like it to be.

Or, to put it another way, if something’s a priority for you, act like it.

Are you putting your real interests first? Even if (as with me) it will take years for them to come to fruition?

~

Photo by Ginny, used under a CC-Share Alike license.