Born Standing Up: A Comic’s Life
By: Steve Martin
Scribner; Reprint edition (November 20, 2007)
228 pages

Born Standing Up is Steve Martin’s memoir. And although he touches on a bit of everything along the way, the main focus is, of course, Martin’s years as a stand-up comedian. He shares some good stories and reminisces about all the years and all the fun that went by in a blink. Of course, at my age, I know Steve Martin primarily from his life in the movies, addressed briefly at the end of the book. Where did he begin his journey you ask? Working at Disneyland as a teenager.

Two of my favorite quotes:

When I graduated from high school, he offered to buy me a tuxedo. I refused because I had learned from him to reject all aid and assistance; he detested extravagance and pleaded with us not to give him gifts. I felt, through a convoluted logic, that in my refusal, I was being a good son. I wish now that I had let him buy me a tuxedo, that I had let him be a dad. Having cut myself off from him, and by association the rest of the family, I was incurring psychological debts that would come due years later in the guise of romantic misconnections and a wrong-headed quest for solitude. I have heard it said that a complicated childhood can lead to a life in the arts. I tell you this story of my father and me to let you know I am qualified to be a comedian.

I DID STAND-UP COMEDY for eighteen years. Ten of those years were spent learning, four years were spent refining, and four were spent in wild success. My most persistent memory of stand-up is of my mouth being in the present and my mind being in the future: the mouth speaking the line, the body delivering the gesture, while the mind looks back, observing, analyzing, judging, worrying, and then deciding when and what to say next.

Buy this book.

When Breath Becomes Air
By: Paul Kalanithi
Random House; 1 edition (January 12, 2016)
231 pages

When Breath Becomes Air is a devastatingly beautiful book. It’s a hard and emotional read though. I mean, by the time it had come out, the author had already lost his battle with cancer. Kalanithi tells the short story of his life and fight with cancer in a way that makes you wish he had devoted all of his previous years to this art of writing. But I feel like we are voyeurs in this. He didn’t write this book for us. He wrote it for his little girl.

Two of my favorite quotes:

I began to realize that coming in such close contact with my own mortality had changed both nothing and everything. Before my cancer was diagnosed, I knew that someday I would die, but I didn’t know when. After the diagnosis, I knew that someday I would die, but I didn’t know when. But now I knew it acutely. The problem wasn’t really a scientific one. The fact of death is unsettling. Yet there is no other way to live.

Words have a longevity I do not. I had thought I could leave her a series of letters—but what would they say? I don’t know what this girl will be like when she is fifteen; I don’t even know if she’ll take to the nickname we’ve given her. There is perhaps only one thing to say to this infant, who is all future, overlapping briefly with me, whose life, barring the improbable, is all but past. That message is simple: When you come to one of the many moments in life where you must give an account of yourself, provide a ledger of what you have been, and done, and meant to the world, do not, I pray, discount that you filled a dying man’s days with a sated joy, a joy unknown to me in all my prior years, a joy that does not hunger for more and more but rests, satisfied. In this time, right now, that is an enormous thing.

Buy this book.