It's Cal Newport here. This is my weekly update video where I bring you up to speed on my own struggles as a professional writer, professor, and podcaster to work deeply in an increasingly distracted world. Now the plan for this week is I want to talk about the books I read in the month of October.

I normally do this on my podcast. Usually the first podcast episode of each month I talk about what I read the month before. This time I forgot. So I figured okay, we'll use the weekly update video to get into these books and as a silver lining because we're filming this instead of just recording audio, I can show you some of the markings I use in my books.

I can give you a in-person preview or review I should say of my note-taking system in my books. So let's get into it. I'm dividing the books I read this last month I should say into two piles. One pile is what I'm thinking of as craft building books. I selected these specifically as part of just an ongoing effort to be a better nonfiction writer.

This pile is more functional books. They had information I needed for stuff I'm working on. In this case, they are both relevant to the book on slow productivity that I'm writing. So let's start with the craft pile over here. I thought it would be interesting to take a common topic and then get two different Pulitzer Prize winning books on that topic.

So I'm using the Pulitzer Prize as a proxy for these are really well-written books and I wanted to have two different books on the same topic as just an exercise of looking at the different ways available to tackling nonfiction writing. So I chose nature as my topic and chose these two Pulitzer Prize winners separated by over 40 years.

Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and Elizabeth Colbert's The Sixth Extinction. So we'll start with Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. This was written in the 1970s. It is a first-person account of a year that Annie Dillard spent living at a small cabin. This was in Virginia near a creek named Tinker Creek.

One thing I did here is I wanted a old copy of this book because this came out in the 70s. I wanted one of these classic Bantam 1970s paperbacks. So I bought this from a used bookstore. Still has the old owner's name in it. So this is a 1975 edition.

It's the fifth printing of the Bantam paperback. For whatever reason, I thought I would just be more of the spirit of the book to have an old version. Here's what's interesting. I had a hard time getting into this. It starts off with a lot of a little bit over-the-top metaphysical fluff.

I'll read you a line from this. "I'm no scientist. 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 bewilderment. He has the faintest clue where he is and he aims to learn. In a couple of years, 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 own place." A lot of thinking like that. There's a whole bunch of early on metaphysics about the universe and their place in it. Once she gets going though, it gets more readable. It's a Pulitzer caliber observational writing about the different seasons in this one place.

It basically reminded me of Thoreau's Walden, but if you stripped away all the more pragmatic philosophy, which I like out of Walden and just left the meditations on the ice at the pond, that's basically this book. But I learned something from it. Then I jumped to Elizabeth Colbert's The Sixth Extinction.

All right, this is about 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 more the form. So how did she write this in such a way that she won a Pulitzer Prize? And what I learned was there was a lot of mixing on the ground journalism with really solid science writing.

That seemed to be the secret here. So she would go to the research center in Chile where they're trying to save a particular breed of frog that was going extinct and from there diverge out to a well-written, lucid, New Yorker style science writing about the overall extinction issue with frogs.

She bounces back and forth between time. So you'll get the discovery of 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 time to things we're discovering today about climate change. So I think really the impressive thing about this book is the science reporting.

The on-the-ground journalism, a lot of it felt unnecessary. She would show up at a place, 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 all the way to Chile just to write two pages about what the tanks look like.

But a good book, I see why it won the Pulitzer. Very different than what Annie's up to. I also read John McPhee's "A Sense of Where You Are". Now this is based off of the very first nonfiction article he wrote for the New Yorker in the mid-1960s. It's a profile of the then Princeton University basketball star Bill Bradley who then went on to be a Rhodes Scholar and then a senator from New Jersey.

McPhee lived near Princeton growing up, used to watch Bradley play basketball when he was at his heyday. 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 watched the Bradley phenomenon a little bit later in his life.

So he was writing about what he knew. This takes that profile and expands it to book length. I just wanted to get a exposure to this McPhee style profile writing. I thought that might be useful craft for me to dissect and all I can say is McPhee knows what he's doing.

It's a quick read, it is a good profile. It really kicks in that style of profile writing, that New Yorker style that McPhee is famous for where you can just tell he is drowning in information about this person and it's set piece followed by set piece followed by set piece connected by 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 really understanding the player.

Not surprisingly a good book. All right, second pile. I have two books that were at least partially meant to be read for writing projects I'm working on. This was a busy month. I mean, I typically have at least one or two fun books in my month. I didn't actually finish a fun book in the month of October.

I did read 250 pages of Stephen King's new book Fairy Tale in honor of Halloween, but I lost steam on that. So I don't have it here in my pile. So let me talk first about Never Broken, the memoir of the musician Jewel. I didn't intend to read this whole book.

I needed some details about Jewel's initial breakthrough in the music, which I had heard her talk about in an interview. 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. You don't know much about Jewel if you don't know much about Jewel.

And what I mean about that is if all you know is her music, you will be shocked when you read a book like this. She comes out of a homestead in Alaska. She was performing as a young girl in Inuit villages with her dad. She was yodeling. It's a crazy backstory about how she ended up leaving Alaska, ending up as a breaking through as a musician at a time when she was homeless.

So it's a crazy story here. So I didn't get it. I meant to read just one chapter, read the whole book. Fascinating. Final book of the month, Coppola by Peter Cowie. It's a biography of Francis Ford Coppola, the movie director. This is not a particularly new book. I think this is from, let me look it up here, I think the 90s.

1994, so it only captures him up through 1994. It's a workman-like biography. It's one of the first to really capture. It's movie after movie, how that came together, what we know about it. Okay, next movie. So it's one of these sort of secondary sources that's useful when you need research on a subject.

I initially was looking into this because I wanted some quotes about the movie brats. So that first generation of directors that went to film school and took over Hollywood in the 70s. Coppola was the, if you'll excuse the term, godfather of that group, but included Spielberg, it included Lucas, included Brian De Palma, included Martin Scorsese, included John Milius.

The main thing I got out of this was what it was like to be a filmmaker, especially in the 70s. A really interesting time. So I feel like I picked up some good tips out of that. All right, what I want to show you briefly before we end today is how I take notes on books when I'm reading those books as research for a project I'm working on.

So I've talked about this in my podcast before, but I can show it to you in action. My method is, if there's a page that has something important on it that I think I might need, I mark the corner. That indicates that this page has content on it that's useful.

And then I will use brackets or arrows or bullet points to pull out what are the actual sentences that I think are useful. So here we can see, 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.

Oh, she lives in a cabin now. Okay, if we're doing the timeline of her young adulthood, this would be an important beat. Down here, she talked about working in town about 15 miles away. And this is an amazing thing. She said, "I rode my horse two hours by beach to get to her job." That's a great tidbit, which I actually used in a draft of my book.

Flip to the next page. Okay, that's a marked page. There's two interesting things there. I have an arrow, an arrow, some underline to point out what's important. A bunch of pages won't be marked at all. Then I get to another page that's marked. Okay, bracket, checkmark. This is how I mark up books.

Mark the corners or something on the page. Mark on the page what's important. If I needed to go back and understand what happened in Jewel's life, let's say it's a year or two from now and I want to write about her, all I would do is flip through this book looking for pages that are marked in the corner.

When I get to a page that's marked in the corner, only reading the lines that are marked. It'll take me about five or ten minutes to do that for this book. 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.

So the key to that system for me is it's low friction. It doesn't slow down your writing. You mark, mark, mark. You barely have to stop. There's no pause from your chapter to go and put things on an index card or type them into a Zettelkasten system. You're marking at the speed of writing and yet you can still very efficiently pull back out of that book what's important.

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. Coppola also has marks. I was doing this one with a pen. But Annie Dillard does it because I was reading this for craft, not for information.

So that's what I read in October of 2022. That is how I mark up my books. I'll be back next week with another weekly update. (upbeat music) (upbeat music)