What I'm Reading Now

Yowza! ... What am I reading now ??? Hmmm ... I'm all over the map these days. Click the pictures to enlarge them ... Upper left corner is David Mathias's excellent new book on Greene & Greene furniture ... I'm kind of picking my way through it, savoring it a couple pages at a time, admiring his detailed photos and written observations on both the Greenes and the talented makers of their designs, the Hall brothers. Without the brothers' talents, the Greene brothers's furniture would, in my humble opinion, have looked assuredly different.

To the right there, a classic from my design library that I visit over and over and encourage my guys to consider from time to time ... It was written by David Pye, I believe in the 70's and has been a sort of 'guide' for me over the years. It's all about the 'mark of the hand' and how a design without that mark is different from one with it ... Keeps us all from obsessing too much, and helps to eliminate the danger of a 'perfectly executed' (dead) object. It's many other things too ... design + art, seeing beauty, 'seeing' in general ... it's all there ... try it, you'll like it ...

ahh Carl Haiisen ... this one had characters from The Ocean Reef Club, a place on Key Largo where I lived for the winter of 1970...classic light, humorous entertainment ... suspend disbelief, laugh ... Classic Carl ... See here too ...

The New Yorker article on the new surge in uranium mines. A psychological mystery about people who actually want to have uranium mines in their towns even though some of their relatives died early and horrible deaths from the last round of it .. go figure...
And then a serious article in Rolling Stone on glacial melting ... absolutely frightening ... ditto with BP and bankruptcy ... These folks are digging pretty deep and doing some excellent writing about it ... I'm a returning RS subscriber who lapsed when Hunter Thompson died a few years back ... Now I remember .... They are good.

And, 'Islands in the Stream', a Hemingway classic I missed somehow. Some of the finest writing on deep sea fishing, family, friends, war .... the big picture ... For the first time, I got a serious linear connection between Hemingway and another of my favorite storytellers, Cormac McCarthy ... A fine piece of writing that stirred some deep thoughts on the creative process. Phew! Those folks drank a lot though ...
And lastly .. one of my clients sent me this one ... 'Shop Class as Soulcraft' by Matthew Crawford. Crawford is an educated man with several advanced degrees who has gone from working in a 'think tank' (knowledge work), to working with his hands as a motorcycle mechanic and electrician. He compares 'knowledge work' with 'manual work' and makes the point that the manual kind has been somewhat demeaned in today's hierarchy of education goals. He discusses the kind of diagnostic thinking and brain action that come with working and learning with your hands ... He's preaching to the choir here, and it was a bit of a heavy sled, but I stuck with it. He's got a point. I find my work as a designer/craftsman/builder/maker/customer relations person totally and completely engaging. I didn't need to read the book to know that, but it's nice to have it pointed out to me and my employees by an obviously very smart person, that we are indeed on the road to intellectual fulfillment if not that big pile of dollars in the sky. I can't imagine myself behind a desk full time, or in a situation where, at the end of the week, I couldn't point to some concrete evidence of the effort I had put in for that week ... It's Friday; it was a good week; we worked on a ton of different stuff and I feel really good about all of it.

This is one in a series of post I have written on this subject. For others, here's a link ... and here, another ... Get out of the shop from time to time ... read a little