Reading

This is the list of the books that listeners to this radio series of interviews are currently reading. Please use the comment box below to add your book(s) or comment if you wish on all these great suggestions!

840 COMMENTS

  1. Установка камина и дымоходов в Москве под ключ — профессиональное решение для тех, кто ценит уют, тепло и стиль в доме.
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  3. Just Kids by Patti Smith. I finished M Train which I loved and in it she describes reading all of Murakami. I decided to follow her lead.

    • I read Just kids some years ago, so powerful and poetic. Enjoy. Thanks for suggesting M Train I just ordered it.

  4. I like literary mysteries a lot. I’ve been on a John Banville kick, the Irish author who wrote Booker prize winning The Sea. He also wrote crime procedural novels featuring pathologist Quirke under Benjamin Black. He has been writing crime novels under Banville. Snow, April in Spain and the most recent The Drowned. Quirke is a secondary character in these.

  5. I’m reading The Power of the Powerless, by Václav Havel (et al) whose message is about the ripple effect created by dissidents in Czechoslovakia who brought down a repressive regime by living within their truth without violence or anger in the Velvet Revolution.

  7. I’m reading now ” The Da Vince Code” . I was read in the past a little bit and then I left for a while … now I’m reading it again . It is thrilling book with great artist work of Leonardo da Vinci …

  8. Im reading now ” The Da Vinci code ” … I was start in the past a little bit and left it for a while .. now I’m back again to read it . It is thrilling book with great artist of Leonardo da Vinci …

  9. I am currently reading ” les gentils Aussi meritent de réussir” by Yannick Alain, in French.

    Website: www.myartinaction.com

  10. I just completed the essays on the power of Images by Maurice Berger – a Vision and Justice book titled “Race Stories” edited by Marvin Heiferman produced by Aperture and The New York Times. It was great to dive deep into understand race through photography with its history. It was awe inspiring!

  11. I just finished Patti Smith’s M Train. What a wonderful read! She is, first and foremost, a lover. When she takes you in her arms, the world suddenly feels good and headed in the right direction, even as we stumble. It took me months to read it as I wanted to savor and stop along the way. It is a moving homage to living a creative life in simplicity, no excess required. Here’s to writing and reading in cafes.

  12. I’m reading bits and pieces of 4 books:

    “Dune” by Frank Herbert
    “Joseph Beuys” by Allen Antliff
    “25 Women: Essays on their art” by David Hickey
    “In a Jingle Jangle Jungle” by Joel Gion

  18. Im re-reading Island of the Mad by Laurie Sheck after reading her forthcoming book Cyborg Fever, both hybrid novels, poetry+fiction in a unique style and approach

  19. Lebensborn – Birth Politics in the Third Reich by Angeniet Berkers
    I wanted to learn more about the effects of violent events on a person’s life, how they affect family life and the the generations that follow. Also, it showed how photography is being used in book form touching on the history of documentation. Was totally shocked how absorbing the photographs and stories read.

  21. Living With Frankenstein by Steven Schkolne

    The Serpent Coiled in Naples by Marius Kociejowaki

    Stories of Your Life by Ted Chiang

    Surreal Numbers by D.E. Knuth

  22. Fritz Saxl’s A Heritage of Images.
    Saxl was a close associate of Aby Warburg and an excellent (and engaging) scholar in his own right. This is a collection of lectures on Renaissance art.

  23. Blake’s Nostos: Fragmentation and Nondualism in The Four Zoas, by Kathryn S. Freeman, my brilliant youngest sister who passed away on Jan. 24. She was a Blake scholar and recognized expert on Romanticism. From now on I will study all of her books one by one. Her newest just came out, posthumously. Blake’s prophetic epics, especially, are the most complex literary works I’ve ever encountered. Katie’s exegesis is equally fascinating and immensely helpful.

  24. Just finished ‘Big magic’ by Elizabeth Gilbert .. looking at her positive viewpoint on creative inspiration v angst and suffering and making a choice between the two pathways. Great read and it’ll put wind in your sails artists.

  25. I just finished Herve Guibert’s Suzanne and Louise and I am about finish Can The Monster Speak by Paul B. Preciado.

  26. Just finished Childhoods End by Arthur C Clarke written in 1953 he later went on to write 2001:A Space Odyssey sci-fy not my bag but really enjoyed it
    Now reading Howard’s End by EM Forster finding this to be a great classic

    • i need to read both, thank you, i love finding classics I have never read – just read Richard Farinas Been Down So long…

  27. Hey all , those days i am reading a few books :
    – Hsk 3 – chinese language
    – James Jean – Rebus
    -Drawing and painting by R.Wilson
    – Composition and narrative from Artists’master collection
    -Color from the same collection

    and as audiobook : Mastery from A. Green

  28. “There There”, by Tommy Orange, when I’m not working on my own book, “8-Sided Drum”. I also picked up an old paperback “This is Not the Life I Ordered” because I couldn’t resist the title…

  32. The Platonic Doctrines of Albinus, a difficult read, but I love ancient Greek Philosophy, it would take me for ever to finish it, but I will..,
    I read a little from Radiant City, Jane Craven, poetry, not enjoying it though.., I prefer the old poets..,

  33. Just finished Dirty Snow by Simenon, a remarkable and dark read, and Prisoners of Geography a wonderful non fiction account of how geography determines the fate of nations.

  38. The Empusium – A health resort horror story, by Olga Tokarczuk. (A winner of the Nobel prize in literature).

    Ideal if also read The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann, earlier 20th century.

    Although , also highly recommend all of the books in English translation by Olga Tokarczuk – especially to artists who can easily relate to creative uses of fragmentation, and ‘magic realism’ – while knowingly firmly placed in the now world.

    • I read another book by her I loved – drive your plow over the bones of the dead, loved it! I will look at the one you mentioned thsnks.

  44. The Drowned by John Banville. Detective story that takes place in Ireland in the 1950s. He’s a terrific writer who won the Booker prize for The Sea.

  52. Think Again by Adam Grant about learning to rethink situations given previous assumptions, procedures, methods. Learning how to innovate.

  55. «Art as Art» (Ad Reinhardt).
    «Images in Spite of All» (Georges Didi-Huberman).
    «The Politics of Collecting» (Eunsong Kim)
    «Theorem» (PP Pasolini).
    «I Am Immortal and Alive» (Gil Wolman).

  58. I’m reading: The Creative Act: A way of being by Rick Rubin…. Amazing book!, it’s all about the philosophy of being an Atist, I highly recommend it.

  59. “Hospicing Modernity” by Vanessa Machado de Oliveira
    “Sacred Instructions” by Sherri Mitchell
    “The Dandelion Insurrection” by Rivera Sun
    “The Ari Ara Series” by Rivera Sun

  60. The story of Art without men by Katy Hessel came out at me in the airport book shop. Like a school text book but a good one and lavishly illustrated with art by women for a change.

  61. La troisième voie du vivant (The Third Way of the living) and Antidote au culte de la performance (Antidote to the Cult of Performance), Olivier Hamant

  63. Spinoza’s Religion, Claire Carlyle
    wonderful detailed exposition of Spinoz’s written work and life: An artist, if there ever was one!

  67. I’m reading “Late Wife” by Claudia Emerson, a book of poetry about here transition from divorce to another marriage, winner of the Pulitzer in 2006 and “No Time to Waste,” by Ursula K LeGuin, a compilation of her blogs. Also just finished “The Painted Drum,” by Louise Erdrich a novel about Native Americans.

    • Hi, Francesca,

      I’m interested in this book, both because of my focus on trees and the fact that I just collaborated on a mural in Cyprus with Unity Through Creativity (my non-profit) and Visual Voices. The painting is mounted on the UN Buffer Zone and is part of the Singing Tree Mural Project. We’re training people to facilitate collaborative murals that envision success to community challenges and help heal heartbreak. We don’t have it on our website yet, but we have a link on website of one we did two years ago. https://www.unitythroughcreativity.org/singing-tree-murals/cyprus-singing-tree-of-peace

      Are you in the north or the south?

      So happy to meet you here.

  71. Twains Feast by Andrew Beahrs
    Incredible storytelling of the early American culinary palette through the eyes of mark Twain with his literary ingredients and appetite.

  73. ‘Mary Poppins Comes Back’ P.L.Travers
    Reminding me about protecting my magick makes it safe for me to acknowledge my magick.

  74. If You Meet the Buddha on the Rosd, Kill Him By Sheldon Kopp about the journey of psychotherapy patients.
    The Painted Drum by Louise Erdrich

  81. Walking In Your Power- lessons from the grandmothers by a Canadian Indigenous author Barbara Derrick can be ordered from Amazon. The author writes through the voice of a grandmother named Muskwa who tells us a story of her life’s healing journey.

  85. I’m reading ‘On the Origin of Time’ by Thomas Hertog. It is about Stephen Hawking’s last theory.
    Stephen became unable to communicate toward the end of his life, even with his voice simulator.
    Thomas had long been a collaborator and close freind of Stephen and by making sugestions and asking questions he was able to see from Stephens eyes if he (Thomas) was understanding the final theory. This book paints an amazing picture of our Universe and it’s evolution.

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  88. 10 minutes and 38 seconds in this strange world by Elif Shafak.
    Exploring the imagined minutes of
    thoughts on her life and ultimately, her demise, after the death of a Turkish woman.

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  91. The Psychopath Test by Jon Ronson. An exploration of psychiatric symptoms extending into a journey into neurodiversity. Scary and also funny.

  92. The Mythology of Sex:
    Explore the Realm of Sexuality Throughout Time and All World Cultures

    by Sarah Dening

  94. I am currently reading “Broad Strokes 15 Women Who Made Art and Made History (In That Order) by Bridget Quinn. It’s a very good read and is both informative and highly entertaining. The writer, Bridget Quinn uses humorous perceptions to uncover the too often forgotten struggles of the painter who also happens to be female. Throughout history up into the current times, Bridget focuses on individual examples of female painters, their challenges and their triumphs. I highly recommend this read for anyone interested in the making of art from a woman’s vantage point.

  95. I’m halfway through reading “Get the Picture” by Bianca Bosker. This journalist’s fall down the rabbit hole of the contemporary art world reminded me of some of the worst experiences I’ve had while trying to open the doors of this purgatory. For some, it will confirm their worst fears about the art world.” Abandon All Hope ye Who Enter Here.” A hellishly good read.

  97. Macroeconomics, An Intro (Thomas), Angela Davis (A. Davis), Braiding Sweetgrass (Kimmerer), Complex PTSD, From Surviving to Thriving (P. Walker) and Selling Online (B. Carey)

  98. Gathering Moss, Robyn Wall Kimmer

    A Way of looking at simplicity, the orgins of life through the eyes of a native scientist.

  99. Exploring CBD for Dogs and pre roll weed has been an enlightening passing as me. The je sais quoi and odour of these products are provocative, offering a calming and enjoyable experience. Whether I’m unwinding after a covet period or seeking creative enthusiasm, hemp pre-rolls plan for a natural surrogate that I can trust. The convenience of pre-rolls combined with the benefits of hemp flowers occasion them a go-to fitting for the treatment of r ‘rest and mindfulness. I know the attention to detail and harmlessness of the products, enhancing my complete satisfaction. Exceptionally recommend trying hemp flowers and pre-rolls an eye to a holistic and fulfilling trial!

  100. Distressing Weed Tinctures quest of the earliest time was an eye-opening experience. The abatement and euphoria were unexpected but welcomed. It enhanced my sensory intuition and sparked a newfound appreciation in place of music and art. Setting aside how, the intense hunger caught me inaccurate guard. Overall, it was a illustrious introduction to a new world of sensations.

  101. Hollow (2021) by B. Catling. A fascinating novel reflecting the work of Hieronymus Bosch in the life stories of strange & eccentric humans, monsters, and beings from the spiritual world.

  102. The Entanglement: How Art and Philosophy Make Us What We Are by Alva Noe (Princeton, 2023)
    A new, powerful understanding of the role of art and aesthetics in life.

  103. A Life of Picasso (Volume 2): Painter of Modern Life 1907-1917. John Richardson.

    Learning about how he and his friends dealt with dealers and collectors then has been enormously soothing. Just as crazy then as today but obviously different.

  104. Just re-read, as I have every couple of years:
    Saturn: An Essay on Goya by Andre Malraux.
    It’s hard to find these days, but my copy has nourished me for decades.

  105. The Wreck by Tom de Freston is a marvellous reflection of a creative dialogue and process between two creative people, one a painter, the other, a blind journalist from war torn Syria.

  107. The Golden Bowl, one of Henry James last great novels. Just finished The Ambassadors. Will plan to re-read The Wings of the Dove next.

    • These are three of my favorite novels. I’ve read The Golden Bowl and The Wings of the Dove several times. James well understood and communicated the most subtle exchanges of information and meaning in human relationships.

  109. I put the fiction aside momentarily to read an older publication by the Metropolitan Museum of Art titled, “ The Painterly Print.” Very interesting, learning a lot.

  112. I am reading The Creative Act: A Way of Being, by Rick Rubin. Anyone who is, was, or wants to be a creative of any kind should read it. It has inspired me to reconsider my path as an artist and to reconsider my attitudes towards my own identity as an artist. The Audible version is narrated by the author who has a warm voice and wonderfully knowledgeable insights.

  113. Just finished The Last Ranger by Peter Heller, about a ranger in Yellowstone. It has poaching, wolves, bad guys and a mystery. I LOVE so much the beautiful atmospheric descriptions of nature in it—the main reason I read it. I became extremely attracted to fly fishing because of this book, which is very strange for me; I never thought I’d ever be interested in fishing. Now I want lessons!

  114. 1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows by Ai Weiwei
    I read this recently with my book club.
    The artist writes almost as much about his father as himself. Ai Weiwei’s time in New York reminds me of my time there years ago. His creation of art as resistance is powerful. Very inspiring.

  115. I finished “Trust” by Hernan Diaz—not sure why it’s a Pulitzer
    I just finished a non-fic about preventing arthritis and getting rid of inflammation.
    I’m nearly halfway through “All the Light We Cannot See,” by Anthony Doerr, also a Pulitzer.( is there a trend here?? Lol)

  117. The Tiny Journalist
    Naomi Shihab Nye
    Published in 2019, this collection of poetry by Nye was inspired by Janna Jihad Ayyad who was the youngest journalist in Palestine. (Ayyad was recently arrested and released).

    • Hi I also loved Namoi Shihab Nye Book “The Tiny Journalist” . It is a a must read.
      for our society now. She gives voice to Palestinian voices who
      have lost their voice. Her poems are as vital today as when they
      were writing years ago and are a plea to recognize our humanity
      to bear witness to the injustices of others

      I also read The Blazing World, by Siri Hustvedt, introduced in book club, a riviting
      ook of a female artist exposing the male dominate view of art and artmaking.
      And a book I go back is Ninth Street Women by Mary Gabrielexplores the postwar
      art scene through the lives of 5 women artist who revolutiozed modern art.

  119. The book I just start to read it, usually I listen to podcast so meanwhile I am working on my art work.
    By: Simone de Beauvoir, Inseparable

  120. I’m reading “Special Orders” is the text you asked me to remember. by Edward Hirsch and Rilke’s “Letters to a Young Poet”.

  121. Currently reading last 50 pages of Demon Copperhead, Barbara Kingsolver’s retelling of the David Copperfield story. Kingsolver places her protagonist in the trailer parks of Appalachia in the recent past.

    • I had listened to her interview by Katy Hessel on the GWA Podcast. She was amazing and her writing is so clear and strong. I couldn’t put it down either. Bought a copy for a friend who is a writer.

  124. I am reading Le Temps des Chaines publisher Wallada in Avignon, France.
    It is about the times the gypsy tribes were enslaved by a great muslim nation. It is the second in a series to help people understand the three great tribes and their culture and history. It is in French only for the moment. A real eye opener and clears up many misconceptions. Well worth the read.

  125. I just finished Barbara Kingsolver’s “Demon Copperhead “ excellent….recommend. Pulitzer winner.
    Just started one of her older books,”Animal Dreams.”
    Need fiction…reality these days is just too much right now..

    • I just finished “Animal Dreams” by Barbara Kingsolver..about halfway through Celeste Ng’s “Little Fires Everywhere.”

  126. The Lady in Gold by Anne Marie O’Connor
    Prequel by Rachel Meadow
    Because we are rivers- poetry by Mark E Mann
    About to start- Hollow by B. Catling

  127. H. Rider Haggard – Collection of Novels: King Solomon’s Mines / Maiwa’s Revenge / Cleopatra / She – Adventurous escapism. ❤️

  128. Reading, Democracy, Inc. , Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism by Sheldon S. Wolin
    Also, Saving Us by Katherine Hayhoe

  129. in planning to read…first I have to order these books from 2 to 5 !…..

    1 Maniac Benjamin Labatut / well its a bit complicated to act as a physics attempt to master the Manhattan project and follow its climax/epilogue with an AI version of the Go game. Its all an allegory how absurd technoid religion has become. worth reading. its still fiction!
    2 Crook Manifesto, by Colson Whitehead
    Ray Carney, the antihero of Whitehead’s 2021 novel “Harlem Shuffle,” is back, trying to keep his life on track: He’s stopped fencing stolen goods, and runs a thriving furniture store in Harlem. Things seem to be going according to plan until his daughter asks for Jackson 5 tickets, and a corrupt NYPD officer offers seats in exchange for a jewelry heist. / fiction
    3 Kohei Saito / Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto / philosophy / eco-economy
    4 Kohei Saito / / Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism: Capital, Nature, and the Unfinished Critique of Political Economy.
    5 Sun House, by David James Duncan
    This novel of ideas, which took Duncan 16 years to complete, follows all manner of people who are staring down crises of faith. These lost souls — from cowboys to urban refugees — make their way to Montana and build new communities for themselves. fiction

  132. THESE Precious Days by Ann Patchett( got this nonfiction after reading her book) Tom Lake about summer stock life all worth it she is a great writer but you knew that!

  136. I read several books at the same time. I just finished The Song of Achilles by Madelaine Miller.
    I’m rereading Cadillac Desert by Marc Eisner, but might decide to just watch the movie that is out now. Most of the non-fiction I read is about water. I’m also reading Terje Tvedt A Journey in the Future of Water. I read at least a poem a day, and Rimbaud’s Illuminations translated by John Ashbery and enjoying the colorful language. My daughter gave me Flush: A Biography by Virginia Woolf which she knew I would love because I am a dog person and I do find it wonderful. Of Water and the Spirit by Malidoma Patrice Some is a book I can’t stop reading, I just dip into it over and over again. The book I am reading on my kindle – which means I don’t leave it behind) is the Balkan Trilogy by Olivia Manning, which I somehow missed when I was younger. The image book I in a lot is Nature’s Palette by Patrick Baty.
    I’ve been wanting to answer this question but I’m always too busy – now I’m recovering from Covid and I have time.

  137. I am always reading several books at the same time. I just finished The Song of Achilles by Madelaine Miller and plan to read the novel Achilles by Elizabeth Cook.
    I’m rereading Cadillac Desert by Marc Eisner, but might decide to just watch the movie that is out now. Most of the non-fiction I read is about water (or about time – and perhaps water can be thought of as a clock). I read at least a poem a day. I’m reading Rimbaud’s Illuminations translated by John Ashbery and loving the colorful language. My daughter gave me Flush: A Biography by Virginia Woolf which she knew I would love because I am a dog person and I do find it wonderful. Of Water and the Spirit by Malidoma Patrice Some is a book I can’t stop reading, I just dip into it over and over again. The book I am reading on my kindle – which means I don’t leave it behind) is the Balkan Trilogy by Olivia Manning, which I somehow missed when I was younger. The image book I can’t put down is Nature’s Palette by Patrick Baty.
    I’ve been wanting to answer this question but I’m always too busy – now I’m recovering from Covid and I have time.

  140. Am reading ‘Archives of Joy..Refections on Animals and the Nature of Being’.
    A gentle kindness here that straddles fiction and non-fiction… dreamlike and insightful ..a poetic healing book.

  141. I just finished “To Paradise,” by Hanya Yanighara and started “How Not to Age” by Michael Greger, MD.
    Next fiction is “ Demon Copperhead” by Barbara Kingsolver.

    • Hi Sandi
      Have followed DR.G. for quite awhile .( likely you have as well).interested to know if all the ‘putting it to the test’ can make a book to read ..or is it mostly data and tables ?

      • Well, I think, his first book was the most readable. In the preface of “—Age” he complained that his editor held him to 600 pages. He’s put quite a lot of his longer lectures and data on electronic links..( so, reading this in an electronic format would be useful. ) I like to underline and stuff so—hard copy for me.
        A lot of the new information is worth knowing—and he does interject his corny humor throughout which helps with all the technical stuff..(I gotta tell ya, though, it’s damn impressive to my vegan critics when I can explain in medical terms why their carnivore diet sucks and is unhealthy…lol)

  142. I am reading PAIN, The Gift Nobody Wants by Dr. Paul Brand & Philip Yancey.
    There’s a blurb on the cover that summarizes the point very clearly, Warning:Life Without Pain Could Really Hurt You. So far the book has dealt with the reality and purpose of physical pain. I am feeling called to examine the purpose of emotional pain and am compelled to think of what it means to have an open heart.

  145. Close-reading, with a pencil, Henry James’ difficult masterpiece, The Ambassadors.
    The House at Pooh Corner.
    The Oak Papers by James Canton, about an 800-year-old oak tree in England.

  146. I thought I read everything by james Balwin. Reading his shorter essays, which form a bio of sorts. Found this gem in them,
    “When power translates itself into tyranny, it means the principles on which that power depended, and which were its justification, are bankrupt. When this happens, and it is happening now, power can only be defended by thugs and mediocrities-and seas of blood. The representatives of the status quo are sickened and divided, and dread looking into the eyes of their young, while the secluded begin to realize, having endured everything, that they can endure everything.They do not know the precise shape of the future, but they know the future belongs to them. They realize this-paradoxically-by the failure of the moral energy of their oppressors and begin, almost instinctively, to forge a new morality, to create the principles on which a new world will be built.”
    James Baldwin

  147. I just finished “A Little Life,” by Hanya Yanighara. Tough subject, masterfully written..could not put it down

    Almost done with Abraham Verghese’s newest book,” The Covenant of Water.” Terrific and wonderfully written.
    Both are highly recommended.

  150. “Second Nature” by Nathaniel Rich is an outstanding easy to read analysis of the current climate crisis.
    He points to the history of concepts of nature and how they change over time as well the ill effects of ecosysytems to humanity. It is a must read for anyone who feels that nature and democracy are connected.

  152. Prisoners of Geography, Ten Maps That Explain Everything About the World
    –by Tim Marshall

    Fascinating and well-written exploration of how geography shapes not just history but destiny.

  153. Denialism: How Irrational Thinking Hinders Scientific Progress, Harms the Planet, and Threatens Our Lives by Michael Specter

  155. I am reading The Perseverance by Raymond Antrobus. Poetry that is angry and beautiful and hopeful presented to us with meaningful playfulness.

  157. Philippe Descola, Les formes du visibles, une anthropologie de la figuration; Ana Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World; Ailton Krenak, Propositions to delay the End of the World.

  160. Faith, Hope and Carnage | Nick Cave & Sean O’Hagan
    Syntax of the River: The Pattern Which Connects | Barry Lopez in conversation with Julia Martin
    The Situation and the Story | Vivien Gornick
    Painting Enlightenment: Healing Visions of the Heart Sutra | Paintings by twentieth-century Japanese artist Iwasaki Tsuneo, interpreted by Buddhist scholar Paula Arai

  166. The Signature of All Things by Elizabeth Gilbert
    a surprising totally engaging I9th C adventurous tale life in Philadelphia,Tahiti and Holland

  168. Beyond Genius, The 12 Essential Traits of Today’s Renaissance Men – featuring Elon Musk, Yvon Chouinard, Richard Branson, Steve Jobs, Dave Stewart, and more. The first book to identify the 12 traits and examine the Renaissance Men throughout history culminating in interviews and chapters on today’s greatest

  170. I’m about 1/2 way through “Anything Was Possible: The Birth of the Musical Follies” by Ted Chapin
    A fascinating insider backstage view. It took a lot of moving parts and cooperation among strong personalities to create this groundbreaking musical.

  171. I just finished to read a very interesting book :Ileana Sonnabend. «The Queen of Arts» by Manuela Gandini 2008 about the life of the wife of Leo Castelli. And just as Leo influenced the American Pop scene, she is considered the greatest inspiration for art movements in Europe.

  172. The Creative Act by Rick Rubin
    Enrique Martinez Celqaya Collected Writings & Interviews, 2010-2017

    Both inspiring for the creative process.

  173. “Side By Side, Building and Sustaining an Effective Community in the Music Studio” is by Wiff Rudd, Professor of Trumpet and Brass Division Music Coordinator at Baylor University’s School of Music since 2002.

    I was introduced to Prof Rudd when he requested permission to use a music composition by my father for a trumpet competition and I have been an admirer of Prof Rudd’s leadership ever since. Prof Rudd’s book is a great resource for music students and teachers, offering supportive advice in navigating the musical performance world, entering the community and developing professional goals, relationships and skills for success. This book is a real inspiration and confidence builder for those intending to find a way forward in a musical career.

  174. This is an excellent list on Art History books by Art in America. https://www.artnews.com/art-news/product-recommendations/essential-art-history-books-1234580813/#recipient_hashed=25d48412fc7b3231737f3ece535c3179e5adfd6fcca0f7e4f98a243a5cb1002d&recipient_salt=5537b284234ac140be5c44dcbb40d962b0ca4818f6cdf56d6837f8b30dca9d01

    Currently reading Walking the Bible by B. Freier. With the Old Testament in hand he and his archeologist friend visit Egypt, Turkey, Jordan, Israel, following in the steps of the Israelites. Interestingly, I learned that of the 40 years the Israelites wandered in the desert before entering Canaan, 38 of them were lived around the city of Petra in current day Jordan.

  175. I am reading ‘Snakes and Ladders’ by Dirk Bogarde

    Its part of his memoirs, and fascinating. Here he struggles to find himself, as a young man, after his involvement in WW2, as he emerges into the world of ‘show business.’
    Interestingly, his book is followed in this list by Julia Wickes choice of book ‘Building a Character’ by Constatin Stanislavski.
    Dirk Bogarde was deeply committed to doing this in his own acting work.

  178. Invisible women by Caroline Criado Perez
    Exposing data bias in a world designed for men.
    Revelatory, changes the way you see the world

    Talking to strangers – Malcolm Gladwell.
    Very provocative, a dark side of human nature
    Eye and heart opening
    Great writing.

  179. Henri Cartier-Bresson interviews and conversations 1951-1998. Aperture. It’s a recent translation from the French

  180. Currently reading ‘Watermark’, by Joseph Brodsky, his essay on Venice. Planning my own book/guidebook on that unique place.

  183. I recently read Shards from
    the Shoebox a captivating series of personal essays.
    I listened to Trust by Hernan Diaz a remarkable work that won the Pulitzer Prize.
    Finally- Stories from the Bipolar Region by Leda Rogers. She is one brave soul!

  184. I revisited two of the books I’ve loved over the years:
    Spell of the Sensuous by David Abrams
    Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer

    They always inspire

  185. Just finished A Short Life of Trouble Written and about Marcia Tucker Really gives insight into the formation of the NEW MUSEUM

    • I just read that too, what an amazing person, right? Made me want to get the Tuttle catalog she put together for the infamous Whitney show!

  186. Here we Go by Dick Polich, (founder of Polich Tallix foundry, which is now UAP)
    His story of how he started working with artists and the issues foundry workers face in making a large metal cast from the artist’s maquette.

  189. Two books I finished this week that made a huge difference for me as an artist:
    The Story of Art Without Men by Katy Hessel
    Art Is Life by Jerry Saltz

    Wow! Such amazing contributions and insight!!

  190. Winslow Homer, American artist: His world and his work
    By Albert Ten Eyck Gardener, 1961.
    Found it in a bookshelf at the Beer Sheva Artist house and requested to borrow it, which they gracefully agreed to.
    I feel my art education centered on European art history, and I know too little about American artists.
    This book is interesting because it places Homer in the context of his time.

  191. Two current readings:
    All the Beauty In The World–The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me by Patrick Bringley
    and
    Walking in Wonder, Eternal Wisdom for a Modern World by John O’Donohue in conversation with John Quinn

  195. Beyond Genius – The 12 Essential Traits of Today’s Renaissance Men

    https://www.amazon.com/Beyond-Genius-Essential-Traits-Renaissance/dp/1481702947/ref=sr_1_1?crid=37GL7FGRUS1GB&keywords=Beyond+Genius%2C+The+12+Essential+Traits+of+Todays+Renaissance+Men&qid=1688319585&sprefix=beyond+genius%2C+the+12+essential+traits+of+todays+renaissance+men%2Caps%2C136&sr=8-1

  197. The Waves by Virginia Woolf. Remarkable stream on consciousness mesmerizing.
    also
    The best Hundred poems of Les Murray.

  198. The Art Of Rivalry by Sebastian Smee
    insight into the human tales of Bacon/Freud Matisse Picasso Pollack de Kooning Manet Degas how they pushed each other into new ideas

    • Read that a few years back. Very interesting. Made me feel a bit lonely as an artist. I don’t know if we have this kind of connection with our colleagues today – rivalry or not.

  201. What My Bones Know
    A Memoir of Healing from Complex Trauma
    —by Stephanie Foo

    Definitely worth reading for anyone recovering from complex trauma. Foo is a writer and producer for This American Life and this is her personal story that’s gritty, honest, and ultimately full of upbeat enthusiasm and hope.

  202. Both theoretical and practical:
    Interviews and Conversations 1951-1998 Henri Cartier-Bresson
    The Passionate Photographer Steve Simon

  207. I’ve noted some great book recommendations from readers thanks.

    I’ve just finished reading 3 related books, each with a very different tone but all strung together with Michelangelo at the center.
    As an artist with a passion for history and culture I found each book fulfilled its promise.

    “Michelangelo’s Mountain” Eric Scigliano
    “From Marble to Flesh” A. Victor Coonin
    “Michelangelo and the Pope’s Ceiling”
    Ross King

  208. I’m reading “Night Fall” a collection of short stories by Issac Asimov, after falling in love with his “Robots and Empire”

  209. Just got YOUR BRAIN ON ART, How The Arts Transform Us by Susan Magsamen and Ivy Ross and also reading The Adjacent Possible by Nancy Hillis.

  210. I’m reading McSweeny’s #70 a quarterly of new fiction, short stories that I devour as soon as it arrives! This one is excellent.

    • I used to love McSweeny’s and then somehow drifted away. I just went to their website and am totally confused by the plethora of products with no real explanation of what is what. The old issues of the magazine had it all – stories, poems, essays, snarky and hilarious bits of whimsey. I’d like to start getting it again. Which product would that be now? Illustoria? Believer? Quarterly Concern? Any advice as to your favorites will be welcome!

  213. The Dragon Queen by Alice Borchardt in a series called The Tales of Guinevere, Bantam Books.
    I am addicted to fantasies and sci-fi and have been since researching hundreds of this style to attempt a book of my own. Not only the story line but the characters are well constructed and the writing of descriptions of the lands and the creatures are so incredibly painted that it is nearly impossible to separate one’s mind from the story and the reality masterfully created. A vision of Guinevere that is unique and unforgettable.

  214. Currently reading “Upstream” by Mary Oliver. The richness with which she dives into the beauty of the natural world around her is both stunning and refreshing. I love the way she honors the influence of Allan and Poe in her work.

  215. Utopian Vistas by Lois Palken Rudnick. The story of the Mabel Dodge Luhan house in Taos NM. Where inter ethnic life,ongoing poverty, hippies, Chicano radicals, gifted artisans, doomed up geniuses, mystics and ghosts mingled together. American counter cultures in New Mexico from 1920’s to 1990’s.

  216. Utopian Vistas by Lois Palken Rudnick. The story of the Mabel Dodge Luhan house in Taos NM. Where inter ethnic life,ongoing poverty, hippies, Chicano radicals, gifted artisans, doomed up geniuses, mystics and ghosts mingled together. American counter cultures in New Mexico from 1920’s to 1990’s.

  217. The Community Cure by James Maskell. Since I work as an art psychotherapist I am keen on connecting people not isolating people as our current medical systems can do. And art has the potential to provide a safe space to grow deeper emotional connections, intimacies between strangers as part of a collective unconscious or transpersonal realm.

  218. “The Tenants of Moonbloom” by Edgar Lewis Wallant. First published 1963 and currently available from New York Review of Books (Classics).
    I read it shortly after its original publication and now find it as compelling and magic as it was then.
    Wallant also wrote The Pawnbroker which was made into a powerful film which was adapted into an award-winning film directed by Sidney Lumet (1965) and starring Rod Steiger, Geraldine Fitzgerald, Juano Hernandez, and Morgan Freeman in his feature film debut. And music by Quincy Jones.

  220. I just finished the novel My Name is Asher Lev by Chaim Potok about a Hasidic Jewish boy who is born into a distinguished Hasidic family and is obsessed with drawing and then painting. His passion is an enigma to his family, especially his father, and to others in the society to which he belongs. This book is a compelling read about the sacrifices one must make for the work and for one’s integrity.

  221. Art is Life
    —Jerry Saltz

    Jerry shares his own story as a “failed artist” (his words) and how his many years of living the life of an outsider/self-taught artist formed him as an art critic who stands out from the rest. His insights into the art world, art history, and the drive to create are worth the dense read even though his over-the-top enthusiasm sometimes devolves into a word salad here and there. But his exuberant love of not only art but for the artists themselves make him somewhat of an outsider critic which affords him an outside-the-box view of the art world. With a searing clarity that many of those playing the game inside of it don’t have, he opens his heart and takes great risks to generously divulge with us the artist/reader what he’s learned. It’s no wonder he won the Pulitzer for Art Criticism. He deserves it.

  222. Rick Rubin, The Creative Act. A sweet, spacious and wise take on the Creative process as an ongoing meditation. Love this book. ❤️

  223. the sea thea sea by iris murdoch,
    Recently I was tempted into a nearby book club, however it would take an emergency far more serious than a book club to disturb my work at 10:00 AM. THE SEA, THE SEA, which title is in a neat trick of double meaning explicating as it does both the sea and the seeing which insights come with age and time. Iris Murdoch bills this as a RICH, CROWDED, MAGICAL LOVE STORY. It is about the transformations of love over time generated by theatrical artifice. acid flashbacks and twists of personal obsession.

    Charles, the main character, is a well known theatre director enchanted by the idea of peace & solitude after a busy and materially successful life. He retires to a small stone fortress by and in some ways in the sea. Harboring the romantic idea of becoming monk like in his cell, he is both rejuvenated and tragically enlightened by his interactions with the sea.

    The darkness we all grapple with adds authenticity to the characters with the camaraderie and depredations of friendship providing comic relief and color to the kaleidoscopic imagination of Murdoch’s tale. A collage of asian mysticism, class explication and the seemingly cold inevitabilities of the natural world, this is not a crowded story so much as a rich one.

    As one may do in difficulty, metaphors expanding meanings into the so called real world might be made in the larger world. Must we wait for the depredations of old age to achieve wisdom? As for the living sea, which has so much in the way of healing, knowledge and awe to offer our species, might we be better caretakers of this living entity instead of poisoning its irreplaceable magic and raiding the life it supports through our greed and ignorance? Nature may seem a rough taskmaster, something to be conquered and dominated, however this way of doing things no longer works, if in fact it ever did.

    A voracious reader always, I read Murdoch when I was young and had difficulty with her complexity, which works here as a spur to interest and a flowering of sensual enjoyment.

  224. 11 by Paul Hanley, 2014 … ‘eleven billion people will share this planet by century’s end. Adding 4 billion to an already overburdened world will force everyone to change everything’

    ” Every concerned citizen of this planet needs to read this book” – Yann Martel, author of Life of Pi

  225. I highly recommend The Inconvenient Indian. Informative, historical accounting with a witty, casual style including engaging pop culture references. Shines a bright light on issues of the past and today. If you read only one book on Indigenous relations, let this be it. From the write-up, “Rich with dark and light, pain and magic, The Inconvenient Indian distills the insights gleaned from Thomas King’s critical and personal meditation on what it means to be “Indian” in North America, weaving the curiously circular tale of the relationship between non-Natives and Natives in the centuries since the two first encountered each other.” https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/93028/the-inconvenient-indian-by-thomas-king/9780385664226

  226. Not a new book (published in 2006) but a must to read: Imperial Life in the Emerald City – inside Iraq’s green zone, by Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Washington Post journalist. To understand how things went so badly in Iraq…and why our foreign policies fail.
    Mary Angela Schroth
    Sala 1 Rome

  227. I would recommend Yve-Alain Bois book “An Obilique Autobiography” He was a partner with Rosiland Krausse in “October”. To run alongside Bois in this book is uplifting.

  228. I went through every page of “Great Female Painters” by Phaidon, reading pages of artists that caught my eye. Placed post-it notes on artists I’d like to investigate further, and am now researching each post-it marked one. Love finding and learning about these influential artists. Starting with Hilda AF Klint.

  229. I’m reading “Bodies of Subversion” which is a history of women and tattoo..and also a history of tattooing and John Irving’s “The Last ChairLift”

  232. I am just began reading Deepak Chopra’s, “Life After Death”. I have been researching time, other dimensions and find myself contemplating “cosmic” spiritual questions intensively most of my life which emerges in my art. This book parallels with my work in progress, with a working title, Timeline of the Cosmos.

  233. Rereading “The Good Earth”, by Pearl Buck, written in 1931, for which she won the Pulitzer. Love this book about a family in China around 1920, and all the trials and tribulations and joys they endure. Pearl Buck is remarkably sensitive and articulate about the actions, passions, deeds (good and bad), that are human beings. So much respect for Pearl Buck.

  234. The $12 Million Stuffed Shark: The Curious Economics of Contemporary Art by Don Thomson
    Super interesting book really. Describes how things really work in art world business. I recommend it, it is a must.
    I will not make a spoiler because it is worth the discovery through the pages.

  235. just finished “night & day” by virginia woolfe- She is such a rich writer, the mannerisms are victorian, which i sort of like, but also her penetration of how peoples minds work and a very dry sense of humor made this a delightful read. also her first volume of essays is good for the history.
    “authority and freedom” by jed perl. Named after the first chapter which is rich and i will probably reread.
    “internet for the people: the fight for our digital future” by ben turnoff
    “the shadow of god:Kant, Hegel and the PASSAGE from HEAVEN to HISTORY” by Michael Rosen. intense and heavy, not easy, but the title was irresistable to me.
    “another world: the transcendental painting group” exhibit catalogue- definitely these are my lineage painters

  236. “In The Dark Places Of Wisdom” Peter Kingsley

    “Conscious Luck” Gay Hendricks and Carol Kline

    “Radical Curiosity” One man’s search for cosmic magic and a purposeful life. Ken Dychtwald Ph. D

  237. Grace Purpura

    How Proust Can Change Your Life by Alaine de Botton

    Alaine de Botton writes a lively and funny book by dipping deeply into Proust’s life and work–giving hilarious Proustarian advice on keeping friendships, why prostitutes do not inspire love, the art of suffering successfully, when you should write a letter and not send it, and recognizing love when you see it. Proust, who describes artists as “creatures who talk of precisely the things one shouldn’t mention,” then wrote a novel of several volumes, giving him the chance to mention them all.

  238. Thank you, Brainard, for this new format for Books We Read. I like the addition of a Reply to voice our thoughts and begin a dialogue. Just naming a book does not motivate me to read it. Adding a comment on how the book resonates to you makes me interested and motivated, and I am more likely to read it.
    Great column.

  239. Currently reading:
    “The Widow Clicquot: The Story of a Champagne Empire and the Woman Who Built It”. by Tilar J. Mazzeo
    and finishing up:
    “Moth” by Melody Razak The book takes place during Partition-era Delhi.

  240. Art is Life, by Jerry Saltz. Especially fascinating we’re the opening chapter about The Raft of the Medusa, and the one about Caravaggio.

  241. this book is an oldy but a Goodie. “On The New” by Boris Groys. I pretty simple formula of what are the mechanics of innovation.
    https://www.amazon.com/New-Boris-Groys/dp/1781682925

  242. Burning Questions, Margaret Atwood
    README.txt, Chelea Manning
    The Essays of Virginia Woolf, edited by Andrew McNeillie
    Regenerate, Sayer Ji

  244. The Post-American World by Fareed Zakaria, editor-at-large of Time magazine, and Emmy-nominated host of CNN, writes a well-researched, intelligent, easy-to-read book on the growth and development of China, India, Brazil, and other countries posing a challenge for America–emerging markets that have surged ahead, coupling their economic growth with pride, nationalism, and a determination to form their own future. With his customary lucidity, insight, and imagination, Zakaria draws on lessons from the past 500 years–the rise of the West, and the rise of the United States–to tell us what we can expect from the third shift, “the rise of the rest.”

  245. I have just finished How to Speak Whale by Tom Mustill. It was very good and passionate about the esistance of whales and how they communicate.

  246. “A Year With Rumi” Daily readings
    “American Midnight-The Great War, A Violent Peace, and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis” by Adam Hochschild. A reminder that our country’s history has had other troubled times.
    “Portraits” by John Berger

  247. Am Re-reading “The Ending of Time” A conversation between physicist David Bohm and philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti. I carried this book with me everywhere in the late 60s to savor the thought given in highly focused remarks during their intense and profound discussions. This book will always be important ..

  248. I like this thread! It reminded me of a couple of books I meant to read, especially “Women in abstract Expressionism,” because that’s what I am.
    I recently read “All About Love, A love Song to a Nation”, by Bell Hooks — inspiring and healing
    And I read “The Redneck Riviera” a local history book.
    I am a third to half way through Madeline Albright’s autobiography (I take breaks) — her family came to the US via UK from Czechoslovakia as WW 2 refugees. If ever there was an antifascist… she speaks from experience.
    A book on mixed generation leadership in academia assigned to college directors by work because for one of the first times, four or five generations of people are working together in the workforce.
    Curation: “Drawing the Line: What to Do with the Work of Immoral Artists from Museums to the Movies” is on my next pile, in my bag. Also for work, a textbook on museum registration.
    Pleasure: I just downloaded “Where the Crawdads Sing.”

  249. RISE AND SHINE by pedram shojai
    ONENESS vs the 1%, by Vandana Shiva
    Bhudda, by Karen Armstrong
    Reluctant Saint, by Donald Spoto

  250. The Master and His Emissary (The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World) by Ian McGilchrist
    And
    The Velveteen Daughter (about the early 20th century child prodigy artist Pamela Bianco) by Laurel Davis Huber

  251. Just finished Robert Macfarlane’s “Underland: A Deep Time Journey,” reading its 496 pages very slowly over several months to absorb the magnitude of his piercing insights. Its philosophical implications are vast.

  252. I am currently reading two books, one in the studio and one at home. In the studio I am re-reading Norman Mailer’s great WW2 opus “The Naked and the Dead”, first published in 1948 (the year before my birth). I first read this in college during the late sixties, when Mr. Mailer was better known for “Armies of the Night” a novel based on the 1967 march on the pentagon. “The Naked and the Dead” was published one hundred years after “Moby Dick” and might be just as great a tale of man’s obsessions.
    At home I am reading a very recently published book titled “Strangers to Ourselves” by Rachel Aviv, subtitled “Unsettled Minds and the Stories That Make Us”. This is a collection of case studies of metal illness and the evolution of treatment and outcome.

  254. Book Review
    How Georgia became O’Keeffe, by Karen Karbo
    and
    Concerning the Spiritual in Art, by Wassily Kandinsky

    I did not know there were others who read more than one book at the same time, according to their mood, feelings, or whim. I have just finished reading Wassily Kandinsky’s, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, together with How Georgia Became O’Keeffe, Lessons in the Art of Living, by Karen Karbo. Two very different works in period, style, and delivery—one by a serious introverted Russian aristocrat of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, and the other by a quirky American humorist and feminist of the twenty-first. And yet, surprise! They were on the same wavelength. Both books spoke of the pioneering movement to free art from its traditional bonds to material reality, allowing the artist to express his own inner life in abstract, non-material terms. Kandinsky believed that just as musicians did not depend on the material world for their music, so artists should not have to copy nature in their paintings. A spiritual revolution in painting, his book is one of the important documents in the history of modern art. As it turns out, Kandinsky’s, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, was one of Georgia O’Keeffe’s influences as an artist. Kandinsky gave O’Keeffe the “get out of jail card” she needed to break free of the artistic tradition of copying nature and the plaster casts in art school that stifled her.  “What about the heart, the feelings?” she asked, and echoing Kandinsky, added. . . “the true subject of any painting is the artist’s inner world.” 

  255. I am currently reading We Begin at the End by Chris Whitaker – for discussion with my literary group and Why Jazz Happened by Marc Myers

  257. The Literary Ladies/Lads Book Tour of African American Authors is now visible. HIPHOP BEFORE THE BLING is now archived in the Universal Hip Hop Museum

  258. I would love to add my book to your list it’s called “What If”
    https://www.amazon.com/dp/057880753X/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_awdb_imm_t1_Y5yUFbZFHPADP

  260. Thank you for this amazing book list from Yale. I see some old favorites and the inclusion of many I am not familiar with. I can see I have my work cut out for me! New to Praxis, but not new to the art world, I have appreciated receiving Brainard Carey’s book, “Making It in the Art World,” which includes not only strategies for navigating the art world, but interesting personal stories for achieving success–like not taking no for an answer, or his personal story for proposing a solo show to Whitney without any completed work, only an idea, and to his surprise, pulling it off! The use of sub-titles makes the book easy to read and to refer back to–topics like writing the artist statement; the necessity for good health, diet , exercise, and discipline; practicing visualization to achieve your goals and having a positive mind-set. Good motivation!

  264. “American Detox: The Myth of Wellness and How We Can Truly Heal”

    Kerri is the founder of CTZNWELL, a movement that is democratizing wellbeing for all. A descendant of generations of firemen and first responders, Kerri has dedicated her life to kicking down doors and fighting for justice. She’s been teaching yoga for over 20 years and is known for making waves in the wellness industry by challenging norms, disrupting systems and mobilizing people to act.

    A community organizer, wellness activist and author of the forthcoming book American Detox: The Myth of Wellness and How We Can Truly Heal, Kerri is recognized across communities for her inspired work to bridge transformational practice with social justice. She’s been instrumental in translating the practices of wellbeing into social and political action, working in collaboration with community organizers, spiritual leaders and policy makers to transform our systems from the inside out. Her leadership has inspired a movement that is actively organizing around issues of racial and economic justice, healthcare as a human right, civic engagement and more.

  266. The Blithedale Romance, Nathaniel Hawthorne
    The Monk of Mocha, Dave Eggers
    Bittersweet, how sorrow & longing make us whole, Susan Cain
    Vincent van gogh, ever yours- the essential letters
    Scorced Earth, Jonathan Crary (a true diagnostic masterpiece of the society &culture now)

  268. I am reading Blood and Bronze The British Empire and the Sack of Benin.
    By Paddy Docherty
    It is a very interesting read filled with great details that brings one of the hottest topics in art today into perspective.

  269. I’m reading—

    Bright Earth, Art and the Invention of Color
    —by Philip Ball

    Highly recommended in a definite yes! especially for painters

  270. What is art? by Leo Tolstoy- I like much of this author’s point of view, however was surprised at the conservatism of his opinions on the art of his time in the latter part of the book.
    SO MUCH LONGING IN SO LITTLE SPACE, THE ART OF EDVARD MUNCH by Ove Knausgaard
    “Fundamental to all creation is that it is not about transferring something one possesses and wishes to express, but about what is expressed emerging as something in itself. Only then can it come alive.”
    Karl Ove Knausgaard from “So Much Longing In So Little Space”
    The Art of Edvard Munch
    “Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees” about Robert Irwin, by Lawrence Weschler
    “Douglass- Autobiographies”
    “Oh to Be a Painter” Virginia Woolfe – not as fabulous as most pf her work, but good from an art historical view.

  271. How to Think Like Leonardo Da Vinci Seven Steps to Genius Every Day by Michael J. Gelb is an exploration of the genius potential we all have.

  272. I know probably everyone read this a while back, but i just finished “Where the Crawdads Sing” a rare dip into fiction for me. I’m halfway through a bio of Henri Toulouse Lautrec.

  273. Breaking the Age Code by Becca Levy. She is an expert on how our society’s ageism has negative effects on health.

  275. Essential reading: Cal Flyn’s “Islands of Abandonment: Nature Rebounding in the Post-Human Landscape.”

    Flyn examines the destruction wreaked by humanity in and on nature and especially in and on cities. Her research throughout the world, but especially in the USA, is remarkable, sobering and absorbing. The The “Washington Post” described the book rightly as “Vital”. I agree with Will McCallum, Head of Oceans Greenpeace, UK, who wrote: “At times desperately sad and in others desperately hopeful – but nowhere losing faith in this beautiful world. Perfect reading for the crisis.”

  279. “The Great Derangement” by Amitav Ghosh
    “HOT – Living Through the Next 50 years on Earth” by Mark Hertsgaard

  280. “Talking to Strangers” by Malcolm Gladwell
    “Yin: Completing the Leadership Journey” by Lisa Marshall, https://yincompletingtheleadershipjourney.com/ Looking at Joseph Campbell’s Heroes Journey from a Yin perspective.

  281. Hogg by Samuel R Delany, The Complete Smoking Diaries by Simon Gray, Scott Burton/Collected Writings on Art & Performance edited by David Getsy, Written in Invisible Ink/selected stories by Harve Guibert

  282. Vilém Flusser & Louis Bec – Vampyroteuthis Infernalis; Nicolas Bourriaud – Planet B, Climate Change and the New Sublime; Hans Belting – Hieronymus Bosch, Garten der Lüste; Jean Baret – Life TM; Homer – The Odyssey

  283. I am currently reading , “The Water Dancer” by Ta-Nahisi Coates and “Braiding Sweetgrass” by Robin Wall Kimmerer. Just finished “On Writing” by Stephen King.

  285. I am currently reading “A Brief History of Time” by Stephen Hawking in my lifelong quest to understand the mysteries that surround us. While my brain can’t grasp his brilliant mathematical mind, I have enjoyed the front seat he gave us into his thinking process.

    Beyond that, I would like to strongly recommend the podcast (I listen on Amazon Prime Music Unlimited while I am painting), called “The History of Rome.” Even if ancient history doesn’t interest you one bit, as this detailed series unfolds, you will be amazed at how parallel our current political reality is with the events of Ancient Rome. Seeing how their version of democracy became eroded and ultimately descended into one-man rule has resolved the incredulity I experienced everyday over political maneuverings that fly in the face of American democracy. I have begun to think that the former president is well-versed in Roman political tactics, or at least the people surrounding him were. This podcast has helped me understand now more than ever that history does indeed repeat itself.

    • Thanks for this. History does indeed repeat itself. We are connected to one another through time and space. The Romans are our ancestors. They were humans and we are are humans too, so it doesn’t seem too far fetched that we would follow in their footsteps. I keep thinking that right before big changes, the old thoughts don’t want to let go, just like a child doesn’t want to give up their toy.

  287. A Not-So-Still Life by Jimmy Ernst, son of Max Ernst. Growing up as a half-Jewish boy before and during Hitler’s regime. Please don’t miss reading this sensitive and easy to read story of Jimmy Ernst who grew up in the artistic ferment of the times in Germany eventually making his way to the new country.

  288. The Mansion, the third book in the Snopes trilogy by William Faulkner
    Emotional Intelligence, by Daniel Goleman

  289. I’m reading “The Soul of a Woman” by Isabel Allende. She’s one of my favorite authors. she follows in the tradition of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, but her own unique voice is present in her books. I would also recommend “House of the Spirits” for those who have not read it. It’s an amazing novel.

  292. Allende never disappoints. Her newest works are topical and typical of her excellent writing. Eben Alexander, Dr. and neurologic cardiogist describes his coma and what he encountered this period. Very fascinating.

  293. Listening to Brene Brown’s “Dare to Lead” – all her work is so useful
    Gabby Bernstein’s “Happy Days” – spiritual and practical guide
    The Little Book of Police Youth Dialogue by Dr. Micah Johnson and Jeffrey Weisberg – I incorporate Circle dialogue in creating collaborative Singing Tree murals and am interested in bring my mural making methodology to Police-Youth dialogue.
    Sun Magazine – great black and white photos and content

  294. Destiny Of The Republic by Candace Millard
    The Greater Journey by David McCauley
    The Journal of Best Practices by David Finch
    The Great Influenza by John M Barry

  295. Entangled Life ~ Merlin Sheldrake I am an audiobook addict. This one was packed with information, I bought the book so I could use it to research the different names of the mushrooms for my next series.

    I Am Malala ~ Malala Yousafzai I just got it, excited to start, it will be my reward after I get ‘some’ of my PRAXIS homework done. I drew Malala in a painting of 7 young activists for a juried show “Politik” in Portland, Oregon. It was during the pandemic. I only know the internet information about Malala, I am excited to hear it in her own words.

    The Island of Missing Trees ~ Elif Shafak, A great love story told by a fig tree

    Circe ~ Madeline Miller Mythology ~Gotta love it when the woman solves ways to concur obstacles in her way. WOWmyn Spirit Rules!

  296. I Live in Japan and regularly read a favourite book, Kamakura: Fact and Legend.
    Kamakura is a small city one hour south of tokyo. It is where the first Shogun of Japan established his base in about 1185CE. Thus began the KAMAKURA PERIOD.
    The book is written beautifully in eloquent English by Itsu Mutsu. (her adopted Japanese name). And English woman who married a Japanese diplomat. They settled in Kamakura and she visited the 48 shrines and temples covered in the book numerous times recording the founding, traditions, facts and legends of that particular place. She also described scenes such as thatched roofs, lotus on ponds, and tranquil valleys.
    The book has inspired and informed me.
    Kamakura is one of Japans favourite towns. It is a valley opening to a crescent shaped beach with views of Mt Fuji from the headland.
    I’d recommend it for connecting with the ancient vibes of Japan or, inspiring a visit. And don’t hesitate to get in touch if here.
    Best regards,
    Paul

    • Sounds beautiful and so interesting! I read the book of tea by kakuzo okakura which was one of the most elegantly written books I’ve come across, and the writer was also a curator responsible for some major American collections of Asian art, but your book sounds excellent.

    • Hi, Paul,
      Thank you for this recommendation. I studied for a month in Japan (Tokyo and Kyoto), and was able to return with my daughter for a second visit. I love all things Japanese and will definitely get a copy of this book. I completed “The Tale of Genji” a few months ago and also Liza Dalby’s “Tale of Murasaki.”

  297. I am currently reading The Surrender Experiment by Michael Singer. It honors the spiritual path that shows us how to embrace what life brings our way instead of resisting it. Letting go in this way stimulates our creativity and invites miracle after miracle into our lives

  298. Listening to Against Interpretation by Sontag. Have to take in small chunks. Like it. Read On Photography in the late 70s when in Jack Welpott’s photo program at SFSU. Was a great book to help photography find a footing in the fine art world back then.

    I’d love to hear people’s favorite books on art interpretation and art criticism.

  299. ‘Hurricane Lizards and Plastic Squid – the Fraught and Fascinating Biology of Climate Change (Thor Hanson), ‘Finite & Infinite Games – A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility’ (James P. Carse)

  301. The Magician, by Colm Tóibín is well written and a complex book. In this historical novel Tóibínl portrays the complex personality of Thomas Mann–the German novelist, short story writer, social critic, philanthropist, essayist, and the 1929 Nobel Prize in Literature laureate. Excellent read!

  303. The Humans, Matt Haig – fasicnating – I’d’ not thought I’d like it – someone from outer space coming to Earth – but its marvelous – a great read and full of wise philosophy on the human condition. Touching – really.

  304. Dear Brainard,

    The best book I read for many many years, not only because it is well-researched and very well-written is “Making Modernism: Picasso and the Creation of the Market for Twentieth-Century Art by Michael C. FitzGerald.

    Whether you study Art History or you do a BA in Arts as an artist, a curator, a dealer, a museum director et al, we have no idea of the making of the modern art market. And this is a weak spot because most of the strategies today and most of the museological displays respond to commercial decisions taken by art dealers like Paul Durand-Ruel, Ambroise Vollard, Daniel-Henry Kanhweiler and Leo Castelli in close cooperation with artists like Picasso, Matisse, Cézanne and collectors like the Steins, Wilhelm Ude, Havemeyer.

    Art history is the result of the close collaboration of the artist-as-entrepreneur, the dealer and the collector.
    The rest of the artistic agents like the art critic, curator, museum director, art historians west al have traditionally been anti-modern and anti-contemporary art and have obstinately obstructed the progress of modern and contemporary art. I would say that this negative attitude changes sometime beginning of the 1970s. So, while today we think that most artistic agents push in the same direction, for centuries this hasn’t been this way.

    This book is also mandatory for artists to understand the kind of contracts that Picasso and the like were able to impose and what kind of strategies both artists and dealers applied for the creation of the market for modern art, which was always very difficult and fragile as it had a very tiny collector’s base and art critics were against modern art and manipulated the public against artists.

    this incredible but oh so relevant story for the art market and all its agents is told magnificently by FitzGerald, whose book was published back in 1996, almost 30 years ago, but it’s still one of the major books in my long library.

    Paco Barragán, Int. PhD, curator and cultural theorist
    (Madrid, Spain)

    • Thanks so much, this sounds fascinating Paco, the making of the very odd global art market system is so important to understanding its future!

    • Hi, Paco,
      This book sounds fascinating. Your description makes me think of how commercialized exhibitions in major museums have become over the last forty years or so. That point was driven home to me by the title of Banksy’s film, “Exit through the Gift Shop.” I avoid them now like the plague!

      “The Offer,” the dramatized TV series about the making of movie “The Godfather,” demonstrates through the clashes of financial managers and artistic directors, how art can degenerate into merely entertainment, rather than art that moves people.

  305. I’m on Book 3 of My Struggle, from a 6 volume set by the sensation Carl Ove Knausgaard, and it’s a remarkable book, autobiographical, much set in Norway (where he is from) and Sweden, where he lives. A masterpiece, and those are not just my words! If you get into it, it is very rewarding.

  308. art in the after culture, by ben davis
    room to dream, by david lynch and christine mckenna
    pictures of nothing, by kirk varnadoe
    of course this is brilliant, though i disagree with much of it.
    art is too big for authoritarian statements!
    the brilliant history of color in art, by victoria finley

  310. “Lives of the Artists” by Calvin Tomkins, 2008.
    Anecdotes about D Hirst, J Johns, C Sherman, J Koons, … and CM Cattelan (author of the taped banana.) Ten contemporary artists in all.

  311. Revisiting Marquez’s fiction. “Love in the Time of Cholera” and “100 Years of Solitude” I think he may have been the first to use magical realism as a device in his novels. Isabel Allende used it in “House of the Spirits.”

    • Yes, I think you might be right, I recently reread Love in the time of cholera and was thinking about his structure and approach.

  313. Underland: A Deep Time Journey, Robert MacFarlane
    Facing the Enemy: A History of Anarchist Organization from Proudhon to May 1968, Alexandre Skirda

  314. Frances Bacon, Revelations, Mark Steven and Annalyn Swan
    The Loft Generation, Edith Schloss
    Florine Stettheimer a Biography, Barbara Bloemink

  315. I’ve Seen the Future and I’m Not Going by Peetr McGough, a bittersweet memoir of the artist Peter McGough of his life with David McDermott. Set in New York’s lover east side of the 1980’s. A candid look on struggling artists, aids, and the dysfunction that would create and destroy both their lives.

  316. Death of the Artist is another truth telling book that helps you to think outside of the box so as to stop doling out money and art into places that will go nowhere. Extremely reaffirming read that forces you to think differently about yourself, the art world and how you broach it.

  317. Thanks for asking. I am currently reading a new publication by Paul Hunter, Mr. Brick & the Boys. It is so fine, I feel grateful while reading it, like miraculous healing as the world burns, because of it’s simple gentle way and wisdom. (also reading 3 others but this one is sticking out in a very good way).

  318. ‘Against Our Will, Sexual Trauma in American Art Since 1970’ by Vivien Green Fryd
    ‘The Song of Bernadette’ by Franz Werfel

  320. I am reading The Plague by Albert Camus. Intereast ing how history repeats itself. The scenario in Algeria during the plague reads much like today with Covid.

    • yes, so true! I reread that also, and I thought that when they were saying “the government is doing too little” as well as “the government is doing too much” is just like today! The truth being questioned too… Great book.

      • Thank you, Brainard, for this new format for Books We Read. I like the addition of a Reply to voice our thoughts and begin a dialogue. Just naming a book does not motivate me to read it. Adding a comment on how the book resonates to you makes me interested and motivated, and I am more likely to read it.
        Great column.

  321. Rashomon, Ryunosake Akutagawa
    Neurodiversity, the birth of an idea, Judy Singer
    Wittgenstein, ethics and aesthetics, the view from eternity, B R Tilghman

  322. I am currently reading Creativity: The Psychology of Discovery and Invention
    by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi as part of my research for my doctoral dissertation on the necessity of enhancing creativity to thrive and evolve humanity.

    • That’s one of my favorites along with “Flow,” by the same other with the difficult to spell and pronounce name!

  323. The White Album, Joan Didion
    Book of the Heart, Meister Eckhart, translated (into poetry) by Jon M. Sweeney and Mark S. burrows

  329. I’m currently reading 3 books:
    Aldous Huxley essays “The Human Situation”-in which he amazingly foresees our current
    situation in ‘The Population Explosion’

    “The Autobiography of William Butler Yeats”

    ‘The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats”
    He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven
    Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,
    Enwrought with golden and silver light,
    The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
    Of night and light and the half light,
    I would spread the cloths under your feet:
    But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
    I have spread my dreams under your feet;
    Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

    It was because I came across this poem that I purchased Yeats complete poems (and his autobiography)

    • I hear you! I fell in love with Yeats’ poetry when I discovered a recording by Sioban McKenna, the Irish actress, reading William Butler Yeats. Simple, beautiful language. So elegant!

    • I hear you! I fell in love with Yeats’ poetry when I discovered a recording by Siobhan McKenna, the Irish actress, reading William Butler Yeats. Simple, beautiful language. So elegant! (see eBay)

      Three Things
      W.B. Yeats
      “O cruel death give three things back,”
      Sang a bone upon the shore;
      “A child found all a child can lack
      Whether of pleasure or of rest
      Upon the abundance of my breast”;
      A bone wave-whitened and dried in the wind.

      “Three dear things that women know”
      Sang a bone upon the shore
      “A man if I but held him so
      When my body was alive
      Found all the pleasure that life gave”;
      A bone wave-whitened and dried in the wind.

      “The third thing that I think of yet”
      Sang a bone upon the shore,
      “Is that morning when I met
      Face to face my rightful man
      And did after stretch and yawn”;
      A bone wave-whitened and dried in the wind.

  330. ‘Abstracts in acrylic & ink by Jodi Ohl – A playful painting workshop.’ – A very nice book for someone who has just started the adventure with abstracts. Beautiful photographs accompany the text. A number of techniques presented. Very interesting piece of work that tell a lot about abstracts.

  331. The Passion, by Jeannette Winterson. A story about Napoleon, the war, but really about life itself. Beautifully written.

    The Little Book, by Selden Edwards. Gripping story about the individual, set mainly in turn of the century Vienna. Great story!

  332. Nature’s Palette: A Color Reference System from the Natural World Hardcover –
    Illustrated, May 18, 2021
    by Patrick Baty (Author), Elaine Charwat (Contributor), & 3 more
    Princeton University Press

  337. Great science fiction, so carefully written
    To Sleep In A Sea Of Stars-
    Christopher Paolini

    A look into the lives of Korean women divers, their culture, their lives from before WWII up through the present
    The Island of Sea Women-
    Lisa See

    Also a story of Korean and Japanese mesh of culture from before WWII through recent history though individual stories.
    Pachinko-
    Min Jin Lee

  338. Mostly I like to read was art books specially about different story behind some local artists in my country Philippines.

  339. And these 2…
    Both by David Hinton

    “Hunger Mountain” and “Existence/ A Story

    Hinton is in his 70s and is perhaps our best translator of early and classic Chinese texts. Over the course of a lifetime he has learned to see/ live in the world with the consciousness of those early sages. He applies this to walking the small New England mountain out his back door – Hunger Mountain.
    Existence, A Story is a book length meditation on one Chinese landscape painting – both books just fabulous – for these sages and for all indigenous ‘shamanic’ cultures, we and the land are both ‘conscious’ … needless to say in the modern Western materialist view of nature that’s not an idea with much currency – fortunately that’s changing on many fronts…

  340. “Wetiko: Healing the Mind Virus That Plagues Our World” Paul Levy The Epilogue itself is such a poignant eloquent and profound statement about the crucial importance of art and artists – especially in these most remarkable times…

    “More than Allegory: On Myth Truth and Belief” Bernardo Kastrup – a physicist takes on the big questions and reveals the important acne of myth – and even how science itself is an unacknowledge myth …Jung, Alchemy et all..

  343. The Hamlet by William Faulkner
    The Dutch House by Ann Patchett
    My Brilliant Friend, The Story of the Lost Child, The Story of a New Name, The Lost Daughter by Elena Ferante
    Midnight in the Whitehouse by Adam Schiff

  345. Salt Fat Acid Heat by Samin Nosrat. I got this book from my partner as a christmas present and it’s been a wonderful read so far. I like the personal touch with which it’s written, you can see the artistic path the author took.

    If you like the kitchen or, if you’d like to get into cooking, this is a great book for you.
    Cheers and happy holidays.

  348. Healing Anger, the Power of Patience from a Buddhist Prospective. The Dalai Lama.

    A Bref History of Thought, a philosophical guide to living. Luc Perry

    Havana Real, one woman fights to tell the truth about Cuba today. Yoani Sanchez

    Dylan’s Vision of Sin. Christopher Ricks

    Design for Dying. Timothy Leary

    American Royals. Katherine McGee

    Palahnuick.Chuck Rant

    Being of the Sun (companion volume to Living on the Earth). Alicia Bay Laurel

  349. Bekim Fehmiu ‘Brilliant and Terrifying’ 1 & 2: A short description from Amazon; “Bekim Fehmiu was a Yugoslavian theater and film actor of Albanian ethnicity. He was the first Eastern European actor to star in Hollywood during the Cold War.”
    While searching through a friends’ book collection I noticed a name that rang a bell. He was not an actor I remember well but I remembered some stories about him keeping his morale high during the war times, keeping himself clean off the illness that ravaged through people; Anger and Hate. His noble aims were not well accepted among his colleagues at the time, it was not popular to think, feel and shake hands, while the winds of hatred were at their full force. As I took the book, a lot of new information opened in front of my eyes. Also, through his book I immediately found another great one to read;
    Stefan Zweig ‘The world of yesterday’. My parents luckily had it on their shelves already – a truly fantastic read about intelligent and peaceful people for whom nations are not borders but bridges.
    Antun Vrgoc ‘My Memories of the World War’ is an autobiography of a Croatian chemist and pharmacognosist who ended up as a prisoner of war in Siberia. A person whose curiosity and courage kept him alive and well during the experience which would probably, drive most of the others to madness.
    Josip Horvat ‘Survival in Zagreb’ (1943-1945) is a diary that literally describes everyday life of an intellectual living in Zagreb during the nazi puppet state regime.

  350. Just finishing Simon Winder, Lotharingia. A personal history of France, Germany and the Counties in between, Picador, 2019. Next?
    Margalit Fox, The Confidence Men. How two prisoners of war engineered he most remarkable escape in history, Profile Books, 2021, then Adrian Goldsworthy, Philip and Alexander. Kings and conquerors, Apollo, 2020;

  356. I’m reading POTATOES NOT PROZAC. I’m currently searching for ways to help manage the side effects of cancer and chemotherapy. This book seems promising.

  357. Oh, to be a painter! Virginia Woolf
    With Pleasure: Pattern and Decoration in American Art 1972-1985
    John Hoyland, The Last Paintings
    Love in the Void, Simone Weil
    The Secret of the Golden Flower, Wilhelm-Jung

  358. Women’s Work The first 20,000 years by Elizabeth Wayland Barber. Maya Cosmos by Freidel, Schele and Parker. The theory of the Avant-Garde by Renato Poggioli. Holistic Medicine and the Extra Cellular Matrix by Matthew Wood.

  359. 1) Cynthia Miller-Idriss, “Hate in the Homeland: The New GlobalFar Right” (2020)
    2) “The Matter of Black Lives,” edited by Jelani Cobb and David Remnick (2021)
    3) Gabrielle Selz, “Light on Fire:The Art and Life of Sam Francis” (2021)
    4) Evan Osnos, “Wildland: The Making of America’s Fury” (2021)

  364. One of the most incredible books that I have ever read. The writer is so articulate – such a pleasure – I even had to use my dictionary again!

  370. What an interesting reading list this is!

    Currently reading Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell and The Lincoln Highway by Amor Towles

  372. The New Testament
    The Adjacent Possibility Nancy Hillis
    The Divine Conspiracy Dallas Willard
    The Poisonwood Bible Barbara Kingsolver

  373. Wilderness Tips and Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood
    All of Henning Mankell’s books including Wallander Mystery Series and now the rest of his books. Rereading works by Doris Lessing and Barbara Pym.
    All amazing.

  374. “The Lady and the Little Fox Fur” by Violette Leduc

    The great French feminist writer we need to remember. (1907 – 1972)

    ‘Leduc can capture the smells of a country….or make you feel the silky slither of her eel grey suit’

  375. Does listening to books count?
    My newest, and now favorite, author is Wilkie Collins.
    “The Moonstone” and
    “The Woman in White”
    I love the way he writes and describes so perfectly that I can envision the people, places and feelings, et al.

  376. I am about to finish “Tale of Murasaki” by Liza Dolby. This is a novel inspired by the world’s first novel, “Tale of Genji” written by Murasaki Shikibu in Heian period Japan (c. 1000).”Genji” is the first novel ever written and it was written by a woman. Liza Dolby imagines Murasaki’s life and inspiration for the events that take place in her novel. The Japanese aesthetic of transience…things are beautiful precisely because they do not last…is found throughout “Tale of Murasaki” as inspired by “Tale of Genji.”

    Recently completed: “The Pope’s Ceiling” by Ross King. I used this book as a reference for a presentation on the Sistine Ceiling. It tells the background intrigue of the commission, the rivalries, and detailed descriptions of process and technique. For anyone who wants to get their head around the Sistine Ceiling frescoes.

  377. “Time or the Magicians: Wittgenstein, Benjamin, Cassirer, Heidegger, and the Decade that Reinvented Philosophy,” by Wolfram Eilenberger

    “Reflections in the Waves: The Interdividual Observer in a Quantum Mechanical World” by Pablo Bandera

  384. I am reading The Night Watchman by Louise Erdrich and Grievers by Adrienne Maree Brown. I have a huge pile of other books in my to-be-read pile. They’re waiting for winter hibernation time.

  386. I am reading How To Be A Successful Artist by Angus Resch. It has some material in it, which I wasn’t previously familiar with. I would recommend it to any aspiring artist. This book has some interesting case studies about successful artists as well as suggestions about career strategies. I think that many of the artists, whom I have met, haven’t come across a lot of the material, which is included in this book. Other artists often ask me career questions and I think that they might find some of the answers that they need in this book. I would say that this book has a different perspective than many art career books. I believe that many aspiring artists would find this career book to be helpful.

  388. I am currently experiencing the loss of two of my dearest and closest longtime friends. I miss them.
    I am reading The Jewel Tree of Tibet -the enlightenment engine of Tibetan Buddhism by Robert Thurman
    which I find very comforting informative and ‘down to earth’
    also
    Anxiety -the missing stage of Grief by Claire Bidwell Smith
    After initially being resistant to the word ‘Anxiety’ I continued to read, stopping when I had a crying episode.
    It hits the spot and I will continue to read it.

  389. Art and Postcapitalism: Aesthetic Labour, Automation and Value Production, by Dave Beech. Brilliant and crystal. Also, Craig Staff’s Painting, History and Meaning.

  390. I am reading several things at the minute. As research for a film I am working on I am reading Anne Nelson’s compelling “Red Orchestra” about the underground movement against fascism in Germany and Francis Stuart’s postwar novel “The Pillar of Cloud”. I’m intermittently dipping into Victor Klemperer’s “I Shall bear Witness”.

    My evening reads are currently Igor Štiks’ and Krunoslav Stojaković’s concisely written “The New Balkan Left” which outlines the recent successes and failures of left-wing political movements and actions in the former Yugoslav republics. I’m also reading Georges Simenon’s The Snow Was Dirty. Written in post war Europe in the same year as Stuart’s book, it portrays the moral ambiguity, corruption and opportunism that was rife as the continent, and globe, recovered from its most devastating war. It has an air of Greene’s The Third Man to it, but it’s a more intimate and sinister book. I love Simenon’s writing – succinct and unadorned.

    There are several stacks of books sitting around making me feel guilty for not having started them yet, but I’m too ashamed to list any.

  391. The Last Things we Talk About, Your guide to End of Life Transitions, By Rev. Dr. Eliabeth T. Boatright. THings we all need to know whether young or old because we all lose imporant people in our lives.
    Another book tht i read practically straight throug is Swimming Back to trout River by Linda Rui Feng. Covers the Cultural Revolution – as it hit a partciular group of people’s lives, the saving grace of music, something about disability, and immigration to the USA. Hugely engrossing and touching.

  392. Just opening the cover (finally) … Karl Marlantes, MATTERHORN A Novel of the Vietnam War (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2010)
    It was Marlantes who said: “When the peace treaty is signed, the war isn’t over for the veterans, or the family. It’s just starting.”
    On the nightstand always:
    David Finkel, THANK YOU FOR YOUR SERVICE (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2013)
    Tim O’Brien, THE THINGS THEY CARRIED (Houghton Mifflin, 1990)
    Karl Marlantes, WHAT IT IS LIKE TO GO TO WAR (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2011)
    These books provide insight on U.S. servicemembers’ experiences in war, the cost of war, the heartbreak for many on coming home, and the civilian-military divide.

    And of another genre … Amy Hempel, SING TO IT (Scribner, 2019) whose short stories I never tire of reading and who donates time writing biographies for shelter dogs on death row with the hope they may be adopted.

  393. ‘The Magic Mountain’
    -Thomas Mann

    ‘Manufacturing Consent’
    -Edward S. Herman & Noam Chomsky

    ‘In Cold Hell, In Thicket’
    -Charles Olson

    ‘The Worm Ouroboros’
    -E.R.Eddison

  394. Theodor w Adorno – Aesthetic Theory. Published 1970- (Adorno’s radical re-thinking of Aesthetics in relation to Modern and contemporary art is so timely now. It makes me realise how so much thought about the making of art has left out a whole realm of Aesthetics.)

    Jean Paul Satre – The Imaginary. ( So much of Lacan’s theory of Vision, the Gaze and Painting comes from this incredible work by Sartre.)

    Flow – Philip Ball. (A scientist who thinks like an artist about patterns in nature, in this case liquids – it’s been an inspiration for the paintings i am currently making with liquid paint, using flow and gravity.

    Merleau-Ponty ‘The Visible and the Invisible’ (This last unfinished work is the most radical re-thinking of vision and its relation to the world that I know)

  395. 1. SeokmunDobeob : the principle and rule of completion on Do(Tao) that makes human (beings) become the gods (2011)

    2. Cheon-gwangCheolro : Hanzonim (the creator / the God)’s biography on training himself to achieve Do(Tao)

    3. Through the Eyes of Joseon Painters (Real Scenery Landscapes of Korea) (2019)

    4. 101 Things to Learn in Art School (2013)

    5. SeokmunDodam edited by Seokmundomun (2012)

  397. Very important to understand the cultural collisions between east and west beginning several hundred years ago, in order to understand what might come out of it, politically, technologically, environmentally. So Two books by Chinese theorist Yuk Hui: Art and Cosmotechnics and The Question Concerning Technology in China. Essential, as well to return to the Dao and to Confucius.
    In addition: Rilke, New Poems (1 and 2), Duino Elegies; Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Map Drawn by a Spy; Mario Vargas Llosa, Death in the Andes; Hagi Kenaan, Photography and Its Shadow; Coco Fusco et al Only Skin Deep. These are all ongoing.

  399. I am devouring Kim Stanley Robinson’s books – I’m so happy he has many. I have finished New York 2040, Ministry of the Future, and am now in the Red Mars series. I always promise myself I will read only one book at a time – but as usual I am reading four plus random poetry – this week by Jorie Graham. Also reading Helgoland by Carlo Rovelli, Memorial Drive by Natasha Trethewey, and Wisdom is Bliss by Robert Thurman.

  400. Deep Adaptation, Navigating the Realities of Climate Chaos (2021)
    Edited by Jem Bendell & Rupert Read
    Deep adaptation is a concept and social movement based on the view that humanity needs to prepare for the possibility of societal collapse, as environmental change increasingly disrupts social, economic, and political systems.
    ‘This book is the “red pill” of our times, offering neither certainty nor confirmation of any story you may be holding about where we are heading in the face of so many colliding crises. What it does offer is togetherness in our insecurity and frameworks in our unknowing for coming to terms with and making sense of these times. I look forward to both “deep adaptation” and “collapsology” entering mainstream discourse so that we might then imagine creating together, as our current paradigm crumbles.’
    Gail Bradbrook, co-founder, Extinction Rebellion

  401. King: A Street Story by John Berger. By chance I found a used copy of this book in Massolit Bookstore in Budapest. I have been working on both a project relating and viewing the world through the eyes of other creatures and a project relating in depth on a daily basis with the homeless. This book is a perfect fit, viewing homeless individuals and their existence through the eyes of dogs. It seems rather serendipitous that it both exists and that I would come across it randomly in a used English books bookstore in Budapest, where I have been living during the pandemic. I only knew John Berger through his book, Ways of Seeing, but of course, this fits the theme. I also read Other Minds: The Octopus and the Evolution of Intelligent Life, during the pandemic, which is a fascinating book by Peter Godfrey-Smith. My mind opened up to the way an octopus can experience and take in knowledge through its arms, which have, in simple terms, brain-like matter within them. I also would like to say, if you like poetry, perhaps you want to read my first published book of poetry, which is a collaboration with myself (Anne Murray) and a Hungarian artist (Zolt Asta- Zsolt Asztalos) with poems I created to go with his photographs. It is called Battlefields and published by AC Books and available on Amazon, SPD Books, John Rule Art Book Distribution. I created it with the intention that the poems can be seen and read in any order carving different paths per the individual’s own intuition, much like in this photographer’s work, where modular sections are moved around. It was recently reviewed under Harriet Books by the Poetry Foundation, which has been such a lovely validation of this unusual modular style of syntax and symbol, which I included. This poetry is my little gift to the world during these challenging times.

  402. I can’t speak more highly of “Beyond the World’s End: Arts of Living at the Crossing” by TJ Demos
    (Duke University Press 2020) It is a powerful look at how contemporary artists are addressing the urgent themes of these times, while imagining what comes after the end of the world.

  403. I’m currently reading for research and pleasure the following:

    Life to Those Shadows by Noel Burch
    The Hidden Life of Trees by Peter Wohlleben
    The Secret Life of Plant by P. Tomkins & C. Bird
    Speaking with Nature by S. Ingerman & L. Roberts

  404. ‘Paper: Paging Through History’ by Mark Kurlansky
    –

    From the New York Times best-selling author of Cod and Salt, a definitive history of paper and the astonishing ways it has shaped today’s world.

  406. I am currently reading “The Road to Unfreedom: Europe, Russia, America” by Timothy Snyder
    which charts the course of authoritarianism as it as has coursed through Eastern, Western Europe and Russia post WW2 and its political effects on the U.S. And “The Cost of Living” by Deborah Levy, a collection autobiographical essays by a writer of pithy prose, and a two-time Man-Booker Prize nominee.

  407. ‘Primeval And Other Times’ by Olga Tokarczuk

    An imaginative (and close to actual) chronicle of ”the course of the feral 20th century in prose that is forceful, direct, and the stylistic cousin of the magic realism in Gabriel Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude”.

    Qu’est-ce qui va changer en 2021

  408. My latest reading self-assignment is Michael Pollan’s “This is Your Mind on Plants”, Penguin, NY (2021). During the pandemic, I have done a lot of technical reading & writing in my capacity as an astrophysicist. I have also reread Dante’s “Divine Comedy”. Leonard Cohen’s poetry is for me a great consolation during this period of self-enforced semi-confinement. I play with the idea of a near-future re-read of Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings”.

  409. I am currently reading “Picasso’s Las Meninas” by Claustre Rafart i Planas which I purchased while visiting Museo Picasso in Barcelona. The museum has the complete series of Picasso’s works inspired by Velasquez’s “Las Meninas” painting and it was the first time I saw the whole series ‘in the flesh’. I have been working on a number of art lessons (for my YT channel “Rob the Art Teacher”) on the subject of how and why artists and art students study other artists, and I plan to add a lesson based on Picasso’s approach to “Las Meninas”.

    I am also ‘in the middle of’ Wiesław Myśliwski’s “Stone upon Stone”, an outstanding example of post-war Polish literature – a semi-autobiographical epic tale, at times poignant, liberally laced with rural wit and irreverence.

  410. My pile now:
    My MeteoriteHarry Dodge
    On Freedom, Maggie Nelson
    The Flowering The Autobiography of Judy Chicago
    No One is Talking About This, Patricia Lockwood

  411. The Conspiracy of Art by Jean Baudrillard. I am reading again all his visionary books as well as What is Power by Byung-Chil Han

  412. Greek plays for a story I want to do:

    ‘Lysistrata and Other Plays’ by Aristohanes (Penguin Ckassics)
    The Acharians, The Clouds, Lysistrata

    ‘Medea and other plays by Euripides’ (Penguin Classics)
    Medea, Hecabe, Electra, Heracles

    and for the depressing stuff
    ‘In defense of Julian Assange’ Edited by Tariq Ali and Margaret Kunstler (OR books)

  413. FÉLIX GUATTARI, The Three Ecologies, 1989
    DONNA J. HARAWAY, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, Duke University Press, 2016
    ( a bit difficult to follow her jump cuts of academic references, her own lack of viewpoints and my real opposition towards her Cyborg chapter )…
    URSULA K. LE GUIN, The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, 1986

  414. I’m reading:

    Maggie Nelson, On Freedom
    Sanford Schwartz, On Edward Hicks
    Alistair Horne, A Savage War of Peace
    Kateb Yacine, Nedjma

  417. I’m currently reading:
    Black Reconstruction in America 1860-1880, W.E.B. DuBois
    Tacky’s Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War, Vincent Brown
    I just finished:
    The Stone Sky, N.K. Jemisin
    Harriet Tubman: The Road to Freedom, Catherine Clinton
    Next up:
    Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration, Nicole Fleetwood

  418. Hello… I’m reading a number of books. Nine by Gwen Strauss (9 women escape from Nazi prison camps); Paleofantasy by Marlene Zuk (what evolution relaly tells us about Sex, Die and how we live); and still putting my own book, Coronaville (Blurb) out there, as well as a brand new art and literary magazine called TROUBLE (Blurb). This is vol 1 number 2, The Drug Issue. 180 pages. Free PDF download.

    http://concretewheels.com/trouble/trouble.htm

  419. Andy Grundberg and his new book:

    “How Photography Became Contemporary Art: From Pop to Digital” is an excellent read – a great story that is both illuminating and concise, from a first-witness account by the author, whereby these (now) legendary pioneers and their incredible art making become fully alive, now heroic, in the context of the past-to-present art world. To truth and beauty at 1/125 of a second – the book echoes the apt phrase of Polaroid – “See What Develops”.

    Yale University Press, excellent book! A must-read!

  420. 1. The Writings of Robert Smithson
    I am revisiting this after many years.
    2. Slide Show – Projected Images on Contemporary Art by Darcie Alexander
    3. Machine in the Studio by Caroline Jones
    Mostly interested in the Smithson essay but the others are good as well.
    4. Let It Come Down by Paul Bowles

  421. The body keeps the score, by Bessel Van Der Kolk (it’s so good!)
    Strange weather in Tokyo, by Hiromi Kawakami (filled with Japanese food, it made me very hungry while reading…)

    • This is interesting. I have long thought it strange that yin is denigrated by some taoist writers. I think this is part of the larger propensity to denigrate the feminine generally.

  426. Just finished Desert Solitaire by Edward Abbey
    Currently reading Inland by Tea Obreht
    Up next is Underland by Robert McFarlane

  427. Ninth Street Women by Mary Gabriel (Joan Mitchell groupie, btw half way through and it’s still about the men(oye))
    The Essential Cy Twombly (Kurt Varnedoe devotee)
    In the Shadow of the American Dream by David Wojnarowicz
    coming up –
    Antkind by Charlie Kaufman
    The SFMoMA Joan Mitchell Retrospective catalog

  428. Navigating The Art World: Professional Practices For Early Career Artist
    Give me the Now
    Everything you wanted to know about contemporary art but were afraid to ask: talk ART
    A Room with a View
    The Magazine

  433. Just read George Orwell “ 1984 “ Sadly the political lies a falsehood are with us still .
    Am just about to reread “ A Canticle for Leibovitz “ by Walter M Miller JR . It traces a monks journey as he tries to to understand the previous20 th. D try civilization and what happened after “ The atomic Flame Deluge was over. The earth was dead and all knowledge was lost “ First published 1929

  434. I just finished The Rock Eaters, a tremendous and moving book of short stories by Brenda Peynado. I devoured it, laughing and crying my way through every story. Now I am about a third of the way through the massive biography of Alice Neel – The Art of Not Sitting Pretty by Phoebe Hoban. It’s an excellent and thorough account of her life. A must read after seeing the show at The Met.

  435. I have just finished “Culture Strike: Art and Museums in the Age of Protest,” by Laura Raicovich

    Before that, “Science and Wonder,” by Mary Baine Campbell

  436. Reading the Merry Misogynist by Colin Cotterill a murder mystery and John James Audubon The Making of an American by Richard Rhodes

  437. rereading a novel by John Mcgahern,That they may face the rising sun,a exquisite piece of writing on rural Ireland by the late novelist,and struggling with a large rather ambiguous novel by martin Amis for the last few months,my instincts are to bin it.

  438. I recently read the autobio The Life of Lazarillo De Tormes; and just read several graphic novels by Garth Ennis/Goran Parlov and by R Kikuo Johnson, including his upcoming No One Else; as well, I carry Chip Delany’s Nova around in my bag for whenever I get a moment.

  439. Currently reading the Bible: Genesis. Certainly appropriate. Interesting if one considers human imperatives and the attitudes that have shaped our society. Also read Hannah Arendt: “The Human Condition”, and reading “Crises of the Republic”. Brilliant.

  440. Facing the Extreme; Moral Life in the Concentration Camps by Tzvetan Todorov.

    Before that, Austerlitz, before that The Rings of Saturn both by Sebald.

    Before that, Locus Solus and Impressions of Africa, both by Roussel.

  443. My favorite book this summer? Reza Aslan’s “ZEALOT” >> upon which I’m clearly discovering that I’m far more Pauline Hellenist than James’ Zionist if our New Jerusalem’s constantly in the offing.

    My take? If, after all, the empirical nature of our due BEING has to postpone the timeless destiny of our true BECOMING, it’s ALL Constitutionally upheld in #MorePerfectUnionFormation via a perfection only mattering — squared to light’s speed — MOVING FORWARD. Meanwhile, should many of our ancestors somehow need to be posthumously saved BEFORE the Cross 2000yrs ago compels the need for a thermodynamic time to provide relativist resolve via absolute rewinds. That our destined singularity CAN, for example, retroactively CAUSE the very creation whence we’ve come in the first place to procreate till we’re at the last place is our feared-stay hope’s only happiness.

  445. Just finished the Short Stories of Breece D’J Pancake. Amazing prose, brilliant, wish I could could write this way.

    Just started Blood and Thunder by Hampton Sides, it’s a bout Kit Carson and America’s conquest of the West during the early and mid 1800’s.

  446. Outside of several poets for my upcoming workshops, I recently finished Southern History across the Color Line by Nell Painter and Just Kids by Patti Smith.
    Am finishing up The Yellow House by Sarah M. Broom
    Made to Explode by Sandra Beasley
    The Harlem Reader, ed by Herb Boyd
    Openings: A Memoir from the Women’s Arts Movement, New York City, 1970-1992 by Sabra Moore
    The Firebrand and The First Lady: Portrait of a Friendship by Patricia Bell-Scott
    In different ways, these memoirs, essays and poetry explore American culture, political change, artistic expression, and attempt to make visible what is often erased.

  447. Kin: A Memoir
    Shawna Kay Rodenberg

    The Long Loneliness: The Autobiography of the Legendary Catholic Social Activist
    by Dorothy Day

    Love Lives Here: A Story of Thriving in a Transgender Family
    Amanda Jette Knox

  449. I’m a few pages away from finishing “Evening in the Palace of Reason,” by James Gaines (2005). It’s about the night Bach and Frederick the Great met at the latter’s palace in Potsdam. An astonishing, mesmerizing tale about art and political power. It’s definitely one of my top ten books!

  450. OnCurating Issue 51
    Fluxus Perspectives
    eds Martin Patrick and Dorothee Richter
    Although the Fluxus art (non-)movement is often read as a historical phenomenon, the breadth of its innovations and complexities actively thwarts linear and circumscribed viewpoints. The notion of Fluxus incorporates contradiction in challenging and enduringly generative ways. More than five decades after its emergence, this special issue of OnCurating entitled Fluxus Perspectives seeks to re-examine the influence, roles, and effects of Fluxus via a wide range of scholarly perspectives. The editors Martin Patrick and Dorothee Richter asked notable writers from different locations, generations, and viewpoints, all of whom having written about Fluxus before, to offer their thoughts on its significance, particularly in relation to contemporary art. With its emphasis upon events, festivals, and exhibitions, Fluxus may also be interpreted as an important, prescient forerunner of contemporary strategies of curating.

    Contributions by Simon Anderson, Jordan Carter, Kevin Concannon, Ken Friedman, Natilee Harren, John Held, Jr., Hannah B Higgins, Hanna B. Hölling, Natasha Lushetich, Billie Maciunas, Peter van der Meijden, Ann Noël, Martin Patrick, Dorothee Richter, Henar Rivière, Julia Robinson, Owen F. Smith, Weronika Trojanska, and Emmett Williams.

    • I taught that book in an Honors College program at Hofstra University, and my students loved it. It’s a brilliant “unreliable narrator” story. I’m only sorry the book (and the author) isn’t better known.

  452. I enjoy this question that you ask in every interview.
    Currently I am reading on visionary art- The first manifest of visionary art by L. Caruana/ and Women of visionary art by DJBrown & RAHill; in conjunction with CGJung- The psychology of kundalini yoga ; Latino art-artists, markets, and politics.

  453. Gore Vidal’s “Creation”. Given to me by Elena Sisto. Fascinating account in novel form about the Persians around 2-300 BC and their travails with the Greeks and ventures into India and China. Includes a view into all the religions that were forming and competing with one another in the Middle East and in Asia at that time. Wry contemporary writing.

  456. At the beginning of the pandemic I became deeply engrossed in the Cixin Liu’s trilogy – the first volume is called The Three Body Problem – recently I read a newer work of his called Ball Lightning – While not a regular reader of science fiction these held my attention and I recommend them highly. These also called to mind something I read and loved several years ago- Vladimir Sorokin’s Ice Trilogy. Having a hard time concentrating with all tht is going on in the world and my normal reading quota is severely diminished

  457. I’m in the midst of: The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins
    by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing

    Also enjoyed: The Arrest, by Jonathan Lethem

  458. I’m reading The Trouble With Poetry by Billy Collins and Rose by Li-Young Lee.
    As always there are a couple of plays on the go (Bakersfield Mist by Stephen Sachs, Spring Awakening by Weekend) and a motley crew of sailing books.

  459. Recently I’ve been dipping in and out of the Complete Letters of Vincent Van Gogh.
    Its such a moving tale of brotherly love and the volumes were given to me over 20 years ago by Lucian Freud when I was sitting for him. Lucian was obsessed with these letters, he talked about them often, and reading them takes me back to those days a lifetime ago, in his Notting Hill studio.

  461. Here’s a list of a few books from this year…

    “24/7”
    Jonathan Crary

    “Digital Uncanny”
    Ravetto Biaglioli

    “Glitch Feminism”
    Legacy Russell

    “Tactics of Interfacing”
    Ksenia Fedorava

    “Cultural Analytics”
    Lev Manovich

    “Call Me Burroughs”
    Barry Miles

  463. I’m just about to start reading “ Ursula K. Le Guin: The Last Interview: And Other Conversations.” In the studio I’m making slow progress on “Art/Work” by Heather Darcy Bhandari and Jonathan Melber. It’s an excellent review (I’m learning some new tips, too) of how to run a professional art practice.

  467. Hi there,

    just re-reading after a really long time since the first Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities and a very interesting book in German that I do not know if it has been translated into English entitled 1913 by Florian Illies. A book that tells only what happened in that year and I wonder how much really happened in art, society and politics: Duchamp’s ready made, Malewitch’s Black/White Square just to mention a few….

  468. I just finished my first book by Thomas Bernhard, “ja” -wow what a writer!

    I follow Karl Ove Knausgårds all books and now read Summer & for my next to follow is obviously his Autumn.
    This summer I have read the 1940s Swedish working class writers, all translated to English which was a mind-blowing experience. For example Harry Martinson (The Road/ Aniara) & Jan Fridegård.

  469. Religion and the Rise of Capitalism by Benjamin M Friedman

    Fortunes of Africa by Martin Meredith

    Satires by Horace

    Cruel Optimism by Lauren Berlant which I am slowly reading with my pal Loren Britton ( they’ve read it before)

  470. Anais Duplan, Blackspace: On the Poetics of an Afrofuture
    Kate Crawford, Atlas of AI
    Joanna Page, Decolonizing Science in Latin American Art

  471. “My Second Work” by Bridget Lowe; Gwendolyn Brooks: Collected Poems; “The Underground Railroad,” by Colson Whitehead; “The News,” by Jeffrey Brown.

  472. Stuart Cosgrove: Harlem 69. The Future of Soul.
    This is the third book (Detroit 67, Memphis 68) in a groundbreaking series that is eye-opening and a fantastic read. Right up there with the Peter Guralnik trilogy (Feel Like Going Home, Lost Highway, Sweet Soul Music).

    Maryanne Amacher: Selected Writings and Interviews.
    Brilliant book paying homage to a brilliant force in 20th Century music.

    Das Jahr 1990 freilegen, ed. Jan Wenzel a.o.
    Quite a tomp dissecting the German year 1990, very very beautiful and a gripping read.

  473. Lots of biographies and autobiographies and also about mindfulness:

    https://www.amazon.com/Kin-Memoir-Shawna-Kay-Rodenberg/dp/1635574552/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=kin+%2B+shawna&qid=1632412778&sr=8-1

    https://www.amazon.com/Long-Loneliness-Autobiography-Legendary-Catholic/dp/0060617519/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=long+loneliness&qid=1632412798&sr=8-1

    https://www.amazon.com/Mindful-Race-Transforming-Racism-Inside/dp/1683640810/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=ruth+king&qid=1632412831&sr=8-1

    https://www.amazon.com/Becoming-Maria-Chaos-South-Bronx/dp/0545621852/ref=sr_1_3?dchild=1&keywords=sonia+%2B+bronx+stories&qid=1632412925&sr=8-3

  474. Upper Bohemia by Hayden Herrera
    A memoir about how two little girls, Hayden and her sister Blair, survived a childhood of neglect, written through the eyes of a child. It is told with an enormous sensitivity to place and to the people who passed through those places.

  476. Field Guide to Getting Lost, Rebecca Solnit;
    The Song of the Trees, David George Haskell;
    The Mother Tree, Suzanne Simmard;
    The Price of the Ticket, James Balwin;
    Jackson Pollock, Kirk Varnedoe.

  477. States of Mind: Experiences at the Edge of Consciousness (a collection of literature, science, philosophy and art, published by the Wellcome Collection)

  478. I’ve Seen the Future and I’m Not Going: The Art Scene and Downtown New York in the 1980s Peter McGough a glorious deep and tragic in depth tour of a period in the art world

  483. The age of Wood. By Roland Ennos

    We think of the past in terms of stone, bronze and steel but that is not a true picture. People have mostly used those technologies to make things out of wood. A history of humankind all the way back to primates through their use of wood.

  485. All The Light We Cannot See
    –Anthony Doerr
    Pulitzer Prize winner, stunning and poetic language in a totally convincing story that takes place in Europe during WW2

    Human, Sean Scully
    Images of Scully’s solo exhibition “Human” at the Basilica of San Giorgio Maggiore in Venice with essays by art historians, art critics, and curators about his work. My friend went to this exhibition on my recommendation after I saw Scully’s exhibition “Landline” at the Wadsworth Atheneum the year before. I fell in love with his work and couldn’t get to Italy to see “Human,” but my friend loved it so much she brought me back this huge book that weighs about 20 lbs. Not the same as in person, of course, but good art reproductions and some damn good writing.

  486. Watson, Lyall. Heaven’s Breath: A Natural History of the Wind. 1984. New York Review Book, NYC, NY.
    Wulf, Andrea, editor. Alexander von Humboldt: Selected Writings. 2018. Knopf, NYC, NY.
    Helferich, Gerard. Humboldt’s Cosmos: Alexander von Homboldt and The Latin American Journey that Changed the Way We See the World. 2004. Penguin Group, NYC, NY.
    Lawrence, Beull, editor. The American Transcendentalists: Essential Writings. 2006. Random House, NYC, NY.
    Allende, Isabel. In the Midst of Winter. 2017. Atria Books, NYC, NY.
    Allende, Isabel. A Long Petal of the Sea. 2020. Ballantine Books, NYC, NY.

  487. Wild By Nature by Sarah Marquis

    Epic endurance, focus, dedication to her goal to walk across Asia … alone … And she had no idea that her journey would take 3 years, but she persisted against all challenges and threats and made it. Inspiring book if you have an epic or even small goal.

  488. How Forest Think: Toward An Anthropology Beyond The Human by Eduardo Kohn. Eduardo is a linguistic anthropology and I believe since writing this book critics it as weighted down a bit by the academics he imposes. It’s interesting to read while considering that tension. After all it’s a unique writer who covers our relation to nature without the bs.

  489. Re-reading: The Quantum Revolution – a radical synthesis of art and science” by Paul Levy.
    This book brings an in-depth analysis of the Quantum Theory with quotes from the major physicists in the world. Paul Levy “translates” every concept in everyday words for the lay person, often more than once. The book is brilliant and truly life-changing. The main take away: What is the real Reality? What and Who are we in that context? What we acquire with this book: brand new eyes – outer and inner.

  492. I am reading The Overstory by Richard Powers, lyrical accounts of various fictional characters and their relationship to trees.I am also reading Ninth Street Women by Mary Gabriel, an excellent account of the women artists during the “abstract expressionist years” I was struck, again, by how incredibly good Lee Krassner was and how she seems to have deferred her career so that she could promote her husband, Jackson Pollack’s career.

    • I’ve been recommending The Overstory to everyone and bought it for everyone on my Christmas list. It’s indelibly imprinted into my consciousness now.

  493. Flannery O’Connor
    The Complete Stories

    Phenomenal writer. I started this collection a while ago and am just returning to it now.

  494. David Arora’s ‘Mushrooms Demystified’ is all you could ever imagine knowing about the magical kingdom. Encyclopedic and almost overwhelming with its small font of nearly 1000 pages but the skillfully collected details are layered with such quirky humour it lures you in.
    Surely it must be the result of a lifelong passion!

  495. I would love to have my books included in your list. here is my link to my Amazon:
    www.Amazon.com/author/annguerra

  496. Kindertotenwald

    Prose Poems by Franz Wright

    Reading this now in hardcover. Franz sent it to me when it was still in manuscript form to read and for safe keeping while he was battling cancer, in case he didn’t make it. He gave a reading from it at Amherst College which was so powerful it blew some people out the door.
    He’s gone now, and I miss him.

  497. Milkman by Anna Burns-so incredibly well written about the troubles in Ireland and how oppressive social control permeates every interaction among the protagonists.
    My absolute Darling by Gabriel Tallent-a new American novel.
    Gun Love by Jennifer Clement also contemporary Americana.

  499. Thinking Like A Mountain, Towards a Council if All Beings
    –by John Seed, Joanna Macy, Pat Fleming, and Arne Naess

    I’m reading this again for probably the fifth time since I first read it in a cultural anthropology class 30 years ago. It’s an anthology of essays on Deep Ecology that changed my life when I first read it many years ago. It begins with Introduction: “To Hear Within Ourselves the Sound of the Earth Crying”

  500. BLASTED ALLEGORIES
    an anthology of Writings by Contemporary Artists
    edited by Brian Wallis, foreword by Marcia Tucker
    published 1989, purchased 1993
    revealed an inner truth and necessary power of artists for me, that due to the art markets system of wealth, and the political system in general, slowly has faded up till now….what remains are the writings by artists….one of the most important books for me, in my archive

  501. Blue, The History of a Color
    –Michel Pastoureau

    Perfect antidote to the overload of red and green throughout this holiday season

  502. my book is on Amazon check it it out Color or Die
    my name is Erik Anthony Totten its the book with black n white cover tnere is a few similar books with the same title mines most recent and check out my two insragram profiles #selftote & #MrTotten79
    thank-you
    for love and creation we are quantum baby
    E.Totten

  505. So many books, so little time, right?
    I’ve been wanting to read Truman Capote for years so I’m starting with this collection of some of his works–

    Breakfast At Tiffany’s,
    A Short Novel and Three Stories

  508. Some Memories of Drawings
    –Edited by Doris Bry, Curator, Whitney Museum of American Art in colaboration with Georgia O’Keefe

    A collection of Georgia O’Keefe’s drawings in various media with each drawing accompanied by the artist’s comments on how, why, when, and/or where she made each drawing.

    Excerpt:
    “Drawing No. 13. 1915. Charcoal. 24 3/4 x 18 7/8 inches
    This is a drawing of something I never saw except in the drawing. When one begins to wander around in one’s own thoughts and half-thoughts what one sees is often surprising.”

  510. Street Fighting Years; An Autobiography of the Sixties by Tariq Ali
    Well written and engaging story of Ali’s progress growing up as a Marxist in the fledgling country of Pakistan and then becoming a key player in the politics of revolution in Britain during the 1960s and his activism during the Vietnam War. Tells the less publicised side of that struggle.

  511. The Book of Joy: Lasting Happiness in a Changing World (a conversation between the Dalai Lama and the Archbishop Desmond Tutu). Deep, wise, quite humorous at times.

    La femme du Blanc by Muriel Diallo

  512. Im reading
    Anne of Green Gables
    by L.M. Montgomery

    My first time reading this classic. Anne has now become my favorite charachter in literature.
    “I would very much love to be good at something astonishing”
    Anne Shirley

  513. TRUE LOVE IS MY COUNTRY
    by Insa Rose Vermeeren, self imposed exile from democracy

    A story of transition between declining democracy and a new world.

  514. I keep coming back to this one, so perhaps it will be intersting to others. Beauty: A Very Short Introduction by Roger Scruton

  517. Have also been reading the Memoirs of Casanova. Super long, but parts are very interesting. To understand Casanova’s beginning as a young priest turned over sexed libertine is worth the one or two dollars in the kindle shop. Also anything by Mary Carr

  518. Reading “Single, Gay, and Christian.” An interesting take and look into what it means to live in these worlds simultaneously, while maintaining your identity in such a way that makes the majority of each group uncomfortable.

  519. In Indian Mexico
    A Narrative of Travel and Labor
    Frederick Starr
    Published in 1908
    The book relates the travels by Frederick Starr visiting the Mexican natives of The Southern part of Mexico. His work was to study the physical type of south Mexican indians but it also relates his adventures , the customs of the people and the friendship he enjoyed with some of them.

  520. The Ravenous Raven by Midji Stephenson, illustration by Steve Gray. While preparing for Women As Birds show in January and working on first ever graphic novel, I needed something energetic and fun. The story is a romp through gluttony featuring a smart bird with a big appetite.

  521. “James Wright:A Life in Poetry” by Jonathan Blunk This is a striking biography of Wright, his life, his creative trajectory, and his passionate commitment to his craft. Anyone working in a creative discipline will find deep veins of rich material about living, creating, and devotion to “the work” in these pages. I highly recommend!

  523. The Word, The Book and The Spaces They Inhabit

    This is a first of a series of short books by story-teller and intellectual lawyer Mari Shaw on “The Noble Art of Collecting”.

  524. The Rebirth of Painting in the Late Twentieth Century

    by Donald Kuspit

    Kuspit is an art critic who “examines the continued validity and variety of painting in the postmodern era…”

  527. The Red Tent
    –by Anita Diamant

    I missed this book when it came out 20 years ago but after recently reading Diamant’s “Day After Night,” I wanted more. While not literary fiction, it is lush and full in its poetic use of all the senses–the sounds, sights, touch, tastes, and scents inherent in ancient nomadic desert life–which is enriching my work in the studio each day.

  530. I am reading “Leaves of Grass” by Walt Whitman, “The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know is Possible” by Charles Eisenstein,” and re-reading “Teach Like Your Hair’s on Fire” by Rafe Esquith. Also memorizing “The Man Who Forgot Ray Bradbury” by Neil Gaiman (which involves reading and rereading a lot :-D).

  534. My Current list:
    Great book for old masters recipes in all media. I am intrigued by the process behind the paint. Esp the making of the pigments.
    The Materials of the Artist and Their Use in Painting: With Notes on the Techniques of the Old Masters, by Doerner, Max
    I also am reading this book, to see what I can do myself with materials from my own land.
    The Organic Artist: Make Your Own Paint, Paper, Pigments, Prints and More from Nature
    Neddo, Nick
    Art from my yard is my current focus, and so a book about birch bark plaiting has led the way to some experiments with vessels.
    Plaited Basketry with Birch Bark
    Yarish, Vladimir
    In seeking to understand more about Matriarch vs Patriarch culture and the art that comes from both I am reading this book
    The Language of the Goddess: Unearthing the Hidden Symbols of Western Civilization
    Gimbutas, Marija Alseikaite
    Finally and most intriguing is the study of Object oriented Ontology, with thanks to Bjork and Tim Morton
    Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics
    by Timothy Morton

    • For me, I am currently looking at all processes of creating art and any and all avenues to deliver that expression. My main body of concern is the intuitive process in creation, not allowing so much my thinking mind to control, but to let the right brain be free to stumble upon what ever it is that it wants to say. I am always surprised.
      I am at one time reading many different books on many subjects, primarily non fiction, nature, animals, history, plants, herbs, healing. This is one that I think is quite interesting at the moment.

      A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future

      Written by: Daniel H. Pink

  538. I have six books that I have had published. “Cowboy Cartoons by Daryl Talbot”, “Cowboy Cartoons #2”, “Cowboy Cartoons #3”. “Oklahoma Cowboy Cartoons”, “Laughing in Cadence” and “Laughing in Rank and File”. Available at Amazon.

  539. I’m enjoying “The Silent History”, a story about a new way of communicating, and being, by Eli Horowitz, et al.

  540. I am leaving the book I wrote, Public Private Relationships and the New Owners of the Means of Production,
    The foundation research for this book is years of studying the economic development statutes put into place in Maine since the Longley Doctrine was institutionalized in the late seventies. My book tells many stories of Maine communities ruthlessly exploited by this doctrine which is stated in a nutshell as ” Centrally managing the economy is an essential government function which must be done by public private relationships”
    Most of my current reading is a continuation of this research, not exactly books- reading statutes and ordinances, and following through with expanded research into articles, written by others. That takes up a lot of time.

  547. Currently reading “Georgia, a novel of Georgia O’Keefe” by Dawn Tripp and
    “The Dream Colony, A Life in Art”, be Walter Hopps with Deborah Treisman and Anne Doran

  548. Lillian de Jong, Janet Benton
    WWWj.janetbentonauthor.com
    True literature and an unforgettable character, deepening your understanding of the mother-child bond and a punishing society whose roots have still not gone away. Enlightening and superbly written.

  549. Cabinet Magazine has a series, Twenty-Four-Hour Book,in ” which an author or artist is “incarcerated in its gallery space to complete a project from start to finish within twenty-four hours.”In this latest, Jeff Dolvin was given a source-text to use one day before-hand:the 1986 catalogue for Braintree Scientific, a company that provides lab equipment for experiments on rats and mice. What resulted is the indelible “Take Take.”

    I am also reading Sharon Cameron’s brilliant meditation on creators such as Robert Bresson and Dostoevsky whose orientation challenges and stands apart from the false constrictures of categorization, “The Bond of the Furthest Apart”.

    And I’m re-reading Bruno Schulz’s “Sanitorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass.”

    All 3 are amazing books.

    disn

  552. But What if We’re Wrong? By Chuck Klosterman. ” …speculates on the likelihood that many universally accepted, deeply ingrained cultural and scientific beliefs will someday seem absurd. Covering a spectrum of objective and subjective topics, the book attempts to visualize present-day society the way it will be viewed in a distant future.” Fascinating, really puts into perspective what is remembered and left out of History

  553. I am presently reading “YOUTH: Without Barrier” just doing another revision. Is a collection of 12 stories involving young people struggling in life. They all made the difference in their life.

  556. Three Degrees of Latitude: A Curious Guide to the Natural History of the Pehuén (Yes it’s written by my sister Jane Coffey and it’s terrific!
    Losing Helen by Carol Becker, (meditations on her mothers passing, sad, funny and wise.)
    Empress Dowager Cixi by Jung Chang (It’s a page turner, about an amazing time and person in China’s history)
    Men in Dark Times, Hannah Arendt (What can one say, it illuminates in this time)
    Olive Kitteridge, Elizabeth Strout
    The Return by Hisham Matar (elegiac, a loving portrait of his lost father, country and time)
    The Sellout, by Paul Beatty (!!!)
    Delacroix’ Journals (somewhat dull but we can ask does the art world really change)
    The Hills of Hebron by Sylvia Wynter
    (brilliant, wonderful vivid novel ,just read it)

  557. Sven Beckert’s Empire of Cotton: A Global History is one of the most revelatory books I’ve ever read, truly epic.
    “Cotton is so ubiquitous as to be almost invisible, yet understanding its history is key to understanding the origins of modern capitalism. Sven Beckert’s rich, fascinating book tells the story of how, in a remarkably brief period, European entrepreneurs and powerful statesmen recast the world’s most significant manufacturing industry, combining imperial expansion and slave labor with new machines and wage workers to change the world.” Cotton manufacturing was the basis for Western industrialization. Much of the foundation of all our wealth today was the capital generated by unpaid labor of slaves.

  558. I recently read the “Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks”, by Rebecca Skloot, the true and unjust story of a young black woman whose cells were taken without permission or knowledge for medical research. This book is an incredible account of what happened to Henrietta and her family. It is important to remember her legacy and and recognize the history of her immortal cells..

  560. Reading “Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery” by Jeanette Winterson. Must reading for anyone trying to approach and understand art of any type.

    Quote: “If the obvious direct emotional response is to have any meaning, the question ‘Do I like this?’ will have to be the opening question and not the final judgement. An examination of our own feelings will have to give way to an examination of the piece of work. This is fair to the work and it will help to clarify the nature of our own feelings; … It is right to trust our feelings but right to test them too. … But here we come to the first hurdle of art, and it is a high one; it shows us up.”

  561. Right now I am reading Heartsnatcher by Boris Vian, a character in a French New Wave film was reading it during a scene in a coffee shop; and so I thought to myself, I should probably check that out.

  562. Currently reading “The Theatre of the Occult Revival Alternative Spiritual Performance from 1875 to the Present” by Edmund B. Lingan

  566. Currently reading “Rabid: A Cultural History of the World’s Most Diabolical Virus” by Bill Wasik and Monica Murphy. Enjoying it immensely, but then, I do love the intersection of disease and culture.

  567. Just finished RED: The Art and Science of a Colour by Bucklow Spike; COLLECTED STORIES by Gabriel Garcia Marquez; THE HANDLESS MAIDEN by Mary Elizabeth Perry. Looking forward to THE RIDDLE OF THE IMAGE also by Spike. Not a fan of fiction but Marques was important so when I heard of his passing, I ordered all of his works and so will make them my summer reading….dark choice.

  568. Finishing ‘The Mind Parasites’ by Colin Wilson. Interesting read (even though I am not a usual fan of the genre this one seems to ‘grasp beyond usual’ if that makes sense)

  570. The Voices Within,
    the History & Science of How We Talk to Ourselves
    By Charles Fern hough

    I find my inner thoughts to be important. And yes, I talk to myself. This book is insightful as Fern hough is a Psychologist and and author. He understands creative voices.

  571. Essential reading for artists today! Incredibly inspiring. — Artists Against War and Fascism: Papers of the First American Artists’ Congress.

    Also reading New Vocabularies in Film Semiotics

  572. James Baldwin: Notes of a Native Son. A Grace Paley Reader. Short Stories by William Faulkner. The entire Sherlock Holmes canon. Jane Eyre for the 10th time

  575. I am reading:

    The Cool School, writings from america’s hip underground
    edited by (the late) Glenn O’brien

    Being of the Sun, (companion volume to Living on the Earth)
    By Alicia Bay Laurel

    • A year later I read “The Painter Gabriel” by Donald Newlove, “How to profit from the print market” practical advice for visual artists by Barney David, “Paul Gauguin” text by Robert Goldwater
      Currently re-reading “Mandala” by José and Miriam Arguelles.

  576. I am reading Max Frisch, Homo Faber, a fantastic book about rational thinking of powerful humans and destiny

  577. Lilli de Yong, Janet Benton
    Janet Benton’s brilliant debut novel, Lilli de Jong about a late 1800’s Quaker Woman
    Its true, I’m Janet Benton’s mother.

  579. I’m reading The Art Of Rivalry by Sebastian Smee. Great first chapter. Jury is out on the rest. Art and Fear is as book I strongly recommend

  580. “Selling Contemporary Art: How to Navigate the Evolving Market” by Edward Winkleman 2015

    One of my goals as an artist is to secure commercial gallery representation. Now that I’ve had my first solo show at a commercial gallery, I am working to find another, then another. This involves talking to many gallery owners, and I find that having an understanding of the challenges faced by modern gallery owners puts me in a better position to understand THEIR goals and discuss how my work would benefit their program.

  582. Javier Marias- A Heart So White
    While reading this book you can feel a dance somewhere. There are moments when i was sure Marias is dancing with me, with my mind. Mostly, I think he is just dancing while writing. Writing is his dance and he is a hell of a dancer. I am grateful to witness this beautiful dynamic.

  584. “Unspeakable”, by, Chris Hedges (cultural critic and author who was a foreign correspondent for nearly two decades for the New York Times). With noble compassion Hedges slays dragons of lies about the political, economic, and psychological ‘terroir’ contemporary artists the world over are steeped in. The truth is daunting but ironically it brings a little relief as you realize that you are not exclusively to blame for your plight. Want a clearer understanding of what you’re in the middle of? Read this book.

  587. Confabulations. by John Berger. (2016)

    nb: ‘Language is a body, a living creature…..and this creature’s home is the inarticulate as well as the articulate’.

  589. Body of Glass (1991) by Marge Piercy is an amazingly astute vision into the future, where the planet is divided by corporations not continents or countries!
    Yes, sounds familiar doesn’t it?

  590. The Vanishing Velazquez by Laura Cumming and What I Loved by Siri Hustvedt are two recent reads that I found engaging. Also, Hold Still by Sally Mann.

  591. I’m reading “Red: The Art and Science of a Colour” by Spike Bucklow
    I came across this book near the tail end of producing a series of paintings utilizing primarily the color red. It has been wonderful and interesting to delve into a color and learn of its historical,
    scientific and cultural ramifications.

  592. I’m reading The Cross of Redemption which is a compendium of articles, essays and interviews with James Baldwin that for a number of reasons hadn’t already appeared in book form. It was pulled together by Randall Kenon and published a few years ago, 25 years after Baldwin’s death. This powerful voice formed in the crucible of the Civil Rights movement is as poignantly on point today as it was then. It was particularly good for me to read a few interviews from 1980 when I had spent a lot of time with Baldwin in France– it brought his voice and concerns from that year to life again, as surely as if he were sitting across the table, long cigarette dangling from one hand, glass of Johnny Walker and ice waving in the other.

  594. Hugo von Hofmannsthal, der Brief des Lord Chandos, This is an excellent book that should be considered and added in your radio series.

  597. Ask More, by Frank Sesno
    Just Mercy, by Bryan Stevenson (up close and personal insight into racism and the death penalty)

  604. Currently reading Brian Rutenberg’s Clear Seeing Place. Wonderfully written journey of a contemporary painter.

  606. My music is called ‘ Songs And Witty Stories From The Heart Museum!’

    My favorite read is Power VS Force by Dr. DAVID HAWKINS.

  607. “The ZERO Marginal Cost Society” by Jeremy Rifkin.
    This book opens with the premise that the traditional aims and practices of “free market” capitalism and consumerism contain the seeds of its own obsolescence and uses current familiar examples to demonstrate the inexorable movement toward zero marginal costs in energy, transportation, communication, education, and production.
    Rifkin points to the Internet of Things, 3-D printing, MOOCS, robotics, as game-changing agents driving us toward a collaborative, open-source revival of the Medieval “Commons” on a globally networked democratized scale…a practical, but optimistic, and inspiring look at a creative future.

  608. “The Three Body Problem” by Liu Cixin. Get ready for the rearrangement of your brain cells. (!)
    “The Wall of Storms” by Ken Liu. The second of his Dandelion Dynasty novels, this book measures swashbuckling with intrigue.

    Thank you for this book list!!!

  609. “Courage to Create” By Rollo May. Re-Read it while deconstructing the book to collage pages and text on mixed-media paintings for upcoming exhibit – “Navigating the Soul’s Journey”. It definitely gave me the “courage to create” thru the artistic process, personal challenges, hurricane Matthew (I live in St. Augustine, Fl), and daily deluge of despairing news of our troubled world( that I finally limited to very small doses so I could stay spiritually connected in the studo.). FYI. If you have an old copy it may be valuable. I saw one listed for $2000. Mine may have been worth that much. Lol. Now it is a valuable addition under layers of other collage elements, paint, and other media!

  610. The Rise by Sarah Lewis
    “Creativity, the gift of failure and the search for mastery.”

    A great book for creatives who (as we all do) lose our mojo from time to time.

  612. I just consumed: Notes from a Minor Key: a memoir of music, love and healing, by Dawn Bailiff. This accomplished, passionate and generous musician, composer, writer offers a generous account of her remarkable life. A surprisingly quick and lush read!

  613. “At a Journal Workshop” writing to access the Power of the Unconscious and to Evoke Creative Ability” by Ira Progoff, PH.D.

    “Serenity” A Companion for Twelve Step recovery, Complete with New Testament Psalms & Proverbs.

    “The Rainbow Book” (Meaning of Color both physically and metaphysically, an encyclopedia from ancient to modern times)

  614. “Everybody’s fool,” by Richard Russo. Folks living in a upstate NY town. Incredible exploration of their interwoven lives along with a dog and a man with the same name as well as police chief who hears voices. Hella good reading

  615. The adventures of Pánfila: The fly-bee Kindle EditionThe Adventures of Panfila is a story that leads to reflection. The book recounts the experiences of immigrants arriving to distant countries who must adapt to new customs and different cultural backgrounds.

    Language, beliefs, food, clothing, physical features, the color of skin and eyes, are aspects that identify “the others” in their new environment. In some cases, there are circumstances or elements that lead to the transformation and at the same time, they are essential tools for survival.

  616. You have to read this book, full of hope for those who in one way or another have had to leave our countries.The book in Spanish, French and English are available

  619. I’m currently reading “Ways of Seeing” by John Berger and “The Female Malady” by Elaine Showalter.
    The book I’ve read before those was Henry Marsh’s “Do No Harm” – stories of Life, death, and brain surgery.

    I can recommend the correspondence between Susan Taubes and Jacob Taubes, 1952. A book by Wilhelm Fink, which gives a great insight as to how it feels to live in the shadow of a successful person. I also love going back to Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s “Letters & Papers from Prison”, which teaches about the simple things one should be grateful for. One of my other favorite books is Nicole Krauss’ “The History of Love”. It’s just beautifully written and shows the importance of love as a driving force.

    I also once in a while go back to my own book ‘Women and Art” (2013), which didn’t turn out so well for various reasons, but try to see the good in the bad. Failing is part of life and a learning experience and if the reader can take that with him or her, I’m still happy.

  622. The Murmuring of the Artistic Multitude, Global Art, memory and Post Fordism.
    Pascal Gielen. [posted by Nancy Hart]

  624. I’m presently reading two Books-
    ‘The Szasz Quotationary’ editor Leonard Roy Frank.
    The book is a sort of compendium of Szasz’s Stand on ‘mental health & illness’ and
    the reality tunnels created by psychiatrists, priests, politicians.
    He is very much for personal autonomy and libertine philosophy.

    The other book I’m reading is
    ‘The Dawning Moon of the Mind-Unlocking the Pyramid Texts’ by Susan Brind Morrow.
    It’ a Brilliant explortion of metaphor, language, poetry and of course the pyramid texts.

  628. A book that resonates so deeply for me. I keep it by my spot at the table to read a few pages while I eat breakfast or lunch these days…helps to ground me and give solace;
    “Braiding Sweetgrass” by Robin Wall Kimmerer

    Another, because I have aging parents and I want more understanding;
    “Being Mortal” by Atul Gawande

  629. I’m re-reading Kandinsky’s “Concerning the Spiritual in Art.” I read as an art student many years ago, and am discovering it fresh with new eyes after years as a working, commited artist.

    Also reading again “Special Orders” poems by Edward Hirsch which I won in a poetry competition in John Skoyle’s workshop at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Reading this collection once was not enough. Stunning poems.

  630. I read an incredible book recently. “The Art of Rivalry” by, Sebastian Smee. I recommend it to any artist who wants to more clearly understand how deeply artists effect one another. It is an historical analysis and truly brilliant.

  631. Eye of the Sixties: Richard Bellamy and the Transformation of Modern Art by Judith F. Stein
    –an incredibly well-researched book on this important era and figure.

    The Sympathizer by Viet Thinh Nguyen

  632. I’m currently reading:
    Lee Krasner, A biography by Gail Levin
    This Way Madness Lies by Mike Jay
    Charles Demuth Watercolors by Barbara Haskell
    Daniel Garber, Romantic Realist by Lance Humphries
    Women Artists by Margaret Barlow

  635. The Unknown Rilke: Expanded Edition
    –Translated by Franz Wright

    Franz was a brilliant poet and translator, my mentor and dear friend, sorely missed. In Franz’s introduction in which he discusses Rilke’s artistic vision, he says, “I think his behavior and statements on artistic practice can be summed up by the words necessity, love, and self-discipline…”

  636. A very interesting book called Manuitius Covenant, The Life and Death of Planet Earth. by Tim Hildebrandt, Randy Handley and Robert price. A realistic fantasy about a possible future that might be preferable to our own.

  639. Great list!
    I am reading Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, Donna Tartt’s The Gold Finch, and Behringer’s Witches and Witch Hunts.

  641. RA Material: The Law of One

    Learn the true history of truth and history. This is the definitive source on channeling and ancient metaphysical knowledge. There is nothing more paradigm shifting than discovering the RA Material.

    Tao Te Ching

    This ancient eastern philosophy is the secret to life—it is the manual to all living things. Mysterious as it is beautifully poetic, it has become the guiding manual for all artists even before they have even heard of it. So powerful as it is soft, it’s able to explain everything by saying nothing. You can go your entire life without finding the secret, or read/listen to the Tao while you’re young and realize what you’ve been missing all along.

  643. The Nature Fix: Why Nature Makes Us Happier, Healthier, and More Creative
    Author: Florence Wiliams

    A must read, great insight to current publications made in the sciences to get us closer to nature by documenting hard evidence of the positive benefits on the human body.

  645. I also love the introduction by Margaret Lamb to Charlotte Bronte’s early books.
    1) The Professor by Charlotte Bronte.
    2) Shirley by Charlotte Bronte.

  647. 1. Art and Fear: Observations On the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking, Bayles and Orland
    2. The Re-Enchantment of Everyday Life, Thomas Moore
    3. Callings: Finding and Following an Authentic Life, Gregg Levoy

  648. I am reading:
    Bitch Planet Vol. 1, graphic novel, written by Deconnick De Landro

    Of Intercourse and Intracourse: Sexuality, Biomodification and thr Techno-Social Sphere, monochrom’s Arse Elektronika Anthology
    Edited by Johannes Grenzfurthner, Guenther Friesinger, Daniel Fabry

  649. Currently reading:
    1. Completed poems and selected letters of Michelangelo
    Translated by Creighton Gilbert

    Loving yourself
    Sherrie Campbell, PHD

    The Entitlement of the Soul
    Palma Mingozzi

    The Currently reading:
    1. Completed poems and selected letters of Michelangelo
    Translated by Creighton Gilbert

    Loving yourself
    Sherrie Campbell, PHD

    The Entitlement of the Soul
    Palma Mingozzi

    The

  655. I took one year to read The Life of The Mind, Thinking, Willing – Hannah Arendt
    I will take another year to come back to my notes creating a Carnet with notes and drawings.

    Now, I read Le langage de la déesse de Marija Gimbutas
    and
    Lascaux ou la naissance de l’art de Georges Bataille

  656. Rabih Alameddine:
    An Unnecessary Woman (NY: Corsair, 2014)

    A wonderful novel about reading, the (obsessive) art of translation, and the way it may fill and define one’s life.

  658. I am reading “The Dark Valley: a panorama of the 1930s”
    Why? I read a lot of things but, with the advent of Trumpian Policy I thought it would be good to understand how the world fell to Fascism in the 1930. Unreal the similarities to today. Learn from your errors. Don’t repeat the past.

    not a real cheery read, but interesting.

  660. My recent and helpful reads:
    The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls
    The First Bad Man by Miranda July
    And My Side of the Mountian by Jean George

  662. Please, read and share!

    www. awayrunning.com

    “Away Running” by David Wright & Luc Bouchard
    Is a very important, timely story that everyone should read.!

  663. I’m reading–

    Tao Te Ching
    Translated by Stephen Mitchell

    The Rumi Collection
    An Anthology of Translations of
    Mevlana Jalaluddin Rumi

  664. Enjoying: ¨Andrea Fraser – from Institutional Critique to the Institution of Critique ¨ by Zona Crítica (in Spanish)

  665. Since you ask what we are reading…

    “The Blazing World” by Sri Hustvedt,
    a fascinating satire/novel about the NY art scene.
    A middle aged conceptual artist thinks she would have had success if she were a man.
    She tries to prove it by having 3 men present 3 of her works as their own.
    The results are not what she expects.
    But besides the interesting plot, the story is constructed like a collage.
    She challenges the reader to see many viewpoints.
    It took me a while to catch on, but then it was a blast.
    The characters are terrific.
    Not an easy read, but worth it.

    Happy New Year,
    Stephanie Marcus

  669. Books I’m reading:
    “Waking Up” by Sam Harris – fascinating

    “How to fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big (Kind of the story of my life)” by Scott Adams

  670. Books: The Body in Pain by Elaine Scarry
    Strange Tools by Alva Noe
    The Alchemy of Air by Thomas Hager
    And my all-time fave: Sensitive Chaos by Theodore Schlenk

  671. Masquerade and Other Stories, Robert Walser (1878 – 1956), John Hopkins University Press, Baltimore and London, 1990

    Here are two quotes:
    “You can’t want to understand and appreciate an art. Art wants to snuggle up to us. She’s so terribly pure and self-satisfied a creature that she takes offence when someone tries to win her over. She punishes anyone who approaches with the intention of laying hold of her. Artists soon find this out. They see it as their profession to deal with her, the one who won’t let anyone touch her.”

    and

    “Aimlessness leads to the aim, while firm intentions often miss. When we strive too zealously, it may happen that our strivings harm us. I would advise speedy slowness or slow rapidity. Still, advice can’t be more than advice. Be patient, everyone, both with yourselves and with others. Bustling about doesn’t bring any great reward. This much is certain: he who never sets out need never return. Think twice before you get energetic.”

  672. just starting to dip into Cy Twombly, Late Paintings 2003-2011 by Nela Pavlouskova.
    Deep into the catalogue from the recent Agnes Martin retrospective.
    In my backpack is Louise Bourgeois, the Secret of the Cells, revised and expanded for waiting
    and How to be an Explorer of the World, a Portable Art/Life Museum for walks with my husband who has early onset AIDS/HIV Dementia

  673. I am kinda theme reading : TheTales of the Otori-just finished book one: Across the Nightingale Floor (Everyone is an Artist in swordsman, painter, calligraphy on the side of what goes on in their life’s in this story set in Japan. The idea of The Nightingale Floor is a floor that sings when walked upon (creaking wood to sound like birdsong) The story is of the assassin who must walk upon it without making it sing. Stuff of hero films. Also reading some background PDfs on Miyamoto Musashi and Hokusai and Hiroshige: Great Japanese Prints from the James A. Michener Collection As well as watching tons of documentaries and reading some of the primary document source materials given

  674. I Just finished reading or re-reading

    1. Seeing with the Mind’s Eye
    Samuels & Samuels

    I am currently reading or re-reading

    2. Man and his symbols
    -Carl Jung

    3. The Power of Intention
    -Wayne Dyer

    4. Living Buddha, living Christ
    – Thich Nhat Hahn

  675. Reading:
    “refractions” a journey of faith, art, and culture Makoto Fujimure essays
    THE MOVEMENT (culture care) help connect creatives from different fields so they may design generative collaborations. To continue this emphasis on cooperation, rather than competition, within the creative community.

  677. currently reading:

    “SOS” (2014) by Amiri Baraka
    “Thought in the Act” (2014) by Erin Manning and Brian Massumi
    “The New Arab Wars” (2016) by Marc Lynch
    “Vision Anew” (2015) ed. Adam Bell & Charles H. Traub
    “Gilgamesh” (2012) by Stuart Kendall
    “Time Slips Right Before Your Eyes” (rev. 2015) by Erica Hunt
    “What Thoughts” (2015) by John Most
    “Hanan al-cinema” (2015) by Laura U. Marks

  679. Books I am Reading:
    1.”The Shape of Time”, Remarks on the History of Things, by George Kubler
    2.” Idols Behind Altars”, Modern Mexican Art and Its Cultural Roots by Anita Brenner.

  680. Just finished a brilliant page turner novel “The Last Painting of Sara de Vos” by Dominic Smith

    Now reading “Telling Stories”, Philip Guston’s Later Works, by David Kaufmann. So Very Good.

  682. Current reading:

    + Seiobo There Below, László Krasznahorkai
    + Ethics, Baruch Spinoza
    + Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, Peter Brown

  683. I am reading
    The elements of color by Johannes Itten
    Essays and poems by Thoreau
    Titian by Jean Babylon, in French

  684. 1 No Logo Naomi Klein (Author)
    2 Sofie Tolstoy’s diary (Author)
    3 A Man Ariana Fallaci (Author)

  686. I have just finished ‘The Sick Bag’ by Nick Cave and ‘The Perpetual Guest’ by Barry Schwabsky.
    ‘Blind Field’, poems by George Szirtes is next to my bed.
    Michel Faber’s, ‘The Book of Strange New Things’ awaits my attention.

  687. Currently reading:

    HUNGER, by Argentinian journalist MARTIN CAPARROS.

    Antwerp à la carte. On food and the city, is our new MAS exhibition. This book is interestingly related to the exhibition concept, and it is extremely relevant.

  688. Heirs to Forgotten Kingdoms , Journeys into the Disappearing Religions of the Middle East by Gerard Russell foreword by Rory Stewart.

  693. How to live,
    by author Sarah Bakewell
    is a must read on Michel de Montaigne.

    Just reread it and founit d so rich and captivating once again.

  694. Currently reading:
    The Blue Flowers by Raymond Queneau
    And,
    The Foundation of the Unconscious: Schelling, Freud and the Birth of the Modern Psyche by Matt Ffytche

  695. hi Yale University Radio reading list forum

    I try to concentrate on / (not so easy)
    Henri Bergson
    1. Materie und Gedächtnis
    2. Zeit und Freiheit

    but while Brainard has sent me the email on 4th of June / I had a blind date with some juxtapositions
    as blind selection of 5 x 2 books from my shelf of different times, geographies and of content.

    1. Bocaccio: Decameron
    versus
    Gen Doy: Picturing The Self / Changing views of the subject in visual culture

    2. B. Traven: Das Totenschiff
    versus
    Alan Cunningham: Count from Zero to One Hundred

    3. Antonio Lobo Antunes: Die Leidenschaften der Seele
    versus
    Jonathan Safran Foer: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

    4. Thomas Pynchon: Gegen den Tag
    versus
    Michel Foucault: Die Heterotopien

    5. Charles De Coster: Thyl Ulenspiegel
    versus
    Francis Garcia Lorca: Poet In New York

  697. The Cantos-Ezra Pound
    Une Saison en Enfer & Le Bateau Ivre A Season in Hell and The Drunken Boat-Arthur Rimbaud
    Other Arthur Rimbaud poems
    The Wasteland and the Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock-T.S. Eliot
    Ovid

    • I would like to share my book with you “What If”
      https://www.amazon.com/dp/057880753X/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_awdb_imm_t1_Y5yUFbZFHPADP

  698. I am reading two books.

    I Shall Not Hate: A Gaza Doctor’s Journey By Izzeldin Abuelaish.

    The Unfinished Canadian by Andrew Cohen

  699. I am in the midst of »la pelle« (the skin) by malaparte, just started »anna viebrock« published by S AM, and skimming for fun »planetary healer manual« – from 1975

    • I would like to share my book with you “What If”
      https://www.amazon.com/dp/057880753X/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_awdb_imm_t1_Y5yUFbZFHPADP

  701. I’m currently reading:
    The Woman Who Says No: Françoise Gilot on Her Life With and Without Picasso – Rebel, Muse, Artist
    and
    Wonderland: The Zen of Alice

    • I would like to share my book with you “What If”
      https://www.amazon.com/dp/057880753X/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_awdb_imm_t1_Y5yUFbZFHPADP

  702. Pure joy reading the list! Remembering and discovering… Thank you for putting this together.
    Adding one more book:
    Genes, poems by Zhivka Baltadzhieva (in Spanish)

  703. 1.” Frank Auerbach: Speaking and Painting” by Catherine Lampert
    2. “Portraits: John Berger on Artists” by John Berger

    • I would like to share my book called “What If” with you
      https://www.amazon.com/dp/057880753X/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_awdb_imm_t1_Y5yUFbZFHPADP

    • I would like to share my book with you “What If”
      https://www.amazon.com/dp/057880753X/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_awdb_imm_t1_Y5yUFbZFHPADP

  704. a. Interlock: Art, Conspiracy, and the Shadow Worlds of Mark Lombardi. Patricia Goldstone.

    b. “Liberty’s Torch: The Great Adventure to build The Statue of Liberty”
    Elizabeth Mitchell

    (again…) Brave New World.
    Aldous Huxley.

    • I have a book you should read called “What If”
      https://www.amazon.com/dp/057880753X/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_awdb_imm_t1_Y5yUFbZFHPADP

  705. I am reading:
    1. “Soul on Ice” by Eldridge Cleaver and
    2. “Similacra and Simulation” by Jean Baudrillard.

    • I have a book you should read called “What If”
      https://www.amazon.com/dp/057880753X/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_awdb_imm_t1_Y5yUFbZFHPADP

    • “The Role of Nursing Writing Services in Supporting Evidence-Based Practice”
       
      Each piece of writing in the nursing field has its own arrangement of prerequisites and assumptions. For example, a consideration plan nursing writing services should incorporate explicit segments like appraisal, determination, arranging, execution, and assessment, every one of which should be tended to with accuracy and lucidity. Likewise, an examination paper on a medical services subject expects adherence to specific designing styles, like APA or MLA, and should be supported by solid sources. Nursing composing administrations can furnish modified help that lines up with these particular prerequisites, guaranteeing that the eventual outcome fulfills the vital guidelines.

  706. Always a win:

    Workin’ on the Chain Gang: Shaking Off the Dead Hand of History by Walter Mosley

    Konstantin Adamopoulos

    • “The Role of Nursing Writing Services in Supporting Evidence-Based Practice”
       
      One more huge benefit of utilizing nursing composing administrations is the custom-made help they offer. Each piece of writing in the nursing field has its own arrangement of prerequisites and assumptions. For example, a consideration plan nursing writing services should incorporate explicit segments like appraisal, determination, arranging, execution, and assessment, every one of which should be tended to with accuracy and lucidity. Likewise, an examination paper on a medical services subject expects adherence to specific designing styles, like APA or MLA, and should be supported by solid sources. Nursing composing administrations can furnish modified help that lines up with these particular prerequisites, guaranteeing that the eventual outcome fulfills the vital guidelines.

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