Each month at Praxis our students read and discuss a book. I facilitate those discussions so I read the books in advance and during the month that the group is reading them.
Last month, the book we read was The Creative Act by Rick Rubin. I think it’s a good book of ideas to inspire creativity.
A nice book to have on the shelf and pull out when you’re feeling stuck on a project or looking for a bit more inspiration for your work.
Most chapters are no more than three pages and are different ideas or tips for sparking and living with creativity.
There is one chapter that I want to write about today, it is called “Look For Clues”
Here are a couple of quotes:
- “Material for our work surrounds us at every turn. It’s woven into conversation, nature, chance encounters, and existing works of art. When looking for a solution to a creative problem, pay close attention to what’s happening around you. Look for clues pointing to new methods or ways to further develop current ideas.”
- “A helpful exercise might be opening a book to a random page and reading te first line your eyes find. See how what’s written there somehow applies to your situation. Any relevance it bears might be by chance, but you might allow for the possibility that chance is not all that’s at play.”
- “When clues present themselves, it can sometimes feel like the delicate mechanism of a clock at work. As if the universe is nudging you with little reminders that it’s on your side and wants to provide everything you need to complete your mission.”
The idea of opening a book to a random page and seeing what’s there and how it’s relevant to you isn’t new, but it is not something I regularly practice. I have my bookshelf full of books, many read, many I’ve yet to read. For those that I haven’t read yet, or put down in the middle, I often have a feeling of incompleteness.
You can imagine their presence speaking to me with things like: “Hey why haven’t you read me yet” “you suck, why are you not making time for reading”
Rick Rubin’s advice and a more helpful perspective would be to allow for each book to speak to you in other ways.
When a book calls your attention, instead of letting that moment pass, pick it up and spend 30 seconds on a random page. See what idea you end up with.
Another idea here is of the anti-library, a term coined by Nassim Taleb:
“The term anti-library was coined by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his book The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable to describe the books that many people own but have not read. Taleb argued that such collections of books make people more humble and curious. He based the concept on the books kept by Umberto Eco —who used the term “anti-library” to describe Jonathan Swift’s description of a library on Gulliver’s Travels—writing that Eco “separates visitors into two categories”: those who praise the size of his library and those who recognize that a library is a tool for research. Describing books that have been read as “far less valuable than unread ones”, Taleb stated that “the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call this collection of unread books an anti-library.” Taleb additionally referred to people interested in anti-libraries as antischolars.” – From the Antilibrary Wikipedia page
It is awesome to buy a book, read it through, and put it on a shelf for reference later. But that is not the only way to get value from a book.
A book you want to read but haven’t will speak to you and remind you to get back to reading.
A book you started and didn’t finish is sometimes because of bad reading habits, but sometimes it is because it’s not the right moment to read it and when you do get around to it it will speak louder and more clearly to where you are in life.
A book you own but haven’t read at all might one day be exactly what you need to reference on a new topic of interest, or it might be the thing you pick up, turn to a random page, and read exactly what you need to see at that exact moment.
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