#Books

Slouching Towards Bethlehem: Essays
By: Joan Didion
FSG Classics
256 pages

Slouching Towards Bethlehem is a collection of essays in book form. This collection put Didion on the map. In an odd way though, the collection feels autobiographical. I sometimes can’t tell if Didion is writing about the particular topic at hand, or about herself. Maybe like this blog? At the end of it all, it’s kind of a journal about me. My favorite chapter was Didion writing about her hometown of Sacramento. The prose of this book was beautiful too. Make sure you watch the Netflix documentary on Didion, The Center Will Not Hold.

Two of my favorite quotes:

My only advantage as a reporter is that I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests. And it always does. That is one last thing to remember: writers are always selling somebody out.

My husband likes my family but is uneasy in their house, because once there I fall into their ways, which are difficult, oblique, deliberately inarticulate, not my husband’s ways.

Buy this book.

Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World
By: Adam Grant
Penguin Books; Reprint edition (February 7, 2017)
336 pages

Grant’s Originals is eye-opening deep dive into the lives of creatives, scientists, and other original thinkers. And let me just give away the secret sauce: The realities are different than perceptions. For many original artists are a lot more like you and I than you might think. Austin Kleon touched on these themes in Steal Like An Artist and Show Your Work. The ability to start, look foolish, be wrong, and keep showing up until you find yourself in the right place at the right time, will get an aspiring original thinker halfway to where they want to be. To get to more good ideas, we need more ideas in general.

Two of my favorite quotes:

I want to debunk the myth that originality requires extreme risk taking and persuade you that originals are actually far more ordinary than we realize. In every domain, from business and politics to science and art, the people who move the world forward with original ideas are rarely paragons of conviction and commitment. As they question traditions and challenge the status quo, they may appear bold and self-assured on the surface. But when you peel back the layers, the truth is that they, too, grapple with fear, ambivalence, and self-doubt. We view them as self-starters, but their efforts are often fueled and sometimes forced by others. And as much as they seem to crave risk, they really prefer to avoid it.

Research on highly creative adults shows that they tended to move to new cities much more frequently than their peers in childhood, which gave them exposure to different cultures and values, and encouraged flexibility and adaptability.

Buy this book.