Books like Color — picked by fans

I first read this book as an angsty artist in college. It was as if the Universe sent me a gift that I needed precisely when I needed it. Rilke–an older/wiser poet, wrote the 10 letters in the book to a young Franz Kappus–a budding/insecure poet. All artists suffer from insecurity, and Kappus wants to know if his poems are good and what he should do.

We all want to do Important and Good work (with capital I’s and G’s). Rilke gently and masterfully steers Kappus to understand that true art is a process and involves every aspect of an artist’s life, that it is often a lonely endeavor but worth it for so many reasons. I felt as if Rilke was speaking to me–as a loving grandfather–with words of encouragement, but also in truth. Nothing was sugar-coated, but I so related and wanted to be the wise creator that… show more.

This is by far the most comprehensive practical guide to being a working artist. I have taught a professional practice course for undergraduate art majors for decades. When I first started teaching this course, I cobbled together chapters from books and articles from everywhere to give the students the information I thought they needed. In 2009, the first edition of this book came out, and it immediately became the textbook for my class.

It really walks you through what happens in the art world and how to navigate finding a gallery or writing for a grant. It also has quotes from people in the field that are helpful. I recommend this book whenever someone wants to know how to get their career started, needs guidance on a contract, or just wants to take their career seriously and to the next level. 

Bell Hooks is a force! I was introduced to her work through women’s studies classes and loved how she saw the world and presented cultural critiques. This book really helped me look outside the lens of male Eurocentric art history. A series of essays, each one covering an artist, topic, or theory.

It’s been a while since I’ve reread any of them, but I remember that this is the book that helped me dive deeper into Carrie Mae Weems's photography–which I admire greatly. It had me contemplating the point of surrounding ourselves with beauty–and how people who have been told to abandon cultural objects of beauty can seek to find objects that truly heal and sustain our lives.

Perhaps the most influential essay to me was the one that outlined how male creatives were given the luxury of time and space to find and develop their practices and that women… show more.

I didn’t love this entire book from cover to cover, but what I did love, I loved deeply. It contemplates what indeed makes an artist an artist, ruminating on a variety of art makers–from Bonnard to Yoko Ono to Bob Ross to Eve Hesse and Sol LeWitt.

LeWitt’s letter to Eve is something that is seared into my brain. There’s profanity in it, so I won’t repeat any of it here, but it struck me to my core; my whole body agreed with his sentiment. Kimmelman is a skilled writer (duh, he was a New York Times art critic), and he manages to tell intimate stories of how things came to be, why we look at things the way we do, why we collect or want things–including lightbulbs.

It validated the idea that artists need to find the thing they are passionate about, trust that, and follow any and everything… show more.

Salt, neither you nor I would be alive without this mundane, everyday product that we scarcely give a second thought to. Salt is essential for human life, explains Mark Kurlansky, and the ingenious ways in which it is harvested and utilised all around the world, from antiquity to now, is the subject of this fascinating book.

I traveled in this book from China to western Sicily, from the North Atlantic, where fishermen preserved their catch of cod in salt, to the Indian sub-continent, where salt marches were eventually to lead to the emancipation of a nation. The Chinese wrote about gathering salt 8000 years ago; methods were perfected by the Phoenicians and the Romans, and salt is still evaporated by the sun and wind alone, hand-harvested through evaporation with hand tools as it has been for millennia.

The story of salt is the story of human civilisation.

This is one of the best books ever written about the Phoenicians. These are the people who founded Carthage and were so influential in the early Mediterranean west. They founded some of the oldest cities in Europe (places like Cadiz) and are essential to Mediterranean history, yet they have been forgotten too. This book brings the context and story of the Phoenicians and the early Mediterranean to life.

A big fat, fact-packed but readable history of the city as it changed from Constantinople into Byzantium and finally Istanbul. This is the book that places Viking immigrants alongside Romans, Goths, Moors, Ottomans, Venetians, and so many other races in a glorious cultural stew that makes the history of most other cities seem linear and dull by comparison. 

I think of myself as an adventurous traveler, but Dervla Murphy travels in a way that I would never even consider.

So, it’s a pleasure to sit in a comfortable chair and read about places I’ll never visit and people who I’d love to meet, but never will. Murphy writes so vividly I feel as though I am right beside her as she fends off wolves, struggles to drag a bicycle uphill through mountain snow, and shares tea with nomads.

This was her first book and every book that follows is equally compelling.

Did the British learn anything from Napoleon’s fatal retreat from Moscow in 1812? Exactly three decades later the greatest debacle in British military history occurred in Afghanistan, the graveyard of conquerors. William Dalrymple serves up a satisfying slice of history, complete with spies, counter-espionage, intrigue, hubris, and folly, and provides context for the emergence of the Taliban. The wise will heed the timeless saying, “The only time Pashtuns stop fighting, is when they go to war.”

This book showed me how important it was for women to write ancient history and how different their interpretations of that history could be. Stacy Schiff’s biography of Cleopatra does full justice to her complicated subject and the fraught historical era she had to negotiate.

I appreciate how richly Schiff evokes Cleopatra’s world, from the palace in Alexandria she lived in as a child to the fleet she commanded in her last, fateful battle. Even more, I love how skeptically Schiff reads the ancient sources on Cleopatra and how thoughtfully she constructs her own more nuanced portrait of the powerful Egyptian queen.