The Books I Read In October 2022

00:00:00.000 | It's Cal Newport here. This is my weekly update video

00:00:04.740 | where I bring you up to speed on my own struggles as a professional writer, professor, and

00:00:10.660 | podcaster to work deeply in an increasingly distracted world.

00:00:27.020 | Now the plan for this week is I want to talk about the books I read in the month of October.

00:00:34.020 | I normally do this on my podcast.

00:00:36.940 | Usually the first podcast episode of each month I talk about what I read the month before.

00:00:41.700 | This time I forgot. So I figured okay, we'll use the weekly update video to get into these books and as a

00:00:47.960 | silver lining because we're filming this instead of just recording audio, I can show you some of the markings

00:00:54.620 | I use in my books. I can give you a

00:00:56.900 | in-person preview or review I should say of my note-taking system in my books. So let's get into it.

00:01:03.100 | I'm dividing the books I read this last month I should say into two piles. One pile is

00:01:10.340 | what I'm thinking of as craft building books.

00:01:13.900 | I selected these specifically as part of just an ongoing effort to be a better nonfiction writer.

00:01:19.900 | This pile is more functional books. They had information I needed

00:01:25.460 | for stuff I'm working on. In this case, they are both relevant to the book on slow productivity that I'm writing.

00:01:31.380 | So let's start with the craft pile over here.

00:01:34.340 | I thought it would be interesting to take a common topic and then get two different

00:01:39.940 | Pulitzer Prize winning books on that topic.

00:01:43.300 | So I'm using the Pulitzer Prize as a proxy for these are really well-written books

00:01:47.260 | and I wanted to have two different books on the same topic as just an exercise of looking at the

00:01:53.660 | different ways available to tackling

00:01:56.260 | nonfiction writing. So I chose nature as my topic and chose these two Pulitzer Prize winners separated by over 40 years.

00:02:03.980 | Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and Elizabeth Colbert's The Sixth Extinction.

00:02:10.820 | So we'll start with Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. This was written in the

00:02:16.380 | 1970s. It is a first-person account of a year that Annie Dillard spent living at a small

00:02:23.860 | cabin. This was in Virginia

00:02:25.860 | near a creek named Tinker Creek.

00:02:28.660 | One thing I did here is I wanted a old copy of this book because this came out in the 70s.

00:02:35.140 | I wanted one of these classic Bantam

00:02:37.380 | 1970s paperbacks. So I bought this from a used bookstore. Still has the old owner's name in it. So this is a

00:02:44.580 | 1975 edition. It's the fifth printing of the Bantam paperback. For whatever reason, I thought I would just

00:02:52.860 | be more of the spirit of the book to have an old version.

00:02:55.500 | Here's what's interesting. I had a hard time getting into this.

00:02:59.220 | It starts off with a lot of a little bit over-the-top

00:03:04.700 | metaphysical fluff.

00:03:07.380 | I'll read you a line from this. "I'm no scientist.

00:03:10.620 | I explore the neighborhood. An infant who has just learned to hold his head up has a frank and forthright way of gazing about him in

00:03:16.100 | bewilderment. He has the faintest clue where he is and he aims to learn. In a couple of years,

00:03:19.980 | what we will have learned instead is how to fake it. He'll have the cocksure air of a squatter who has come to feel his

00:03:24.900 | own place." A lot of thinking like that. There's a whole bunch of early on

00:03:28.540 | metaphysics about the universe and their place in it. Once she gets going though, it gets more readable.

00:03:34.580 | It's a Pulitzer caliber observational writing about the different seasons in this one place.

00:03:40.540 | It basically reminded me of Thoreau's Walden, but if you stripped away all the more pragmatic

00:03:46.460 | philosophy, which I like out of Walden and just left the meditations on the ice at the pond, that's basically this book.

00:03:52.780 | But I learned something from it.

00:03:54.780 | Then I jumped to Elizabeth Colbert's The Sixth Extinction.

00:03:58.300 | All right, this is about

00:04:01.060 | man-made extinctions, the extinction crisis that's being caused by man-made topics. What I'm interested in though is less the topic and

00:04:08.580 | more the form.

00:04:10.900 | So how did she write this in such a way that she won a Pulitzer Prize?

00:04:14.260 | And what I learned was there was a lot of mixing on the ground journalism

00:04:19.780 | with really solid science writing. That seemed to be the secret here.

00:04:24.620 | So she would go to the research center in Chile where they're trying to save a

00:04:30.580 | particular breed of frog that was going extinct and from there

00:04:34.500 | diverge out to a well-written, lucid, New Yorker style science writing about the overall extinction issue with frogs.

00:04:44.020 | She bounces back and forth between time.

00:04:46.260 | So you'll get

00:04:48.700 | the discovery of

00:04:50.100 | dinosaur bones and how man first learned that huge species went extinct and something we didn't know was true and that you'll jump forward in

00:04:56.100 | time to things we're discovering today about climate change.

00:04:58.300 | So I think really the impressive thing about this book is the science reporting.

00:05:03.300 | The on-the-ground journalism, a lot of it felt unnecessary.

00:05:06.980 | She would show up at a place,

00:05:09.300 | talk to a few people and then do really good science writing and I would almost feel bad for her that she had to fly

00:05:14.540 | all the way to Chile just to write two pages about what the tanks look like. But a good book,

00:05:19.180 | I see why it won the Pulitzer. Very different

00:05:21.500 | than what Annie's up to.

00:05:24.340 | I also read John McPhee's

00:05:26.900 | "A Sense of Where You Are".

00:05:29.420 | Now this is based off of the very first nonfiction article he wrote for the New Yorker in the mid-1960s.

00:05:36.380 | It's a profile of the then Princeton University

00:05:39.780 | basketball star Bill Bradley who then went on to be a Rhodes Scholar and then a senator from New Jersey.

00:05:46.820 | McPhee lived near Princeton growing up, used to watch

00:05:51.100 | Bradley play

00:05:53.700 | basketball when he was at his heyday.

00:05:55.660 | So he had a personal connection. His dad had a connection to the Princeton team and so he knew the team and he knew and

00:06:02.100 | watched the Bradley phenomenon a little bit later in his life. So he was writing about what he knew.

00:06:06.620 | This takes that profile and expands it to book length. I just wanted to get a

00:06:11.140 | exposure to this McPhee style

00:06:15.100 | profile writing. I thought that might be useful craft for me to dissect and all I can say is

00:06:21.300 | McPhee knows what he's doing.

00:06:24.580 | It's a quick read, it is a good profile.

00:06:27.660 | It really kicks in that style of profile writing, that New Yorker style that McPhee is famous for where you can just

00:06:33.740 | tell he is drowning in information about this person and it's set piece followed by set piece followed by set piece

00:06:40.180 | connected by

00:06:42.900 | discursions or divergences throughout time and backstory and what he used to be like and what this is like and you come out of it

00:06:48.260 | really understanding the player.

00:06:50.180 | Not surprisingly a good book.

00:06:52.660 | All right, second pile. I have two books that were at least partially meant to be read for writing projects I'm working on.

00:06:59.300 | This was a busy month. I mean, I typically have at least one or two fun books in my month.

00:07:05.260 | I didn't actually finish a fun book in the month of October.

00:07:08.820 | I did read 250 pages of Stephen King's new book Fairy Tale in honor of Halloween, but I lost steam on that.

00:07:14.860 | So I don't have it here in my pile.

00:07:16.860 | So let me talk first about

00:07:19.420 | Never Broken, the memoir of the musician Jewel.

00:07:23.220 | I didn't intend to read this whole book.

00:07:26.700 | I needed some details about Jewel's initial breakthrough in the music, which I had heard her talk about in an interview.

00:07:34.860 | I needed details about that specific occurrence for use in the book I'm writing, but this was so fascinating I ended up reading the whole thing.

00:07:42.220 | You don't know much about Jewel

00:07:46.060 | if you don't know much about Jewel. And what I mean about that is if all you know is her music,

00:07:49.620 | you will be shocked when you read a book like this. She comes out of a homestead in Alaska.

00:07:55.540 | She was performing as a young girl in Inuit villages with her dad. She was yodeling.

00:08:02.340 | It's a crazy backstory about how she ended up leaving Alaska,

00:08:06.500 | ending up as a breaking through as a musician at a time when she was homeless.

00:08:10.020 | So it's a crazy story here.

00:08:12.940 | So I didn't get it. I meant to read just one chapter, read the whole book.

00:08:16.340 | Fascinating.

00:08:19.100 | Final book of the month,

00:08:21.100 | Coppola

00:08:22.500 | by Peter Cowie. It's a

00:08:24.500 | biography of Francis Ford Coppola, the movie director. This is not a particularly new book.

00:08:31.700 | I think this is from, let me look it up here, I think the 90s.

00:08:34.300 | 1994, so it only captures him up through

00:08:37.180 | 1994. It's a workman-like

00:08:41.380 | biography. It's one of the first to really capture. It's movie after movie, how that came together, what we know about it.

00:08:48.140 | Okay, next movie. So it's one of these sort of secondary sources that's useful when you need research on a subject.

00:08:54.420 | I initially was looking into this because I wanted some quotes about the movie brats.

00:08:59.380 | So that first generation of directors that went to film school and took over Hollywood in the 70s.

00:09:05.820 | Coppola was the, if you'll excuse the term, godfather of that group, but included Spielberg, it included Lucas, included Brian De Palma,

00:09:12.900 | included Martin Scorsese,

00:09:15.020 | included John Milius. The main thing I got out of this was

00:09:17.900 | what it was like to be a filmmaker, especially in the 70s. A really interesting time.

00:09:23.820 | So I feel like I picked up some good tips out of that.

00:09:25.820 | All right, what I want to show you briefly before we end today is how I take notes on books

00:09:32.060 | when I'm reading those books as research for a project I'm working on.

00:09:36.180 | So I've talked about this in my podcast before, but I can show it to you in action.

00:09:40.420 | My method is, if there's a page that has something

00:09:45.100 | important on it that I think I might need, I mark the corner.

00:09:49.780 | That indicates that this page has

00:09:52.900 | content on it that's useful. And then I will use

00:09:56.500 | brackets or arrows or bullet points to pull out what are the actual sentences that I think are useful.

00:10:02.540 | So here we can see,

00:10:04.540 | she said, "I was so proud when I moved into my little cabin." Why am I marking that? It's an important beat in her timeline.

00:10:11.860 | Oh, she lives in a cabin now. Okay, if we're doing the timeline of her young adulthood, this would be an important beat.

00:10:17.220 | Down here, she talked about working in town about 15 miles away. And this is an amazing thing.

00:10:22.340 | She said, "I rode my horse two hours by beach to get to her job."

00:10:26.420 | That's a great tidbit, which I actually used in a draft of my book.

00:10:31.140 | Flip to the next page. Okay, that's a marked page. There's two interesting things there.

00:10:34.820 | I have an arrow, an arrow, some underline to point out what's important.

00:10:38.340 | A bunch of pages won't be marked at all. Then I get to another page that's marked. Okay, bracket, checkmark.

00:10:44.420 | This is how I mark up books.

00:10:46.740 | Mark the corners or something on the page. Mark on the page what's important.

00:10:51.460 | If I needed to go back and understand what happened in Jewel's life,

00:10:56.100 | let's say it's a year or two from now and I want to write about her,

00:10:59.140 | all I would do is flip through this book looking for pages that are marked in the corner.

00:11:03.700 | When I get to a page that's marked in the corner, only reading the lines that are marked.

00:11:08.100 | It'll take me about five or ten minutes to do that for this book.

00:11:11.300 | And I will have loaded back in 90% of what's probably useful out of this book for use in an article, for use in a book chapter.

00:11:19.060 | So the key to that system for me is it's low friction. It doesn't slow down your writing. You mark, mark, mark.

00:11:25.060 | You barely have to stop.

00:11:27.540 | There's no pause from your chapter to go and put things on an index card or type them into a Zettelkasten system.

00:11:32.980 | You're marking at the speed of writing and yet you can still very efficiently pull back out of that book

00:11:38.340 | what's important.

00:11:40.980 | So you can tell if you look at my library which books I'm using for research and which books I'm just reading for my own purpose.

00:11:45.940 | Coppola also has marks. I was doing this one with a pen.

00:11:49.140 | But

00:11:51.220 | Annie Dillard does it because I was reading this for craft, not for information.

00:11:55.460 | So that's what I read in October of 2022. That is how I mark up my books.

00:12:00.980 | I'll be back next week with another weekly update.

00:12:04.360 | [Music]

00:12:06.360 | (upbeat music)

00:12:08.940 | (upbeat music)

The Books I Read In October 2022 | Weekly Update #5

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