Hey y’all,

Thanks for all the kind words about my studio! Looking forward to showing you inside next week.

Here are 10 things I thought were worth sharing this week:

1. One of my favorite things in art: “deliberate imperfection.”
   
   

2. I’m enjoying Yiyun Li’s The Book of Goose. I read a good deal of it Sunday afternoon, soaking in the bathtub after a long bicycle ride. Novels came back into my reading life this year in a big way — a trend that got started last year with Lauren Groff’s Matrix. I loved Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow and Don Delillo’s White Noise. I really liked Antoine Wilson’s Mouth to Mouth and Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven. Even though it drove me a little nuts, I was glad I read Iris Murdoch’s The Sea, The Sea.
   
   

3. This is the time of year I can’t help myself and I start buying a bunch of books. Recent purchases: an anthology of the black punk zine Shotgun Seamstress (a nice appreciation from Hanif Abdurraqib); P.G. Wodehouse’s Joy in the Morning; a new Joe Brainard monograph, The Art of The Personal; Heather Radke’s Butts: A Backstory; and my big splurge, the epic, gigantic, 27-pound box set of the first 50 issues of Love and Rockets.
   
   

4. If you want to find even more books to buy, I like paging through The Millions’ “A Year in Reading.” Two favorites: Elisa Gabbert and Emma Alpern, who shouts out two wonderful works by people who stutter: JJJJJerome Ellis’s book/LP The Clearing and John Hendrickson’s forthcoming memoir, Life on Delay.
   
   

5. Amanda Petrusich’s 9,000-word profile of Metallica in The New Yorker.
   
   

6. TV: one of my absolute favorite shows, the wild Chicago comedy South Side, is back for a 3rd season. I am shocked that more people don’t talk about this show! It’s so funny.
   
   

7. More TV: The spy show Slow Horses is back for a second season. (I enjoyed Jill Lepore’s profile of Mick Herron, who wrote the novels the series is based on.)
   
   

8. Cocktail: If you’re a White Lotus nut like me (creator Mike White was great on Fresh Air!), I recommend buying a bottle of Averna and fixing a Black Manhattan to drink along with the finale. I make it with this recipe my agent/mixologist Ted gave me: 2 ounces rye, 1 ounce Averna, a few dashes of bitters, and a maraschino cherry, with a tiny bit of the juice thrown in. Delicious.
   
   

9. RIP drummer Hamish Kilgour, who co-founded the wonderful New Zealand band The Clean.
   
   

10. I endorse: starting and ending the day with books, a.k.a. the bookends approach to reading.

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xoxo,

Austin

PS. My books make great stocking stuffers!!