Fans pick 100 books like Distinction

Nancy Lemann is one of the treasures of contemporary American literature and I re-read many passages in this book out loud to my wife, out of amusement and as a sort of personal honorific. Honestly, I found myself reading much of this book out loud, even alone, as does the Southern lilt of her writing punch through the page.

But that merely surprised me. The story is engrossing on both levels–micro/macro in the common parlance. A lot of writers drop hints about how to do what they are doing right into the text of their work. Tolstoy, for one, is very clear about this if we’re paying attention–specifically in Anna Karenina. There’s plenty of that here. Also see her recent story published in the Paris Review. It’s like a green book for great writing.

So, first things first with this list of recommendations to unlock your creativity: you got to get yourself out of the way. There’s no better way to do this than acquainting yourself with Sufism, even on an introductory level.

I am very close friends with the pre-eminent American translator of the 13th-century Sufi poet Jalal al-Dīn Rumi, and it still took me many years to get to this book. Maybe everything happens at the right time, but you still need to settle with yourself to get any ball rolling, especially the powerful tool of your own creativity–the only medicine, the single refuge. 

So, after the first things, you need some actual instruction, and the great Russian filmmaker lays it all out here. The book is his memoir about filmmaking, but it’s really about art making, written as large or small as you can imagine. I wrote a review by request a few years ago.

Allow the tools he discusses here to free you from the oppression of lazy filmmaking, as well as your own timidity and fear. It works. Ask me how I know.

Once you’ve opened yourself up, gotten a few instructions and are reminded that nothing is holding you back, you’re ready to connect with your own internal mechanisms. Hillman re-positions psychology in the context of soul-making, where it makes most sense and is most useful for us.

We get hung up on so many things, and Hillman fearlessly wades into every one of them with great intention. I think Hillman is one of the smartest, most perceptively radical writers not named Jung, and this book grapples with the uneasy humility that is creative work: your own soul-making.

At some basic level, the drinking culture in eighteenth-century taverns has survived in Parisian wine bars and cafés today. Yet, as a social anthropologist, Demossier shows us that wine-drinking culture has changed into something different today. Since 1980 the number of French people who drank wine every day has plummeted from over 50 percent to barely 20 percent. Yet at the same time, wine has taken on a larger cultural role in French identity as a nation even for those who drink wine less regularly. All the TV programs, books, wine blogs, wine tourism, and consumers flocking to wineries for a degustation at the source demonstrate that drinking wine is now as much a part of what it means to be French as speaking French.

This is one of the best books I know for covering a huge amount of material in a compact, reader-friendly, yet very thorough form. The author provides insightful perspective on French history, psychology, culture, cuisine, language, and habits, and offers particularly helpful advice about how to recover from the inevitable moments of cultural awkwardness. Although some of the practical information is outdated, the general insights into and analysis of French people and their culture will never go out of date. I think it’s well worth reading for anyone who has an interest in France and the French that goes beyond the surface; anyone who has a genuine interest in understanding this fascinating people and culture. 

This is a brilliant essay in literary criticism. It traces English ambivalence towards French language and culture in the centuries that followed the Norman Conquest. It does so by delving into major literary texts—by Chaucer and Shakespeare among others—that explore that ambivalence for what it is: the symptom of a fetish. I like the way Williams writes and I find her inspiring in her desire to remain faithful to the complexity of the texts she studies and their attitudes.

The Chauvet Cave in Southern France is a unique time capsule that gives us a glimpse into the imaginary world of humans living 30,000 years ago.

Dawn of Art is written by those who discovered the cave and recognized it as the earliest masterpiece of human-made art.

What I found most fascinating about the cave as described in this book is the fact that humans decorated it over a period of thousands of years, perhaps as many as two hundred generations.

This is a remarkable achievement of collective artmaking, with one generation passing down the required artistry to the next generation. It made me wonder whether we have lost the reverence for the past that our distant ancestors must have possessed.

If you are going to read Orwell you need to know something about what Mckibbin calls the “fundamental mentalities and structures” of English social and political life. This is the best, covering Orwell’s life-span. These were the years when England first began to see itself as ‘democratic’, and yet, “the great mass of the English people was unmoved, or unmoved directly, by the cultures of the country’s intellectual elites”. Enter George Orwell.

I am in awe of how Anne Helen Petersen was able to weave together a cathartic validation of how exhausted our generation is with a clear historical explanation of where American burnout culture actually comes from. As someone who has fallen victim to cycles of overwork despite my best efforts to inject my life with balance, I needed to read about how overworking is not my fault, but it is also not necessary.

This also gave me some great data points to cite in debates with well-meaning family members who still look upon our entire generation as lazy and entitled.