The Marginalian
The Marginalian

Reads tagged with “books”

Thoreau on Defining Your Own Success
Thoreau on Defining Your Own Success

“If the day and the night are such that you greet them with joy, and life emits a fragrance like flowers and sweet-scented herbs, is more elastic, more starry, more immortal — that is your success.”

read article

Carl Sagan’s Reading List
Carl Sagan’s Reading List

Reverse-engineering one of the greatest minds of all time by his information diet.

read article

An Anatomy of Inspiration: A 1942 Guide to How Creativity Works
An Anatomy of Inspiration: A 1942 Guide to How Creativity Works

“The true novelist, poet, musician, or artist is really a discoverer.”

read article

The New Swiss Army Knife: Bill Gates Predicts the iPhone in 1995
The New Swiss Army Knife: Bill Gates Predicts the iPhone in 1995

What Siri and the appification of faxing have to do with the difference between envisioning and enacting.

read article

100 Ideas That Changed Architecture
100 Ideas That Changed Architecture

How the art and science of building evolved along the parallel axes of the philosophical and the pragmatic.

read article

No Man’s Land: A Meditation on Mortality and Self-Delusion from French Illustrator Blexbolex
No Man’s Land: A Meditation on Mortality and Self-Delusion from French Illustrator Blexbolex

“And still, that insinuating, ever-growing silence.”

read article

Vita Sackville-West’s Love Letter to Virginia Woolf
Vita Sackville-West’s Love Letter to Virginia Woolf

“I am reduced to a thing that wants Virginia.”

read article

Celebrating John Cage: 40 Years of Visualizing Music Notation Around the World
Celebrating John Cage: 40 Years of Visualizing Music Notation Around the World

“To be an artist, you must immerse yourself with great passion in all that surrounds you.”

read article

Italo Calvino’s 14 Criteria for What Makes a Classic
Italo Calvino’s 14 Criteria for What Makes a Classic

“A classic is a work which constantly generates a pulviscular cloud of critical discourse around it, but which always shakes the particles off.”

read article

Where the Heart Beats: John Cage, Zen Buddhism, and the Inner Life of Artists
Where the Heart Beats: John Cage, Zen Buddhism, and the Inner Life of Artists

On love, liberty, and the pursuit of silence.

read article

View Full Site

The Marginalian participates in the Bookshop.org and Amazon.com affiliate programs, designed to provide a means for sites to earn commissions by linking to books. In more human terms, this means that whenever you buy a book from a link here, I receive a small percentage of its price, which goes straight back into my own colossal biblioexpenses. Privacy policy. (TLDR: You're safe — there are no nefarious "third parties" lurking on my watch or shedding crumbs of the "cookies" the rest of the internet uses.)