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I really liked listening to the audiobook version of this read by the author. I think it's just really striking hearing his words in his own voice and giving the kind of emphasis he intended for each of the points in these short chapters. Not sure it would come across with quite as much impact reading what he wrote as words on a page. The author is best known for his place in the world of music as a producer and record company executive, but the book is really intended for an audience of creative people of all kinds. The idea goes far beyond the idea of just making music or generating new ideas or collaborating with others to produce art. The author's many years of developing the work of artists has made him think hard about what the point of art is in the first place, and the answer is not just getting paid for creating new things. He really seems genuine when he talks about what drives someone who has an artistic bent, it's not just something that he's learned to make up while dealing with musicians. He doesn't really make a big deal of his association with the famous in the studio or deciding edits on half-finished work or figuring out when it was time to stop tinkering with a song. So it isn't packed with memoir type anecdotes with big name musicians here. Everybody's heard about the artists with huge egos, those who drove themselves to madness, even suicide, those who committed terrible things believing them as measures necessary to continue to create art. Rather than sensationalism, it comes closer to asceticism to unlock the springs of creativity. Some people say that he's trying for a popular work of spirituality or philosophy as its guru, but he explicitly states that not everything he proposes will work for everyone. He's worked with so many different kinds of artist he knows it's futile to come up with a single prescription that'll work in every case. He lists the biggest kinds of obstacles and pitfalls that people encounter and he calls those out for people who want to avoid them in the first place. I didn't mind that a lot of the remedies are things found in other self-help, productivity, or wellness works. They don't have to be original tips to work. He gives really interesting clues on how an artist can focus on stripping things down to the essence, the way a producer cuts out unnecessary part of a mix, to get to the core of their message.

I keep a snapshot of the chapter titles in this book as a reference to dip back into this audiobook in the future when putting together my own work. I think anyone who has an artistic vision, whether in performance, or writing, or visual art can gain something by from this book and adapting some of his principles to their art. The spiritual overtones are not essential if that's not their vibe, but if they find even one bit of advice that is useful, latch onto it, leaving the rest, the book has accomplished its goal. Other books of this type like to hammer on just one simple formula and promise results automatically, without any work by the reader. This author instead says that the artist is key in choosing the appropriate starting point, with an open mind, to do great things, and I appreciate it.

I came to this collection by seeing some of the poems online and feeling drawn in by these odd fierce pieces by someone I hadn't heard of before. I wrote a couple of my own in response as I tried to figure out the secrets behind what she was doing, picking the lock, not imitating the style. Sometimes this exercise gives me something interesting in the end, even if I don't figure everything out. When I saw the book on sale when I was on vacation I bought it to try to learn more about this person I didn't know very well.

Some of the poems are arranged in little groupings, some in a section of their own, and many of them have titles used to describe poetic forms of the past two centuries in English. The poem "Villanelle" isn't itself a villanelle, and "Ballad from the Soundhole of an Unstrung Guitar" isn't in ballad meter. The images veer widely from musings on the literature to raw personal accounts. The language avoids complex structures as she does things like talking about the weird rhymes and rhythms Gerard Manley Hopkins words without trying to imitate them in her own lines, but they often still reveal complexities of thought. She is not bothered if some of her diction might be viewed as crude, shocking. The clearest things to me is seeing how she's wrapped up with the subject of literature, and how her writing sounds like it has a clear intention, even if I don't always understand what it might be, even if she says she used to fake her ideas of poetry back in school. I think it might be easier to appreciate these poems with a guide, but it's not necessary, just keeping an open mind.

I'm going to give it a top rating, even though I don't think that makes much sense. There is plenty of substance in this little book, like the best books of poetry, and the poems make me feel that even if I can't capture their ideas or technique, by reading them I might be able to come up with my own.

This book had its origin in a TED talk where the author presented her insights on mind patterns writers get into. The identification of patterns that aspiring authors commonly hear or get into on their own is useful and clear. Some of the examples she gives to illustrate the points are jokey and silly but the idea is to make them stick in mind better. this book came out over ten years ago and I had already heard a lot of the points it made before back when I was more actively writing fiction, but there were others that hit me in a new way. A lot of the issues brought up aren't currently at the front of my mind right now so they were welcome. There is an emphasis throughout on what works emotionally in a story rather than what gets included as part of rote practice, which I appreciated. I think that this one thing is the main way the book has something to offer among all the other books on writing practice. The asides on brain science are sort of interesting but I think not really essential takeaways. The book isn't aimed at the writer who has a good deal of experience and already has ways to avoid the common pitfalls or at people producing other kinds of work such as non-fiction or experimental literary fiction. It also does not give the reader lists of ways to apply the principles described directly in their current project. But for what it tries to do I thiink it does a good job.

This book came out not long after Conversations with Friends but it seemed to have a quite different structure, concentrating on the two main characters, Marianne and Connell. At the beginning they are in their secondary school days and first come together, they leave their small town to go to Dublin to attend the same college where they drift apart a few times, achieve their successes, get into trouble, and by the end come to a new understanding of their situation. Like the earlier book and the book Beautiful World, Where Are You? a few years later, this book wove in ideas about economics and politics to make one think about how these affected the ways the characters behave. But I think it was more psychological considerations such as childhood trauma, depression, and a will to self-harm that played even greater roles in shaping them. The other characters appearing, the families of the two and their various circles of friends and lovers, all receive lesser degrees of characterization, much of it through dialogue. In some ways the book felt like a less ambitious bit of storytelling than the other two with fewer important things to be keeping track of. The author is still interested in how one gets to know a person, whether it's someone else or one's own self, and digs in to the frustration caused by getting the wrong idea of a person's nature, which is easy to believe here with young people just entering adulthood. There is an imbalance of wealth between Marianne and the working-class Connell similar to what Beautiful World, Where Are You? depicted between Alice and Felix, but those were older characters already out in the world making the issue seem even more substantial. The author is also big on depicting awkwardness her characters feel in general, and I think money and its lack is just one of various ways to achieve that effect in this book.

By the end, one of the main characters is about to launch on a literary career. The talent and work it took to get this far was touched on over the course of the story in a rather understated way, I thought, so I was a little surprised when this is what it led to. I was expecting there were going to be more setbacks and more effort to get to this, and wondered whether it was a conscious choice the author made to keep that from becoming a big focus separate from the relationship plotline. This made me think of the book as being closer to romance than a story about how these two start to approach success in life. The second character has been having unresolved ideas of what to pursue in life which aren't resolved by the end. All of this makes me think that I should rate it one step below what I gave to Conversations with Friends, but not because of the quality of the prose. I know that other readers have expressed some disappointment with this book in comparison to the other, but this isn't my feeling. I consumed this as an ebook, not in audiobook form as in the case of the other two novels, and I wouldn't be surprised if that affected the way that it hit me.

This little book takes the form of very short sections a page or two long describing either the frame story of a meeting between Kublai Khan and explorer Marco Polo who describes his travels through Central asia, or the fanciful cities he claims to have found there. These are titled with enigmatic tags such as "Cities and memory," "Cities and signs," "Thin cities," "Continuous cities" and the like. Each place is dominated by a single dream-like feature governing its citizens. Some come off as fantasy, others so dark as to constitute horror, while still others concern themselves with some odd philosophical point. There is no plot, not even in the frame story sections, no single theme, and the two named characters are given only the slightest of personal qualities. I would say that this is less a novel or series of short stories than a literary construction with fabulistic features. I feel as though the author's intent is to dazzle the reader with the extreme variety of minimalist settings that might have something to say when taken all together about the breadth of human imagination. I never felt that I wanted any of the little sections to be expanded into a proper story itself. Instead, this book presents itself as a travel guide to a nonexistent region that streams by the reader with the speed of someone clicking on a remote. The only way these cities resemble our own is the way they contain people of types we recognize, preying on one another, suffering, wrapped in delusions, working and desiring and trying to make sense of their baffling circumstances they are to weak and confused to escape.