Wayfaring: Essays Pleasant and Unpleasant
By: Alan Jacobs
Eerdmans (June 28, 2010)
168 pages

Wayfaring is a delightful collection of essays by professor Alan Jacobs. He touches on everything from Harry Potter, to trees, to friendship, the efficacy of Christian community, and writing poetry. I particularly enjoyed his defense of the popular “penny dreadful” genre. Do not miss Jacobs’ other books. The ones I have read so far include How To Think, The Pleasure of Reading In An Age Of Distraction, and The Year Of Our Lord 1943.

Two of my favorite quotes:

Of all the many virtues of the essay as a form, it seems to be that the most wonderful of them is exhibited here. It is what I have elsewhere called a humble mutability of tone, a willingness to acknowledge and accept the vagaries of the mind, with its habit of following its own pathways in serene disregard of what we would have it do. Lamb may have meant to write a comical bagatelle; his mind, it turned out, contained a store of memories that would not confine themselves to the mood in which he began.

I HAVE COME late to the knowledge of trees, and while I would like to think that I have loved them all my life, that’s probably not really true. Had I loved them all along I would know more about them by now. The most enlightening and attractive writers about trees seem to have been lifelong aficionados -one book I recently read begins, “Having been partly arboreal since the age of eight, I . . .” -and the ease with which they describe their old friends shames me a bit. Reading them, I feel much the same envy I feel when watching an experienced skater flow across an iced-over pond.

Buy this book.

Keep Going: 10 Ways to Stay Creative in Good Times and Bad
By: Austin Kleon
Workman Publishing Company (April 2, 2019)
224 pages

Austin Kleon’s newest book Keep Going is just that, 200+ pages of encouragement to continue living the creative life. The main points, I believe, surround the need to view art as a life to be lived, rather than a goal to be achieved, the necessity of a proper perspective, and the benefits of taking a break. If a marketable trilogy is what Kleon had in mind, this book makes for a perfect conclusion to his two previous books, Steal Like An Artist, and Show Your Work.

Two of my favorite quotes:

A day that seems like a waste now might turn out to have a purpose or beauty to it later on. When the video-game artist Peter Chan was young, he loved to draw, but would crumple up his “bad” drawings in fits of frustration. His father convinced him that if he laid the “bad” drawings flat instead of crumpling them up, he could fit more of them in the wastebasket. After his father died, Chan found a folder labeled “Peter” in his father’s possessions. When he looked inside, it was full of his old, discarded drawings. His father had snuck into this room and plucked the drawings he thought were worth saving for the wastebasket.

I don’t want to know how a thirty-year-old became rich and famous; I want to hear how an eighty-year-old spent her life in obscurity, kept making art, and lived a happy life. I want to know how Bill Cunningham jumped on his bicycle every day and rode around New York taking photos in his eighties. I want to know how Joan Rivers was able to tell jokes up until the very end. I want to know how in his nineties, Pablo Casals still got up every morning and practiced his cello. These are the people I look to for inspiration. The people who found the thing that made them feel alive and who kept themselves alive by doing it. The people who planted their seeds, tended to themselves, and grew into something lasting. I want to be one of them. I want to make octogenarian painter David Hockney’s words my personal motto: “I’ll go on until I fall over.”

Buy this book.