Well-Read Life™

A writing mother’s read on children’s reading

If you were one of the estimated 200,000 readers who enjoyed this fall’s National Book Festival in Washington, D.C., you were treated to presentations by two members of the same writerly, readerly family: David McCullough and his daughter Dorie McCullough Lawson.

Turns out that Dorie already has a couple of books under her belt, the newest being a children’s story called Tex. But there’s more to this storyteller than just the story. Dorie has become an advocate for getting kids to read in ways that matter.

Since Levenger has just introduced this year’s batch of recommended gifts for young readers, we thought it was a good time to also introduce you to Dorie. Here’s her conversation with our editor of Levenger Press,  Mim Harrison: 

Levenger Press: How did you come to be such a thoughtful champion of children’s reading? 

Dorie McCullough Lawson: I was lucky to be raised by parents who love books. My mother has always said, “If you can read, you can do anything.” When you grow up hearing that, you know books are powerful things. As a child I was read to, I read on my own, we talked about books. The characters and scenes from books were simply a part of my life and consciousness from the beginning. And I’m sure it had an effect knowing that books were being written right there at home, by my father.

Something else that was important: from about third grade on, my friends and I talked about books. I still remember which books we read. Once my friend Shannon and I were both crazy about a book called The Blind Connemara, and the school library had only one copy. It was quite a war over that book!

LP: Many advocates of children’s reading believe that as long as kids read something—anything—it’s a good thing. Do you agree?

DML: I disagree. There are so many wonderful books out there that in a lifetime we couldn’t read them all. There just isn’t time or brain-space to waste on anything that isn’t terrific. It’s true at any stage of life, but especially in early childhood, because what we read and put into our brains during that precious time tends to stay there forever and in turn influences who we are.

LP: What role do sports play in children’s willingness to read?

DML: As a culture we do spend an inordinate amount of time and money on sports. Families are consumed by children’s soccer or hockey and the task of transporting the players here and there. And the players are becoming younger and younger. I wish a greater proportion of that time and effort and interest were spent on reading and books and the life of the mind.

It’s really pretty simple: Children are very good at knowing what’s important to the adults in their lives. If we adults are interested in sports, talk about sports, buy the right equipment, the likelihood that the child will be interested in sports is very high. If we are interested in books, and read to our children, and talk with our children about books, if we spend time in bookstores and libraries, then the same will be true for books and reading.

The question also raises the issue of scheduling. If our children are too overscheduled with athletics and lessons of all kinds, reading and time for the imagination suffer. Kids need more time to just roll around on the floor and have a few hours of boredom to give their heads time and space to go to work.

LP: There are plenty of opportunities for children today to escape into a fantasy world. Do you think that’s beneficial?

DML: I think there is certainly a place for fantasy, and it is valuable to children to have fantasy in their lives, but I do think that we tend to blur the distinction between fantasy and imagination. It’s imagination that we need to propel us forward. It takes imagination to put oneself in another person’s shoes, to build a tunnel or develop a new surgical technique, to come up with a new evolutionary theory. It definitely takes imagination to get an obstinate child to do something he or she doesn’t want to do. We need imagination every day.

With children, we should remember and appreciate the value of simple things. We need to help them use the power of their minds to envision themselves doing things they can’t already do, or going places they’ve never been. I’m not crazy about over-filling their heads with talking trains and sponges and avatars and powerful robots.

LP: Do you read aloud to your kids?

DML:  Yes. We have four children spanning nine years, and my husband and I read picture books whenever we can to the littler ones, but we also read aloud every night to the whole family. It’s only for about twenty minutes, but everyone sits down together in the living room to hear the story. We read longer chapter books aimed mostly for the older children, but the little ones are there and they absorb some of it. They often color or draw while we’re reading, but no matter what, they know it’s a time of day when we’re all together and it’s important to us.

It’s most definitely not always a beautiful, cozy happy scene of family bliss! Often someone is disruptive or fussy, or someone is complaining about the book, or someone has just learned how to make himself burp and can’t seem to stop, or my husband or I wish we could make a phone call instead, but we stick to it. If it goes badly one night, there’s always the next day to try again.

For us it’s like dinner—sometimes the food is delicious and the conversation is wonderful, and sometimes it’s none of those things. But just because dinner doesn’t go well one or two nights, you don’t give up on it. And we don’t give up on reading together.

LP: In an age of e-books, is there still value in putting tree-books in little hands?

DML: There’s huge value in real books! Children learn to get enjoyment from something that isn’t plugged in. A child’s attention span is strengthened by spending time with something that doesn’t have any flashing colors or changing pictures or whiz-bang technology. The only excitement with a real book, and it’s real excitement, happens inside the brain.

I also think there is a connection when you give a child the actual book that you enjoyed or a grandparent enjoyed. The real book reaches across time.

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Now to you, dear reader. When it comes to kids and reading, is there too much time for sports and not enough for books? I’d love to hear your comments. Just click on the Comments link below. (If you’re reading this as an email, click here and you’ll connect to Comments).

—Steve

Charles Dickens’s ‘Brilliant Improvisation’: Behind the pages of A Christmas Carol

“My own, and only manuscript,” scrawled Charles Dickens on the final page of his handwritten draft. He was referring to his little story of 1843 that became the colossal hit, A Christmas Carol.

Now little Levenger Press brings readers the one and only full-color facsimile of these manuscript pages. We did so in partnership with The Morgan Library & Museum, which owns the manuscript. (If you’re in New York between now and February 12, 2012, go see the Morgan’s superb Dickens exhibit.)

What makes this facsimile extraordinary is the Morgan’s painstaking restoration of each page. As our friend Declan Kiely, Morgan curator and Dickens scholar, says, the result is as close as science can get to the pages looking exactly as they did when Dickens rushed them to his printer shortly before Christmas, 1843.

How do great thinkers and writers think? That’s what we try to reveal for readers in the facsimile editions we publish. The way Dickens wrote—not only stylistically but physically—reveals much about the maestro behind the masterpiece.

Come eavesdrop on our conversation with Declan and Levenger Press editor Mim Harrison, as Declan takes you deeper into the mind of Dickens.

—Steve

Levenger Press: Why will lovers of A Christmas Carol want to read this version of it—a kind of “Christmas Carol in the raw”? What do we gain by watching how the writer wrote?

Declan Kiely: A Christmas Carol is such an iconic story—it has been referred to as a “culture-text” for the world at large—and has been adapted so many times, that it is easy to lose sight of its origin. What readers gain by reading this story in manuscript is the excitement of seeing the first product of Dickens’s imagination, his first thoughts and second thoughts, the false starts and revisions, and the sheer toil of the literary mind at work. The manuscript is literally crammed with small and large-scale revisions that are vividly evocative of Dickens’s working methods. To see them is to witness at first-hand, and to be enthralled by, his fierce creative energy.

LP: Dickens wrote this story in just six weeks. How was he able to just dash off a classic?

DK: There was a popular misconception during Dickens’s lifetime, which continued for a surprisingly long time afterward, that he wrote easily and carelessly, that he was a writer with a facility rather than genius. It is quickly apparent, when looking at the manuscript, that this was not the case, and that Dickens wrote, as he told one correspondent, “with great care and pains (being passionately fond of my art, and thinking it worth any trouble).” I think that the original manuscript, inasmuch as it allows us to see how the writer wrote, deepens rather than dispels the essential mysteriousness of the creative process.

LP: Did Dickens’s other stories help him in writing this one?

DK: It is worthwhile to remember that for Dickens, A Christmas Carol was an experimental work of fiction. By 1843 he had, of course, been writing for several years, beginning with his Sketches by Boz, going on to write his first novel, The Pickwick Papers, followed quickly by Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickleby, all published serially over many months. What he had never written before was a story that would be published in a single volume and that aimed to capitalize on the Christmas holiday market. The whole enterprise was, to a certain extent, like so much of Dickens’s early work, a brilliant improvisation and also consciously and necessarily opportunist in nature.

LP: What do Dickens’s strike-outs and changes reveal most compellingly to you?

DK: When Dickens sat down to write A Christmas Carol in October 1843 he was writing with his back against the wall, conscious of the clock ticking down to December 25, and knew that he couldn’t allow himself the same freedoms that a much more capacious, novel-length narrative permitted. So the manuscript reveals Dickens’s rigorous discipline and his sharpest wit. The story represents Dickens’s literary genius in its most concentrated form. His changes are indicative of an author consciously reining himself in, cutting off digressions—as he does on the very first page, when he decided against an extended meditation on the character of Hamlet in the interests of moving his story along at a brisker pace. A tight narrative was essential to his purpose, and so his revisions seek to achieve concision, and increase vividness and immediacy. A Christmas Carol is a lean book, there is no superfluity, and that’s why it can and has been so well adapted—initially for the stage and, in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the big screen.

LP: How does this manuscript compare with other manuscripts of Dickens?

DK: There is more revision evident on each page of A Christmas Carol. As Dickens matured as an artist, he became more deliberate, writing in a slower and more deeply considered way. By the time he wrote his last completed novel, Our Mutual Friend (the manuscript of which is also at the Morgan), his writing had shrunk in size, and many more revisions appear on every page. Indeed, the pages are so clotted that one early commentator wrote that “the fineness and closeness of writing are enough to render the most amiable of experienced printers temporarily insane.”

LP: So in other words, the better he got as a writer, the more he revised?

DK: Absolutely. Dickens said of his early writing that he did not know the source of his ideas and inspiration, that they came “ready made to the point of the pen.” He seems to have made no outline or plan for A Christmas Carol—at least, none survives. He certainly made no plan for his first novel, The Pickwick Papers, which, like all of his subsequent novels, he composed serially as well as published serially. The same can be said for Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickleby, so it was not until he came to write The Old Curiosity Shop that he began to write plans—or “mems,” as he called them—to guide his own progress from the story’s beginning until its end, which was published eighteen months later. Perhaps the reason he revised his earlier work less than his later work is because, as he told a friend, “the plot, the motive of the book, is always perfected in my brain for a long time before I take up my pen. I add a great deal to the original idea as I work on, but, as I always know the end from the beginning, I can safely commit my work in parts to the press.” It’s likely that this is true of A Christmas Carol: Dickens knew precisely the plot, characters, and themes of the story before he put pen to paper. The manuscript is fascinating because, following his revisions, we can see the ways in which Dickens improved upon his original conception as he shaped his narrative.

LP: Why was Dickens so keen on using good paper for something that would be transmuted to print?

DK: Dickens had very high standards in just about every aspect of his life. He was extremely orderly and fastidious. He could not write unless everything on his desk, and in his work space, was “just so.” That included his paper and ink. He kept a collection of carefully prepared goose quills that he shaped with his pen knife (which is where the term originated), so that he would not be distracted if he needed to change quills when writing. The manuscripts of his early novels survive in fragmentary form only, but as his writing developed it is clear that he took a closer interest in the preservation of his working papers. Anyone who wants their work to last chooses the best available writing materials, the finest tools for the job. Dickens was discerning in his selection of paper, using “superfine” cream-colored paper for A Christmas Carol, and black iron gall ink. Later in his career he switched to blue paper and blue ink, which dried more quickly.

LP: Do you think Dickens somehow knew there would be value in his “own and only manuscript”?

DK: As far as I know there is no other manuscript that Dickens pointedly annotated “my own and only manuscript.” This quite clearly suggests his own fondness for the story and his estimation of its value. He gave it to one of his oldest friends, Thomas Mitton, both as a token of close friendship and in gratitude for his financial and legal assistance. Today, A Christmas Carol is one of the most highly valued literary manuscripts, in both the materialistic and artistic senses, in the Morgan’s collection.

LP: What do we lose, in terms of understanding a writer’s creative process, now that we have keyboards instead of quills?

DK: The arrival of word processors has led to the disappearance of any evidence of creative process. Word processors were invented, after all, to facilitate the creation of seamless, sophisticated, professional-looking, “finished” documents that can be infinitely replicated. Even with typewritten texts it is possible to compare typed drafts, to follow the evolution of a work through the author’s literal cut-and-paste insertions, or revisions made by hand onto the completed typescript. But an electronic document, even when changes can be tracked, does not convey the same vivid sense of something hand-made, or allow the development of the work to be as easily traced.

Handwritten manuscripts have an indisputable uniqueness and a special aura because they are the closest we can now come to their creator, and represent the creative spirit. We have gained in efficiency and convenience but we have lost the personality of a handwritten text in which it is possible, in some cases, to gauge the speed of writing, the difficulties (or otherwise) involved in achieving a certain effect or particularly successful sentence or paragraph, or the emotional temperature of the author at the time of writing.

Computer-generated documents are impersonal, and completely mute in terms of what they can tell us of the struggles of composition. A handwritten manuscript tells the story of its composition in the same way that the age lines of the human face can reveal the story of a person’s life.

LP: What was the most surprising development in the Morgan’s restoration of the manuscript?

DK: When carrying out conservation treatment, as with any carefully controlled activity, the last thing one wants is surprises! So the treatment progressed very much as our very experienced conservators expected. I think it is true to say that the appearance of the treated manuscript exceeded all of our expectations—it looks much fresher and, overall, much better than any manuscript that has not been so extensively restored. The removal of the silk backing from each sheet, which was probably attached in the 1920s as a preservation measure, returned the manuscript to its original state; it is an exciting development, restoring its physical authenticity. The conservation treatment reaffirmed that the “silking” of the manuscript was an unnecessary act of preservation in this case – but that’s because Dickens chose such good quality paper for his writing.

LP: What’s the most striking difference between how the restored manuscript looks and how it had looked before it was cleaned?

DK: The manuscript of A Christmas Carol had acquired the patina of age but had become dull and a bit muddy-looking. The acidity of the iron gall ink was partly responsible for this, and one of the primary reasons for washing any manuscript written in iron gall ink is to de-acidify it and prevent any further deterioration. The result is that the paper color and brightness return to something much closer to its original color – cream, in this case— and the text becomes crisper and clearer. The paper’s texture is also restored, making it less brittle and more flexible, just as it was when Dickens took a sheet and began writing. What we see today, in Levenger’s facsimile edition of the manuscript, is as close as scientifically possible to the physical appearance of the manuscript when Dickens sent it to the printer at the start of December 1843.

And now to you, dear reader: Does seeing the author at work enhance your appreciation of that author’s work? I’d love to hear your comments. Just click on the Comments link below. (If you’re reading this as an email, click here and you'll connect to Comments).

How Lincoln got the Gettysburg Address to go viral

I learned something reading our new Levenger Press book on Lincoln and his five versions of the Gettysburg Address.

There was a reason Lincoln kept the speech so short (about 272 words), and it had nothing to do with a lack of something to say. He calculated—correctly—that his brevity would help carry his message the length and breadth of the Union.

As Doug Wilson, the co-director of the Lincoln Studies Center, describes it in the narrative he wrote for our book:

“In an age where newspapers were virtually the only access Americans had to news of important events, the great majority of Northern adults would have seen, usually on the front page, not just a notice of the President’s speech at the Gettysburg ceremony, but, because of its brevity, the speech itself in its entirety.”

Today we would call that smart viral marketing on Lincoln’s part. Just imagine what he might have done with Twitter.

It wasn’t just the length of the speech that mattered to Lincoln, of course. It was the words and their cadence. Levenger Press editor Mim Harrison asked Doug, himself a man of words (read his Lincoln’s Sword: The Presidency and the Power of Words), to talk more about how Lincoln crafted this most revered of American speeches.

Levenger Press: Even the first draft of the Gettysburg Address that Lincoln wrote—the Nicolay copy—is very neatly penned. There are few strike-throughs or cross-outs or incomplete sentences. How was Lincoln able to deliver such clean drafts of this speech?

Doug Wilson: My own view is that the first page of the Nicolay copy represents the earliest stage of the Gettysburg Address of which we have a documentary record, and as such is probably the distillation of an unknown amount of previous drafting. The evidence for the way Lincoln composed a consequential letter or address is only partly from the existence of earlier drafts, but largely consists of testimony about the way he took notes on his topic, preserving ideas, phrases, arguments, etc. on pieces of paper that served as the basis of his first drafts.

LP: Where are these original draft notes?

DW: Most of these scraps of paper, along with most earlier drafts of important speeches, have disappeared. The few examples that have survived, as well as his early drafts of letters that he retained as file copies, show that he typically made changes that added to, deleted from, or corrected what he had first set down.

LP: How do you think Lincoln wrote the Nicolay draft?

DW: A reasonable guess is that the first page of the Nicolay copy represents the state of the first half of the speech at the time he left Washington for Gettysburg. The second page was not written at the same time, does not actually fit the material on the first page,  was written on different paper with a different writing instrument, and, to my way of thinking, is actually the second page of a different draft. In other words, he created "clean drafts" like the first page of the Nicolay to see what, if any, changes were still needed.

LP: Did Lincoln ever read his speech drafts to his wife for her critiquing?

DW: I'm sure he must have read drafts of speeches to his wife, if only because he liked to try his speeches out in the presence of a listener. We have many examples of his doing this, but I don't recall a well-documented example involving Mary Todd Lincoln.

LP: How do you think Lincoln inflected his “of the people, by the people, for the people” when he delivered the Gettysburg Address? Do you think he stressed “if,” “by” and “for”? Or did he repeatedly stress “people”?

DW: I know that there is some evidence that he emphasized the word "people," which persuaded Carl Sandburg and others to do likewise. I have always had reservations about this, if only because of the awkwardness of the resulting cadence, and prefer to see the emphasis placed on “of,” “by,” and “for.”

LP: Why do you think that myths about Lincoln’s writing of the Gettysburg Address persist? For instance, the myth that he wrote it hastily, on the back of an envelope, on his way from Washington to Gettysburg.

DW: I am tempted to speculate that any text that becomes so famous and familiar as to become the focus of a widespread common interest is probably ripe for myth-making. In the case of the Gettysburg Address, the myth of the envelope gained enormous popularity in the famous fictional story by Mary Andrews at the beginning of the 20th century. The strong impression made on readers by her treatment of this detail overrode the circumstance that it was not a verifiable fact.

LP: Perhaps because of its cadence, the Gettysburg Address comes close to sounding like a sacred text. How much was Lincoln influenced by his readings of the Bible?

DW: We have an abundance of evidence that Lincoln knew the Bible very well, that he could cite chapter and verse to an impressive extent, and that he read the Bible habitually while President, so I don't have any doubt that the Biblical sound of the Gettysburg Address, language and cadence, was influenced by his intimate familiarity with the original. I think there are other writings that carry the imprint of his reading of the Bible, the Second Inaugural being the most conspicuous case, but he was wise enough not to overdo it.

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Now to you, dear reader: What has your own experience been in reading the Gettysburg Address? Did you ever memorize it? Has it moved you in some way? I’d love to hear your comments. Just click on the Comments link below. (If you’re reading this as an email, click here and you’ll connect to Comments).

All the President’s Maps (and Why Objects Still Matter)

For all that George Washington has come to symbolize for the nation, he remains an elusive Founding Father. He couldn’t write like Jefferson, argue like Adams, or charm like Franklin. Most of us know more of him than about him.

But there is a way that Washington reveals himself. It’s through the objects of his profession—specifically, the maps he used in his work as commander-in-chief.

That’s what historian Barnet Schecter shows us in his stunning new book. It’s titled George Washington’s America, but the subtitle tells the real story: “A biography through his maps.”

From his days as a teenaged surveyor, Washington was a man of the land. He used his intimate knowledge of America’s geography as a way of first defending and then expanding a country that was just beginning, quite literally, to take shape. Washington used not only the maps of the day; he also drew his own.

Three centuries later, these maps give us an opportunity to put our hands on a part of our national history, and to trace with our fingers the paths that Washington took.

But what would we have done had GW used a GPS?

The products of productivity

Working virtually is a wonderful thing, and I do a lot of it, too. But as much as I’m drawn to cloud computing, I want physical objects to ground me.

I work better on my iPad when I prop it against a bookrest.

I can’t seem to read nonfiction without a pen in my hand.

I conceptualize better when I map out new ideas on paper.

Our good friend Mike Keller is a director of the Stanford University Libraries and is involved in some heavy-duty digitization projects. The other day I watched him switch seamlessly between his smartphone and his pocket note pad and pen as he checked appointments, searched sites and jotted reminders.

To a certain extent we are products of the products we use, and are only as productive as the physical objects we bring to the table. I’m on a quest to find out how our readers are influenced, improved or inspired by the objects they work with.

What is the physical object that you would not want to do without, because it makes you better? How does it help you?

I’d love to have you be part of this conversation. Just click on the Comments link below with your submission. (If you’re reading this as an email, click here and you'll connect to Comments).

The best protection when riding your bike may be—surprise!—a book

“Get a bicycle,” advised Mark Twain. “You will not regret it, if you live."

When people hear I ride my bike on A1A, our narrow coastal road here in Florida, they share with me, with more regularity than I like, their stories of family members or friends who were badly injured—or worse. I used to get annoyed, having heard enough of these stories, but now I try to listen attentively, nod and silently pledge to keep my guard up.

And I keep riding. The pleasure of the fresh air and exercise, the beautiful ocean, the squawking of parrots passing overhead (when not drowned out by the cars whooshing by) are all irresistible to me. I’ve ridden more than 10,000 miles in the last five years along this scenic road and through luck and vigilance, have managed to avoid getting smacked.

But then I raised the stakes: I got Lori and my adult sons into riding the same road. Now, it’s a family affair.

Because I espouse a well-read life—a life of action fueled by reading—I felt it was my duty to seek out books that could help all of us stay alive on our bikes. With the help of our reference librarians at the Delray Beach Public Library, I found a singular book that is so good I want to share it with everyone who rides—or who would like to. It’s called The Art of Cycling: A guide to bicycling in 21st century America by Robert Hurst, published in 2007. (It was originally published in 2004 as The Art of Urban Cycling: Lessons from the street.)

What a how-to book can be

While there are thousands of books on bicycling, this is the best book I’ve come across for offering lots of hard-earned, practical advice for staying alive. Happily, Hurst is a skilled writer with a passion for history, so he weaves a tale that gives historical and even philosophical perspective in a manner I found totally engaging.

A former bike messenger, Hurst interviewed many expert cyclists and accomplished what a great how-to book should: he distilled years of experience into a readable, understandable book that can help those with less experience gain tremendously—without having to make all the mistakes themselves.

Readers learn what to be most wary of in city traffic, where to position yourself (not always to the right), how to do hand signals (not what you learned in driver’s ed), the surprising benefits of glancing back, the danger lurking behind gaps in traffic. These and many other practical tips might save you from painful first-hand experience, but what’s even more valuable in my estimation is the transcendent philosophy the author conveys so effectively.

Forget about blaming bad drivers

Once a friend of mine who doesn’t ride but drives frequently on A1A vented to me about cyclists. “Sure, I’ll share the road,” he said, “but why do they think they can ride two abreast and block traffic? They need to obey the traffic laws. Then I’ll share the road.” I pointed out to my friend that it is actually legal to ride two abreast when passing and other times when you’re not blocking traffic. This only served to set him off about the large, aggressive groups (pelotons, French for pack) that sometimes block an entire lane, and run red lights. I realized I wasn’t going to change his mind. And my friend is a very smart and thoughtful fellow.

Wherever the road finds you

In truth, there are scofflaw cyclists with inconsiderate attitudes, and they can give cyclists a bad reputation, just as there are bad motorists who reinforce every cyclist’s fears. The real issue isn’t the outliers, but the quite human tendencies of people using different modes of transportation. Perspective depends on where you stand—or sit.

When I lived in Manhattan, I went almost a year without driving a car. (Like most young New Yorkers, I couldn’t afford to keep one in the city.) For this year, barely a day went by when I didn’t get angry at some rude driver who cut me off in a crosswalk, or threatened to. Then in the summer, I rented a car to drive up to New England but first had to drive out of the city. I couldn’t believe how inconsiderate the pedestrians were! Didn’t they realize how frustrating it is to drive in New York? Motorists can’t even turn right on red!

This laughable change in perspective, it seems to me, is what it’s all about between bike riders and drivers. When you drive, bike riders are inherently annoying. They are too slow and bothersome when already there is too much car traffic to contend with. And when you ride, car drivers are inherently dangerous, too close, too fast, and too many.

Post all the signs you want about sharing the road, but the reality is that roads were designed for cars. Moreover, roads almost universally were designed for fewer cars than now race and jockey for space on them.

To expect motorists and cyclists to share the road is like expecting a case of beer and a cupcake to share the cooler.

Hurst totally understands perspective and the reality of biking on roads designed for cars. His years of experience and deep thought on the matter have resulted in a heightened state of awareness, and he offers a well-reasoned sermon that all congregants in the church of biking are well advised to hear.

Staying in the lane called vigilance

Forget about blame, says Hurst. “Blame is what happens when it’s already too late,” he writes. “The successful urban cyclist counts on nothing but chaos and stupidity.”

He offers some tough love from the street of hard knocks:

“The vigilant cyclist expects serious ineptitude from strangers in traffic, and therefore is not surprised or angry when it has to be endured.”

“The vigilant cyclist is not a trusting cyclist, but makes up for this lack of trust with a load of patience.”

A perspective of vigilance can, Hurst says, be oddly relaxing rather than tiresome, since it requires light but constant attention and thus ideally takes you away from other thoughts and cares. The more you ride the better you can become at vigilance, but riding will never be a time to totally relax, never a place to daydream.

Learn counter-intuitive physical lessons by reading

I take special delight in how-to books that can help us do physical things better, especially to learn the counter-intuitive aspects that seem to be part of doing many sports well.

Do you know that in order to turn left on your bike you have to first push the handlebars gently to the right? That’s another thing I learned in this gem of a book. (If you don’t believe it, try it next time you ride.)

Our family happened to be in Hawaii last year driving toward Kona when we passed Lance Armstrong. After all of us doing double takes, we got safely ahead and pulled over to watch his motorcade race by and take some photos.

Lance was trailing (drafting) a guy on a motor scooter, occasionally pulling out to maintain the high speed on his own in a technique I later learned is called motor pacing. He was followed by his support van. The van also served to protect him from passing cars. This wheeled trio of vehicles traveled in what looked like a giant bike lane, a full car width wide, on that beautiful Hawaiian highway.

It’s too bad more of us can’t ride under such safe conditions. If we wish to ride, we must deal with the reality of a hard universe designed for a different species.

The good news? What we put inside our heads can sometimes keep us safer than what we strap on the outside.

If you have found another book that can help us cyclists stay alive, I’d love to hear. Just click on the Comments link below with your submission. (If you’re reading this as an email, click here and you'll connect to Comments).

Seven Ways Electronic Books Could Make Us Better Readers

In this transitional era, when the world is moving from paper to electronic books, I hear many people say, “But I love my paper books...” So do I, and my business depends on selling products to people who love books and paper. But iPads, Nooks and smartphones have demonstrated that books are bigger than any medium through which we receive them. What’s more is that our new book technology can make it easier for us to lead well-read lives.

That’s why we’re so excited here at Levenger to be launching our first eBook, More Words That Make a Difference. Customers loved it as a print book, and we think you’ll love it just as much—or perhaps even more—as an eBook. Now in one press of a finger, the index whisks you to any of its 1,306 words.

As with audiobooks, electronic books are demonstrating their own strengths and weaknesses when compared with time-honored paper books. The surprising thing to me is just how strong their strengths are. Some are fairly obvious, like the ability to search and to expand type size. Others are subtle, but when taken together, will allow readers to get more books in their lives and more life from their books—which, as it turns out, is the subtitle of the book on reading I wrote five years ago, called The Little Guide to Your Well-Read Life (not yet an eBook, but soon to be).

Happily, however, I believe paper books may have an even larger role going forward. And this isn’t about which of our book-children we love the most—it’s that I believe that with the help of digital technology, we are poised to take our love affair with books to the next level.

After eight months of reading on my iPad, I can report that most of the methods I recommend in The Little Guide for enhancing your reading life are made easier—sometimes dramatically easier—by eReaders.  Herewith are seven reasons why e-reading will help us become better readers of books.

Reason #1: Giving Up on Books. In my research on reading, I discovered that one major obstacle keeping people from reading more books was the nagging feeling many have that they must finish the books they start. This clean-your-plate mentality, a holdover from our school days, fetters adults in their pursuit of lifelong learning. In my talks on reading I turn this attitude on its head and say, “If you’re not giving up on at least five books every year, you’re not beginning enough of them.”

With e-books, it’s easier to sample many more books and apply the liberating 50-page rule: If it doesn’t float your boat after 50 pages, give it the heave-ho.

Reason #2: Having Better (for You) Books to Choose From. Reading success is greatly enhanced when you’re choosing books not from some airport newsstand while running to your flight, but from the books you’ve been lovingly setting aside for yourself. But when you have the time and inclination to begin a book, you’re not always near that stack of books that you really want to read. With your electronic reader, you can fill it up with those beckoning books—the ones I call your Library of Candidates.

Reason #3: Writing in Books. One great way to become more engaged in your books, especially nonfiction, is to write in them. Yet millions of people, whom I refer to as Preservationists (versus Footprint Leavers like myself), are terribly reluctant to write in their books. It seems like defacement to them. This reluctance is blasted away by electronic reading. Highlight and annotate with abandon on your digital copy to make it yours.

Reason #4: Sharing Books. So much of the enjoyment of books is in discussing them with friends and family members. When we all have our own eReaders, it will be far easier to obtain books, begin reading when you wish and discuss them sooner.  Over breakfast with three of my colleagues, one of them mentioned a passage in a book we’re all reading. I lifted my iPad from my case and quickly searched for and highlighted the passage that meant so much to him, and wrote an electronic note in the margin about it. Wow.

Reason #5: Smart Re-reading. To get much more from your books, you’ll want to review them shortly after finishing them the first time. Your long-term yield from your reading is so much higher with this little extra time. With physical books, this can be a logistical problem. On a recent plane trip, I reviewed my highlighted and annotated copy of Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience on my iPad. Would I have dragged my print version on this trip? Not a chance, and I would have missed out on this delightful re-reading just when I wanted it, and benefited from it, the most.

Reason #6: Having Your Library at Hand. Living Library is my name for those books you’ve read, loved and cherish, and enjoy having on your shelf at home. What if you could have this library with you whenever you wished? Now you can, virtually, with such software as Shelfari,  Good Reads, and Library Thing. And with the eReaders’ access to the Web, your library and your book are clicks away. “Wait—didn’t I read something like this in my other book...? Oh, yes, I’ll update my review right now.” That’s the kind of rich reading that Mortimer Adler was advocating in his How to Read a Book, 50 years before it has become so very easy to do.

Reason #7: Books as Portals. When a book sends you to a dictionary or encyclopedia, it can be the best kind of learning. But when this had to be done physically, it seldom was. Now that the opportunity to run off on an intellectual journey is only clicks away, we can more easily use books as stepping stones to learning expeditions.

Even so, this power can be either wonderful or an impediment to focused reading. Developing new reading skills is the price we must pay for new powers.

Surprise Bonus Reason #8: Getting in Flow. Electronic reading can actually help us focus on the text. (Yes, I know, now I’m claiming the opposite of what I just wrote above.) I judge it to be slightly easier to hold my iPad in its easy-to-grip case than to hold a conventional book. Not only is a paper book usually heavier, but you must flex it a bit with both hands to make the pages flat to your view. Being able to just tap to turn the page versus actually turning the page, is surprisingly nice. 

These are small things to be sure, but over time—and combined with the ability to be free from highlighters and pens for writing, and to adjust the type size and brightness of the screen—I’ve found that I get in the flow of reading sooner, get there more often, and stay there longer with my iPad. I wasn’t expecting this. Nor did I even want it to be true. But here’s proof of the pudding: when I’m at home and have the choice to pick up my hardcover book or my iPad with the same book, I pick up my iPad. H’mm...

A dark lining to this silver cloud

Technological progress, even for something as beneficial as electronic books, has a way of being a mixed blessing. The dark lining I’m worried about is the one  Stewart Brand describes so well in his Clock of the Long Now. It’s that our digital files—in this case, our precious notes in our books and our virtual libraries—may last forever or for six months, and it’s hard to know which it will be.
The best protection, based on the long history of books and libraries, is duplication and dispersal. Don’t, in other words, do your own reenactment of the burning of the Library of Alexandria.

For Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow, I’ve written my own rough review in Word by clicking through my highlighted passages on my iPad. Not only does this help me get the most from the book, but then I copied my write-up into my review on Shelfari (in the cloud), and printed this out to put inside the dust jacket of my hardcover, which sits in my library at home.

The rainbow

Note that I’ve purchased two copies of Flow, the electronic one on my iPad, and the hardcover for my library. In fact, I bought a dozen more to give to our staff at Levenger and to my family, I liked it so. Is it possible electronic books, by making it more enticing to read well, will open up a new golden age of book publishing, book selling, book sharing and book collecting? In my opinion, it is quite possible—much as digital photography has democratized further photography to millions more who now enjoy taking and sharing photos.

And now that physical books are freed from carrying 100% of the load of what Barbara Tuchman rightly called “the carriers of civilization,” they can be liberated to do what they do best—be wondrous, beautiful, tactile objects. (Try holding a Levenger Press print book in your hand, and you’ll experience some of this tactile pleasure.)

Physical books brilliantly designed, expertly printed, bound with creamy paper and touch-me covers, books that say “keep me and treasure me”— those will be as treasured as ever they were. Perhaps even more so.

Borges’s new idea of heaven?

“I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library,” Jorge Luis Borges famously said. In order to get to heaven, you must recognize when you’re there. Let’s quit worrying about the so-called demise of printed books and recognize the blessings of our new book age. We get to ramp up the enjoyment of electronic books, become better readers, and appreciate even more our lovely paper ones.

I’m imagining that paper books will evolve to become something akin to candles—we have them in our homes and cherish their light, but don’t light our homes with them. Readers of Lincoln’s era would likely be surprised at how well-lit our homes are, and I think it’s likely that we will be surprised at how well-read future book readers will be.

How about you, dear reader—how are you balancing your print and virtual bookshelves? I’d love to hear. Just click on the Comments link below. (If you’re reading this as an email, click here and you’ll connect to Comments).

Christmas Presents You Can Touch, and Be Touched By

If there’s any time of the year when the physical still matters—the feel of a rich paper, the smell of a good leather, the heft of a fine pen—surely it’s at holiday time. The allure of gifts you want to touch and that will touch those you present them to is powerful.

Perhaps they’re our validation that we are still human, and not virtual, beings after all. We know the magic of touch.

And so with a bit of cosmic justice in this year when e-book technology revolutionized the way we read, we use some technology ourselves to tell customers about our good old papery books. The result is the two short videos you see here:

Traditions to literally hold onto

Last month I had the honor of hearing rock-music legend Patti Smith stand tearfully in front of a crowd at the National Book Awards, seconds after her Just Kids was announced the nonfiction winner. “Please,” she said, ”no matter how we advance technologically, please never abandon the book. There is nothing in our material world more beautiful than the book.”

As the publishers of the few but uncommon beautiful books of Levenger Press, we couldn’t agree more.

These two books— The Fantasia of Leonardo and Henry David Thoreau on Cape Cod—as always, are available only from Levenger. We hope that all the objects we create give you such singular satisfaction in their giving and their receiving.

Can videos such as these short ones above be used successfully to sell print books? It’s a novel idea. Just click on the Comments link below with your thoughts. (If you’re reading this as an email, click here and you'll connect to Comments.)

Happy holidays from your grateful, book-loving merchant,

Steve

The Lost Maps of Henry David Thoreau: A New Way of Reading America’s Best-Known Woodsman

“After years of wondering and having nearly given up on finding Thoreau’s copies of the Champlain maps, a colleague pointed out to me that the Library of Congress had obtained, in the early 1970s, several manuscript maps that were thought to possibly have been drawn by Thoreau. Not expecting much (I knew that the Library had 5.5 million maps in thousands of drawers), I went to the case that contained this group of manuscripts….I could not believe what I was looking at….”

With these words John Hessler, the Senior Cartographic Librarian in the Geography and Map Division of the Library of Congress, reveals a Thoreau that was, for most of us, as hidden as those maps. The famous Walden Pond writer as mapmaker? Who knew?

John did, thankfully, and he indeed found the two 17th-century maps by Champlain that Thoreau copied with his own hand and annotated. John also discovered four pages of related notes by Thoreau.

John’s story of the maps—their connection to Cape Cod and their larger significance—is part of the fascinating new material in our Levenger Press book, Henry David Thoreau On Cape Cod: His Journeys and the Lost Maps. A lovingly abridged reprise of Thoreau’s Cape Cod, it’s published together for the first time with the full-color, unbound facsimiles of the Thoreau maps and notes (they are neatly folded and nestled in a pocket inside the back cover).  

Mim Harrison, our editor of Levenger Press, had a chance to talk with John about this new way of reading Thoreau. I think you’ll like these highlights of their conversation.

—Steve

Levenger Press: What was it like to discover Thoreau’s two lost maps?

John Hessler: Thoreau was always an author who meant a great deal to me. I started seriously reading his journals while doing research in the Alps on high-altitude alpine biogeography. His way of describing things, places and landscapes interested me. Later, when I found out he was a mapmaker, I understood more of what attracted me to him. Discovering his maps was, for me, uncovering another layer in the work of an author that I had come to think of as a model for some of my own work. As far as its importance to Thoreau scholarship—any new manuscript is an important discovery. These maps certainly open up new territory for scholars to explore.

LP: How did Thoreau copy Champlain’s maps?

John: One of the things that people do not realize about Thoreau—and this is very much due to his mythic status as an outdoorsman—is that he spent a great deal of time in libraries. As an alum of Harvard College he obtained borrowing privileges, and would often make the short trip from Concord to Cambridge. Most of the maps he drew appear to have been copied from books in the Harvard Library. Some of Thoreau's maps are only rough sketches, but others, like the two Champlain maps in the Levenger book, are more expertly drafted, showing that he certainly had some mapmaking talent.

LP: On the larger of the two maps, Thoreau appears to be correcting Champlain with annotations in red ink. Was Thoreau accurate?

John: Thoreau had a real sense of geographic history. He did not necessarily strive for accuracy, but rather wanted to understand how the geography of particular places changed over time. This is reflected in the lists of the different names of places that he collected in his notebooks, and in the red annotations on the 1612 map by Champlain. We can see in this activity a writer who was really one of the first cartographic historians. Thoreau was using maps to look at what happened in the past, not to define a present.

LP: How were maps used in America in Thoreau’s day? Were they more important than now?

John: Maps, to a certain extent, were not necessarily the wayfinding tools they are now. They tended to describe a territory in order to outline what a particular geographical region looked like, and who ruled over it. The maps that Thoreau used and copied are these types of maps. They show coastlines, important locations, Indian territories and new discoveries. They are nationalistic, calling places by names like “New France” and “New England.” Thoreau was always critical of wayfinding maps, such as the ones he used during his trips to the Maine woods, and typically found them to be inaccurate as directional aids—“labyrinths of error,” as he called them.

LP: You also found four pages of notes about the two Champlain maps as well as others that Thoreau studied. How did you determine the notes were written by Thoreau?

John: Over the years I have spent a great deal of time looking at Thoreau manuscripts and have become quite familiar with his characteristic paleography. As soon as I saw the handwriting, I knew it could only have been his. Knowing it was his and reading it are, however, two different things. His writing is more difficult to interpret than that found on many of the medieval and Renaissance manuscripts I typically work with. It took some time to figure out what he was saying on those four small pages.

LP:  The maps and notes have never been published for the general public until now. What do you think they add to the reading experience?

John: Thoreau has become an icon of American letters. Famous figures from very different cultural backgrounds—personalities like Gandhi and Martin Luther King—claim to have been inspired by his writings. He has also become a somewhat mythic figure in the environmental movement. I think that Thoreau’s mapmaking and note-taking show us another side of the man, one less mythic and more like ourselves. He was a person who liked to walk, to observe, to read and to investigate his world: not necessarily to change it, but simply to understand it for himself.

LP: You write in your commentary that all Thoreau’s books are rooted in a place. Do you think that’s because he was harboring mapmaking tendencies all along?

John: I think place was a very important concept in early 19th-century America. We were a young republic, and had not yet come to terms with what this land was and how it would evolve. Things seemed limitless, but limitlessness can result in a feeling of ungroundedness. It can evoke a desire to understand a limited region and to settle down in a place. Thoreau's mapmaking is an extension of this attempt to fully understand a particular place, the northeastern United States.

LP: What do you think Thoreau would make of today’s GPS?

John: One of the things that Thoreau talks about in relation to maps is how once an area is mapped, it loses some of its mystery and becomes much less interesting. In his journals he says this about some of the woodlots and forests that he surveyed around Concord. I think he would find our desire to quantify everything, to leave nothing to chance discovery, to be a loss. It was Thoreau who said, “how little there is on an ordinary map.” What he meant by this is that while a map showed the boundaries, the roads and the buildings, it left out the actual lives of people, the scenery, and all of the things that make human existence interesting. For Thoreau facts were important, but facts, no matter how detailed, could never completely describe the poetics of human history and place.

And now to you, dear reader: Does the idea of finding new ways to read famed writers like Thoreau appeal to you? I’d love to hear your thoughts. Just click on the Comments link below with your submission. (If you’re reading this as an email, click here and you'll connect to Comments).

—Steve

Ross King’s da Vinci code: a new reading on Leonardo, and how Leonardo read

We’re  more than proud to say that Levenger Press has just published a new work by bestselling author Ross King, The Fantasia of Leonardo da Vinci: His riddles, jests, fables and bestiary. I know many readers are fans of Ross, as am I—I loved both his Michelangelo and the Pope’s Ceiling and Brunelleschi’s Dome.

In The Fantasia, Ross introduces us not to the artist Leonardo but to the writer and reader. And he shows us Leonardo off camera—the view that only scholars like Ross have really known, until now. Here’s some of our recent conversation with Ross about the genius who called himself “an unlettered man” and had a huge distrust of “infinite children.”

—Steve

Levenger Press: How did Leonardo combine what was on the page with what was happening in the streets around him for his writing?

Ross King: Leonardo was a great observer of the world around him. We’re told he always kept tucked in his belt a little notebook in which he jotted down anything that amused or interested him. He also used to follow people through the streets of Florence or Milan, surreptitiously making sketches of their features with a view to using them in paintings. And, of course, he made meticulous drawings of the bodies he dissected, as well as of the machines he planned to build.  That said, Leonardo also valued what he found in books.

LP:  Is there any connection between what he drew and what he read?

Ross: What is probably Leonardo’s most famous drawing – the nude man with his arms and legs outspread – was based on the writings of the Roman architect Vitruvius.

LP: Would the books in Leonardo’s library have been illustrated?

Ross: Leonardo himself worked as a book illustrator, since he did the illustrations for his friend Luca Pacioli’s Divine Proportion, which was published in 1509. Hand-illuminated books or manuscripts, however, would have been far too expensive for Leonardo. Only wealthy families, such as the Medici, could afford them. But a number of his books would have been illustrated with woodcuts. Woodcut illustration was a fairly new technology, but in the fifteenth century Florence was a center for it. One of the books he owned, Luigi Pulci’s Morgante Maggiore, had woodcut illustrations. Also, most editions of Aesop printed after 1480 – and Leonardo owned one of those as well – included charming woodcuts.

LP:   Did Leonardo mean for his own fables and bestiary to be published?

Ross: I’m sure he did. He clearly had plans to print and publish numerous books of his own, both scientific treatises and more diverting books such as his bestiary. He was an inveterate writer. We now have almost 6,000 pages of his notes and drawings – and this is less than half of the papers he wrote in his lifetime. Unfortunately, Leonardo seldom finished things he started, and he never saw any of his works through the printing press.

LP: What was a bestiary, and why were they a popular form of allegory?

Ross: A bestiary is a “book of beasts,” a collection of stories giving allegorical descriptions of animal behavior. Bestiaries were popular because they were treasure troves of animal lore, and they were often highly amusing to read. They were also popular because they could be used as vehicles for moral and religious teaching. Furthermore, they were used to teach children to read. Leonardo owned a bestiary called the Fior di Virtù (“Flower of Virtue”). This may have been one of the first books he ever learned to read.

LP: Did Leonardo like animals in the flesh, as well as in allegory?

Ross: Leonardo was one of history’s great animal lovers. He was said by one of his earliest biographers, Giorgio Vasari, to love the whole of the animal kingdom, and to treat all living creatures “with wonderful love and patience” – a very rare thing in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries! Vasari describes how Leonardo used to buy caged birds and release them into the air. He was also, for at least part of his life, a vegetarian, refusing to eat anything that contained blood.

LP: Do we know how Leonardo physically read? Did he try to read his books in the mirror way that he wrote?

Ross: I think it’s unlikely in the extreme that he read books by means of a mirror. His major problem in reading books was his lack of expertise in Latin. He famously called himself an uomo senza lettere – an “unlettered man.” By that I think he meant that he was a disciple of experience, not books – which is not strictly true. But he didn’t have the qualification that all “lettered” men had: a good knowledge of Latin. He may have studied some Latin as a child, since his father was a notary, but he didn’t really begin studying Latin seriously until he was in his late 30s. He probably never really achieved a great proficiency.

LP: How do you think he would feel about e-books? Would the animal-rights/vegan in him applaud the absence of vellum?

Ross: I suspect that Leonardo, who loved invention, would have embraced technology such as e-books, especially if it meant saving the lives of animals. Many books in Leonardo’s day were made from vellum—the skins of calves, lambs and kids. He deplored the slaughter of these creatures and believed, unlike virtually all of his contemporaries, that animals had souls.

LP: As a man of invention, he must have applauded the printing press.

Ross: Strangely, Leonardo was suspicious of printed books and the printing press. He distrusted a process, such as printing, that produced what he called “infinite children” without differentiation between original and copy. I suspect he would have preferred his works to appear in manuscript form rather than by means of moveable type.

LP: What would have been the inspiration for his riddles?

Ross: Riddles were a popular form of amusement at European royal courts, where poets and jesters matched wits against one another for the amusement of kings and courtiers. Leonardo was part of this long tradition, since he used to divert and amuse the courtiers in Milan with riddles and stories. The inspiration for these riddles came from the world around him – and, very often, from his disgust at its senselessness and violence. Many of his riddles cast a light on man’s cruelty to man, and especially to animals.

LP: Would any of his friends have been able to guess the answers?

Ross: Some of them, certainly. One of his friends and fellow riddlers was the great architect Donato Bramante. Another friend was the mathematician Luca Pacioli. It’s hard to imagine even Leonardo stumping such brilliant minds.

LP: What’s your favorite Leonardo riddle?

Ross: “Men will walk and not stir, they will talk to those who are not present, and hear those who do not speak.”

LP:  Should we tell our readers the answer?

Ross: I wouldn’t dream of withholding it.

Care to share your thoughts on Leonardo as a reader? I’d love to hear. Just click on the Comments link below with your submission. (If you’re reading this as an email, click here and you'll connect to Comments).

—Steve

Are You Doing What You Love? (50 Famous People Show Us How)

Dr. Arthur Conan Doyle used the down time in his medical office to write detective stories. Isaac Newton worked for more than 25 years at a job in the Royal Mint, helping to prosecute counterfeiters and putting England on the gold standard.

The novelist Anthony Trollope got better at his craft only when he took on a civil service job in the post office (where he designed Britain’s famed cylindrical red post box). The same happened to William Faulkner on this side of the Atlantic: he was his most prolific as a writer when he was also a postmaster.

And who knew that Hedy Lamarr, the famous film star of the 1930s and 40s, had a passion for radio technology? Next time you’re on your cell or using Wi-Fi, give a nod to the screen siren for her pioneering work in prototypical 1G technology.

From moonlighting to daylighting

I knew little about the second lives of these people until I read the galley of the book we just published at Levenger Press, Don’t Quit Your Day Job. In today’s hardscrabble job market, the book provides a reassuring message: even if you don’t love your day job, you can often find ways to do what you love off hours.

Explains Levenger author Jack Lynch, “history is filled with famous people who held more than one job—real jobs, not honorary posts or mere recreation or low-prestige jobs abandoned for the dream job.” By day Jack teaches English at Rutgers University, where he recently made full professor—in between writing our book, along with The Lexicographer’s Dilemma.

“There is something unsettling about the great and powerful continuing to push the time clock,” Jack says. “We expect our geniuses to hide themselves away in attics and have little to do with the mundane concerns that occupy the rest of us.”

Yet Jack can tick off at least 100 well-known stars in their fields who aren’t so much moonlighters as daylighters. Some of them have loved both their jobs. Others have resented the one job, and this became added fuel that fired their true passions.

“Poetry and surety claims aren’t as unlikely a combination as they may seem,” observed Wallace Stevens. The Pulitzer Prize-winning poet was a longtime and devoted employee of the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company. If he could find poetry amid insurance policies, that should give the rest of us confidence that we, too, can find ways to feed our passions and sustain our souls.

From dreaming to doing

The Labor Department reports that over the past couple years, Americans have started to watch more TV (2 hours, 49 minutes a day) and spend more time sleeping (8 hours, 40 minutes a day). Is there some time here that we can steal to do what we dream of?

The 50 famous achievers that Jack profiles in Don’t Quit Your Day Job—including contemporaries like playwright/politician Václav Havel and engineer/musician Tom Scholz—remind us that dreaming and doing can live together.

“Their interstitial lives invite us to think about how we might reinvent our own life, and reconcile our jobs with our passions,” says Jack.

How about you, dear reader—have you found a way to do what you love, regardless of what else you do? I’d love to hear how you do it.

Just click on the Comments link below with your submission. (If you’re reading this as an email, click here and you'll connect to Comments).