A Bookseller's Diary: Let me pick your brains

When I first read, somewhere, of the emergence of Arts & Letters Daily on the Internet in September, 1998, I looked it up and was instantly captivated. A cross between The Drudge Report for ideas and 19th century British broadsheet newspapers, A&LD was a dazzling assemblage of articles and commentaries from around the globe, wittily introduced, Twitter-style, in intros of a few words. You clicked the link to get the full text.

The brainchild of Denis Dutton (1944-2010), a New Zealand academic, A&LD took off like a rocket and by August of 1999 was attracting a quarter million readers a month. Online magazines Slate and Feed, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and the Yale-based Lingua Franca all sought to buy it; Lingua Franca won.

Came the Internet bust, and in August 2002 Lingua Franca declared bankruptcy. Dutton and managing editor Tran Huu Dung carried on, financing operations, until they ran out of money. The website closed October 7, 2002. I was devastated, so much so that it was months before I stumbled across news that The Chronicle had bought AL&D out of bankruptcy and returned it to the Web October 25, 2002. My daily window on the world was back, and we have visited every day since.

Recently I have felt that thrill anew, with the discovery of Maria Popova's visually stunning, intellectually incandescent site, Brain Pickings. When I saw this entry today, I had to pass on my recommendation: this is a site worthy of support! It takes a rare mind to pull together the favorite book lists of Marquez, Tolstoy, Sontag, Alan Turing, Brian Eno, David Bowie, Stewart Brand, Carl Sagan, and Neil deGrasse Tyson; here is a sample of what she presents:

Gabriel García Márquez’s Formative Reading List: 24 Books That Shaped One of Humanity’s Greatest Writers

By: Maria Popova

“Life is not what one lived, but what one remembers and how one remembers it in order to recount it.”

The most reliable portal into another’s psyche is the mental library of that person’s favorite books — those foundational idea-bricks of which we build the home for our interior lives, the integral support beams of our personhood and values. And who doesn’t long for such a portal into humanity’s most robust yet spacious minds? Joining history’s notable reading lists — including those of Leo Tolstoy,Susan Sontag, Alan Turing, Brian Eno, David Bowie, Stewart Brand, Carl Sagan, and Neil deGrasse Tyson — is Gabriel García Márquez.

Woven into Living to Tell the Tale (public library) — the autobiography that gave us the emboldening story of Márquez’s unlikely beginnings as a writer — is the reading that shaped his mind and creative destiny. “Life is not what one lived, but what one remembers and how one remembers it in order to recount it,” Márquez writes, and kindred-spirited readers instantly know that memorable books are the existential markers of life’s lived and remembered chapters.

Here are the books that most influenced Márquez — beginning with his teenage years at boarding school, of which he recalls: “The best thing at the liceo were the books read aloud before we went to sleep.” — along with some of the endearing anecdotes he tells about them.

1. The Magic Mountain (public library) by Thomas Mann

The thundering success of Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain … required the intervention of the rector to keep us from spending the whole night awake, waiting for Hans Castorp and Clavdia Chauchat to kiss. Or the rare tension of all of us sitting up on our beds in order not to miss a word of the disordered philosophical duels between Naptha and his friend Settembrini. The reading that night lasted for more than an hour and was celebrated in the dormitory with a round of applause.

2. The Man in the Iron Mask (free ebook | public library) by Alexandre Dumas
3. Ulysses (free ebook | public library) by James Joyce

One day Jorge Álvaro Espinosa, a law student who had taught me to navigate the Bible and made me learn by heart the complete names of Job’s companions, placed an awesome tome on the table in front of me and declared with his bishop’s authority:

“This is the other Bible.”

It was, of course, James Joyce’s Ulysses, which I read in bits and pieces and fits and starts until I lost all patience. It was premature brashness. Years later, as a docile adult, I set myself the task of reading it again in a serious way, and it not only was the discovery of a genuine world that I never suspected inside me, but it also provided invaluable technical help to me in freeing language and in handling time and structures in my books...

What is Brain Pickings? I cannot do better than Ms. Popova's own introduction:

Hey there. My name is Maria Popova and I’m a reader, writer, interestingness hunter-gatherer, and curious mind at large. I’ve previously written for WiredUK, The Atlantic, The New York Times, and Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab, among others, and am an MIT Futures of Entertainment Fellow.

Maria Popova. Photograph by Elizabeth Lippman for The New York Times

Brain Pickings is my one-woman labor of love — a subjective lens on what matters in the world and why. Mostly, it’s a record of my own becoming as a person — intellectually, creatively, spiritually — and an inquiry into how to live and what it means to lead a good life.

Founded in 2006 as a weekly email that went out to seven friends and eventually brought online, the site was included in the Library of Congress permanent web archive in 2012.

Here’s a little bit about my seven most important learnings from the journey so far.

The core ethos behind Brain Pickings is that creativity is a combinatorial force: it’s our ability to tap into our mental pool of resources — knowledge, insight, information, inspiration, and all the fragments populating our minds — that we’ve accumulated over the years just by being present and alive and awake to the world, and to combine them in extraordinary new ways. In order for us to truly create and contribute to the world, we have to be able to connect countless dots, to cross-pollinate ideas from a wealth of disciplines, to combine and recombine these pieces and build new ideas.

I think of it as LEGOs — if the bricks we have are of only one shape, size, and color, we can build things, but there’s a limit to how imaginative and interesting they will be. The richer and more diverse that pool of resources, that mental library of building blocks, the more visionary and compelling our combinatorial ideas can be.

Brain Pickings — which remains ad-free and supported by readers — is a cross-disciplinary LEGO treasure chest, full of pieces spanning art, science, psychology, design, philosophy, history, politics, anthropology, and more; pieces that enrich our mental pool of resources and empower combinatorial ideas that are stronger, smarter, richer, deeper and more impactful. Above all, it’s about how these different disciplines illuminate one another to glean some insight, directly or indirectly, into that grand question of how to live, and how to live well.

Please enjoy.

Truly, enjoy!