Devotion (Why I Write)
By: Patti Smith
Yale University Press; Reprint edition (September 4, 2018)
120 pages

Devotion (Why I Write) is a poetic memoir that highlights selected glimpses of the writing life. The romantic life portrayed comes across in fiction, travel, and the rhythmic poetry of everyday life. More than I already do – this book made me want to read and write full-time. To spend the days lost with paper and words. I also devoured both of Smith’s previous memoirs Just Kids and M Train. If you care about writing and art, read Patti Smith.

Two of my favorite quotes:

Why is one compelled to write? To set oneself apart, cocooned, rapt in solitude, despite the wants of others. Virginia Woolf had her room. Proust his shuttered windows. Marguerite Duras her muted house. Dylan Thomas his modest shed. All seeking an emptiness to imbue with words. The words that will penetrate virgin territory, crack unclaimed combinations, articulate the infinite. The words that formed Lolita, The Lover, Our Lady of the Flowers.

There are stacks of notebooks that speak of years of aborted efforts, deflated euphoria, a relentless pacing of the boards. We must write, engaging in a myriad of struggles, as if breaking in a willful foal. We must write, but not without consistent effort and a measure of sacrifice: to channel the future, to revisit childhood, and to rein in the follies and horrors of the imagination for a pulsating race of readers.

Buy this book.

Loserthink: How Untrained Brains Are Ruining America
By: Scott Adams
Portfolio (November 7, 2019)
256 pages

Loserthink is a gem of a book. Adams lists example after example of thinking that is not quite right. Some are logical fallacies, some are fuzzy thinking, and some are nothing but ignorance or emotion. Read this book and practice thinking about things more clearly. Every high school student should read Loserthink. (Maybe pair this book with How To Think, By: Alan Jacobs?)

Do not miss these two other books by Adams:

• Win Bigly
• How To Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big.

Two of my favorite quotes:

My nomination for the most loserthinkish advice in history is: “Stay in your lane.” That is the sort of advice that is better served to an enemy, not a friend. If everyone followed that advice, you wouldn’t have civilization. The world as we know it was engineered, designed, and built by people who left their lane and tried something outside their temporary skill stack. They figured it out as they went. I’ll agree that one size doesn’t fit all, and some people probably should stick to what they do best. But I wouldn’t want society to decide that staying in one lane is some sort of obvious wisdom. In my experience, the smartest plan for life is to leave your lane as often as you can (without inviting major risk) to pick up skills that will complement your talent stack. The more skills you have, the more valuable you will be, although you won’t necessarily know in advance where it will take you.

Hallucinations generally involve adding imaginary things to the environment. For example, if you think you see ghosts, UFOs, or Bigfoot, you are imagining then added to the existing scenery. What you rarely or never see is a hallucination that subtracts something from the existing reality. For example, you never hear of people hallucinating that the furniture in their homes is missing when it is actually still there right in front of their eyes. 

Buy this book.