Hey y’all,

Late autumn in Texas can be pretty darned good. It’s cool out and the leaves are finally falling off the trees. The owls are back in the box! The Christmas tree is up. Time for as many bike rides as we can get in.

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

1. Holiday shopping is stressful for me, so I did myself the favor of getting all mine done this week. If you’ve still got shopping to do, I’ll point again to my 2023 studio gift guide for creative weirdos and note that you can’t go wrong with my books! If you’d like them signed and personalized from Bookpeople, Wednesday the 13th is the deadline for online shipping and Friday the 15th is the deadline for in-store pickup. (While supplies last — they’re running low on stock.) Of course, there’s no shipping to worry about when gifting a subscription to this newsletter with the 20% off holiday discount:
   

   Give a gift subscription

   
   

2. My wife loves cooking, so a great help to me this year was New Yorker writer Helen Rosner’s food-themed holiday gift guide. (Don’t look if you haven’t already, Meg! 😂) If you know somebody who loves food and books and books about food and books, I’m really enjoying Dwight Garner’s new memoir, The Upstairs Delicatessen.
   
   

3. Two of my very favorite critics have their year-end lists up already: Stephanie Zacharek’s The 10 Best Movies of 2023 and Amanda Petrusich’s The Best Music of 2023. (I listen to a lot more new music than I watch new movies, so I can co-sign the Anohni and the Johnsons, Oneohtrix Point Never, and Pharoah Sanders records.)
   
   

4. If you have a Texas music lover on your list, check out Texas Wild, a tribute to classic Texas tunes with artwork by Mishka Westell that benefits the Texas Parks & Wildlife Foundation. (A really cool project by my good friends at Butler. Texas Monthly called it one of the best albums of the year.)
   
   

5. While I’m being provincial, let me say that my favorite album out of Texas this year was Being Dead’s When Horses Would Run. (A handful of not-Texan favorite albums that came out this year: Andre 3000’s New Blue Sun, Yo La Tengo’s This Stupid World, and the reissue of Hiroshi Yoshimura’s Surround.)
   
   

6. A list that won’t cost you: What Will Enter the Public Domain in 2024? (Yesterday’s entry on the advent-style calendar was Wanda Gag’s Millions of Cats, a book I’ve read to my kids hundreds, thousands, millions and billions and trillions of times.)
   
   

7. How writer Sharon Olds builds up “a huge archive of thinking and feeling” in her notebooks.
   
   

8. As many of you know, our Friday night ritual in the Kleon house is pizza and a movie. The rest of the year will be old Christmas favorites (although we may try Gremlins this year), so I consulted my three years of logbooks and came up with a list of our favorite movies so far.
   
   

9. ”All the technique in the world doesn't compensate for the inability to notice.” RIP photographer Elliott Erwitt.
   
   

10. “Some guy from a neighborhood that had to have resembled mine once said, ‘The pessimist sees a pile of horseshit and thinks that’s all there is. The optimist thinks that if there is enough horseshit around, there must be a pony someplace.’ And sometimes the plot in which we find ourselves requires us to become our own pony.” RIP TV legend Norman Lear.
    

Thanks for reading. This is a hand-rolled, algorithm-free, completely reader-supported publication. If you’d like to support my work, buy my books, hire me to speak, or become a paid subscriber:

Get 20% off for 1 year

xoxo,

Austin