My $50 Gift Card List
When I unwrapped my Christmas gift card, my first thought was: sports bra, baby! But what are the chances, really, that I’d end up with the perfect running companion I've been pining for all these years? I’d probably just end up tossing away $50 on yet another ill-fitting boob-pancake maker. Fortunately I came to my senses in time and remembered Amazon’s original claim to fame.
I decided to do the thing right and get fifty bucks’ worth of books capable of unsucking even the most uninspired day. So here’s my Start the New Year off Right Reading List:
1. What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami
Me today: “So there’s a book about my late-blossoming passion, running, by another of my late-blossoming passions, future Nobel-prize winning writer Haruki Murakami*… and I don’t have it?”
Me 5-7 business days from now: “The perfect running companion I've been pining for all these years just arrived in the mail! I’m having a deep, magical Murakami-character-esque epiphany! Maybe my life is actually a novel, and I’m really a character who inexplicably speaks English written by a Japanese author destined to win the Nobel Prize*, and…”
Price: $9.60 (Paperback, new)
*Sorry, Murakami haters, it’s GOING TO HAPPEN. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle clinched it.
Items 2-5 were chosen for me by Maria Popovich, incomparable curator of the creative life. I want to read virtually every book she’s even mentioned on her blog, but these are the ones that I seem to need most desperately in my life this year.
2. The Wisdom of Insecurity by Alan Watts
Looks self in the eye, tells self sternly to be open-minded (but who is doing the talking – and to whom?!) I absorb plenty of feebly-reasoned New Age pap secondhand just by dint of living on the West Coast. It doesn't follow that Eastern philosophy is a bunch of hooey, as I well know from reading actual Eastern philosophers. From the excerpts I've read Watts talks copious amounts of clearly reasoned sense, probing questions of creativity and commercialism, meaningful living and happiness. The Wisdom of Insecurity is my “Don’t fall into the trap of thinking you’re so smart that you have nothing left to learn, you arrogant bastard” pick.
Price: $9.45 (Paperback, new)
3. The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World by Lewis Hyde
I have the good fortune of a job that allows me to let my creativity off the leash every single day – and the grace of time create “my own” work as well. (Not nearly enough time…) But, like most creatives, I want more – want to learn the trick for switching on the fire hose and letting magic, beauty, madness, plot, character and structure come shooting forth in a jet I can ride to the end of a perpetually sustained life of high-level creativity. The fact that established authors agree that there is no such trick and it doesn't work that way is, of course, not a sufficient disincentive to make us hopefuls stop looking. And though I haven’t found the switch to the fire hose yet, I have found that a steady diet of writing-on-writing from people who really know their stuff has allowed me to amp my own creative output from a trickle to … well, to a slightly more voluminous trickle. This book looks like it should be part this author’s balanced breakfast.
Price: $11.81 (New)
4. How to Do Nothing All Alone By Yourself by Robert Paul Smith
This one’s actually for my daughter, who always wants “something to do,” but can’t always figure out what that something might be. (But I read all my kids’ books, so it’s for me, too.)
Price: $11.07 (Paperback, new)
5. Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Matter by E.F. Schumacher
The title sold me on this one. In days of dystopia, it can feel hopelessly naïve to imagine a Utopian future. But why discount best-case scenarios just because post-apocalyptic survival stories are all the rage? Right now it may seem impossible to pry the world from the grip of larger-than-life systems that actively hate and regularly spit on people, but around the globe people continue to work, every day, toward a more humane future. This one will join the eclectic crowd on my “books that remind me not to write off the human potential for reinvention” shelf.
Price: $0.01 (Paperback, used, acceptable condition)
6. The Ecology of Wisdom: Writings by Arne Naess
This is my “stumble-upon” book, the sort of thing I used to pluck from the sales table in bookstores. I've found some of the most bowl-you-over books I've ever read that way (Including Gödel, Escher, Bach and Song for the Blue Ocean.) Which makes me hanker to spend the next $50 in an old-fashioned physical bookstore… it’s been too long!
Price: $3.05 (Hardcover, used, good condition)
7. How to Tell if your Cat is Plotting to Kill You by Matthew Inman (AKA “The Oatmeal”)
Not to brag or anything, but I've been an Inman fan since the dawn of Twitter. I just finished The Terrible and Wonderful Reasons Why I Run Long Distances; why not immerse myself in a collection of ‘toons about the adorable clawed creatures who maintain such a regal indifference to the “why” of long naps?
Paperback: $7.49
Well, that brings my total up to $52.48 – guess I'll be paying 2.48 plus shipping myself. I'm sure it'll be well worth it, though.
I decided to do the thing right and get fifty bucks’ worth of books capable of unsucking even the most uninspired day. So here’s my Start the New Year off Right Reading List:
1. What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami
Me today: “So there’s a book about my late-blossoming passion, running, by another of my late-blossoming passions, future Nobel-prize winning writer Haruki Murakami*… and I don’t have it?”
Me 5-7 business days from now: “The perfect running companion I've been pining for all these years just arrived in the mail! I’m having a deep, magical Murakami-character-esque epiphany! Maybe my life is actually a novel, and I’m really a character who inexplicably speaks English written by a Japanese author destined to win the Nobel Prize*, and…”
Price: $9.60 (Paperback, new)
*Sorry, Murakami haters, it’s GOING TO HAPPEN. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle clinched it.
Items 2-5 were chosen for me by Maria Popovich, incomparable curator of the creative life. I want to read virtually every book she’s even mentioned on her blog, but these are the ones that I seem to need most desperately in my life this year.
2. The Wisdom of Insecurity by Alan Watts
Looks self in the eye, tells self sternly to be open-minded (but who is doing the talking – and to whom?!) I absorb plenty of feebly-reasoned New Age pap secondhand just by dint of living on the West Coast. It doesn't follow that Eastern philosophy is a bunch of hooey, as I well know from reading actual Eastern philosophers. From the excerpts I've read Watts talks copious amounts of clearly reasoned sense, probing questions of creativity and commercialism, meaningful living and happiness. The Wisdom of Insecurity is my “Don’t fall into the trap of thinking you’re so smart that you have nothing left to learn, you arrogant bastard” pick.
Price: $9.45 (Paperback, new)
3. The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World by Lewis Hyde
I have the good fortune of a job that allows me to let my creativity off the leash every single day – and the grace of time create “my own” work as well. (Not nearly enough time…) But, like most creatives, I want more – want to learn the trick for switching on the fire hose and letting magic, beauty, madness, plot, character and structure come shooting forth in a jet I can ride to the end of a perpetually sustained life of high-level creativity. The fact that established authors agree that there is no such trick and it doesn't work that way is, of course, not a sufficient disincentive to make us hopefuls stop looking. And though I haven’t found the switch to the fire hose yet, I have found that a steady diet of writing-on-writing from people who really know their stuff has allowed me to amp my own creative output from a trickle to … well, to a slightly more voluminous trickle. This book looks like it should be part this author’s balanced breakfast.
Price: $11.81 (New)
4. How to Do Nothing All Alone By Yourself by Robert Paul Smith
This one’s actually for my daughter, who always wants “something to do,” but can’t always figure out what that something might be. (But I read all my kids’ books, so it’s for me, too.)
Price: $11.07 (Paperback, new)
5. Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Matter by E.F. Schumacher
The title sold me on this one. In days of dystopia, it can feel hopelessly naïve to imagine a Utopian future. But why discount best-case scenarios just because post-apocalyptic survival stories are all the rage? Right now it may seem impossible to pry the world from the grip of larger-than-life systems that actively hate and regularly spit on people, but around the globe people continue to work, every day, toward a more humane future. This one will join the eclectic crowd on my “books that remind me not to write off the human potential for reinvention” shelf.
Price: $0.01 (Paperback, used, acceptable condition)
6. The Ecology of Wisdom: Writings by Arne Naess
This is my “stumble-upon” book, the sort of thing I used to pluck from the sales table in bookstores. I've found some of the most bowl-you-over books I've ever read that way (Including Gödel, Escher, Bach and Song for the Blue Ocean.) Which makes me hanker to spend the next $50 in an old-fashioned physical bookstore… it’s been too long!
Price: $3.05 (Hardcover, used, good condition)
7. How to Tell if your Cat is Plotting to Kill You by Matthew Inman (AKA “The Oatmeal”)
Not to brag or anything, but I've been an Inman fan since the dawn of Twitter. I just finished The Terrible and Wonderful Reasons Why I Run Long Distances; why not immerse myself in a collection of ‘toons about the adorable clawed creatures who maintain such a regal indifference to the “why” of long naps?
Paperback: $7.49
Well, that brings my total up to $52.48 – guess I'll be paying 2.48 plus shipping myself. I'm sure it'll be well worth it, though.
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