(gentle orchestral music)
- Hey everyone, welcome back.
I know it's been a few weeks,
for which I am so sorry.
I hope you missed me,
I certainly missed you.
But I'm back and I'm
in this beautiful room.
The truth is I've been filling in the room
for a little while, but I
wasn't living in here yet.
Now I am living in here,
I'm sleeping in here,
I'm loving this room so much.
For many of you that are on my Instagram,
you saw me move in.
You saw me put together
all this furniture,
my bed, my bookshelf.
And today, as a welcome
back to my YouTube channel,
I'm gonna take you through
my collection of books.
You see that bookshelf,
or those bookshelves
I should say, behind me?
I'm gonna show you, I'm gonna pick out
some of my favorites.
And this is just the beginning
'cause from this moment on,
every week I'm gonna be pulling
a book from my collection
and I'm gonna be talking
about it with you.
I'm super excited about this
because books just make me happy.
I literally was so excited
putting books on my shelf
and organizing them, and smelling them,
and thumbing through
them, and reading them,
and looking at them because
I love books so much
and it's just such a huge part of my life
and I haven't done that yet on YouTube.
So I'm gonna be making
that a weekly thing.
So, I hope you're excited about that too.
All right, so are you ready?
You ready, you gonna come with me?
I'm gonna show you something.
I'm gonna show you some things
that I hope you like 'cause I like 'em.
All right, come on.
Okay, I first wanna be talking about
the organization of my bookshelves.
Any book lover just gets
super excited about,
okay, how am I gonna organize this?
'Cause I can organize this
in so many different ways.
Now I was thinking to myself,
obviously fiction, nonfiction,
that's an easy, obvious choice.
Then I can separate poetry,
but within nonfiction,
there's so many different things going on.
And you could see that some things
just wouldn't make sense
next to each other.
So within nonfiction,
you'll see I've organized it
in very specific ways that reflect
a lot about who I am and what I collect.
So, here we go.
Up in the upper left, we have my poetry.
There's almost three in a
row of shelves for them.
We have Bukowski, Charles Bukowski,
his You Get So Alone at Times
That it Just Makes Sense.
Gotta love some Bukowski.
And my favorite poet, who's probably
a very difficult poet to read,
but who's amazing is Anne Carson.
This is one of my favorites,
The Beauty of the Husband: A
Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos.
Amazing stuff.
So this is my poetry section.
So over here you'll see letters
and writing books.
Now, I don't have too many
writing books these days.
I have read a lot of 'em,
but I was kind of distilling
it down to probably the best,
and by far the best is Bird
by Bird by Anne Lamott.
I also have like this book.
I love letters so much.
And they're so intimate
and very fascinating.
This one is Beloved
Prophet: The Love Letters
of Kahlil Gibran and Mary Haskell.
If you've read The Prophet by Gibran,
this can be fascinating.
Gibran and Haskell fell in love.
Haskell was much older than him
and she was his financial benefactor.
And she decided, in fact,
they were engaged very briefly,
but then she called it off because
she thought that their relationship
would hinder his vocation, his writing.
And she believed so much in him
that she let go of him, the lover.
And as we move down, boom,
this is kind of like a mixture
of things to be honest of nonfiction.
We have some philosophy over here.
Jean-Paul Sartre.
And you got Thoreau's Walden here,
but we also have things like,
the River of Shadows by Solnit.
This is a beautiful and
really important book,
Against Interpretation and
Other Essays by Susan Sontag.
I particularly bought this book
for the essay Against Interpretation.
I think it's really, really important
to begin a conversation around art.
I feel like so much of
contemporary artists
are basing their work off of these very,
very complex and difficult
philosophies and theories,
and this makes a case,
really calling out
critics and art historians
for using too much of that
and distancing the art
work from the viewer.
Moving across, we have
my books on feminism.
Gotta have that, you
know me, feminist man.
And so we have, of course,
the diaries of Anais Nin.
We have this amazingly
beautiful biography,
Savage Beauty by Nancy Milford,
which is a biography on
Edna St. Vincent Millay,
which is a female poet,
early 20th century, 1920s.
Very, very popular.
Really ahead of her time woman.
We also have The Second Sex
by Simone de Beauvoir.
Now I have not read the entire thing,
but I've read sections of it.
And of course, one of my
favorite feminist texts,
boom, Bad Feminist by Roxanne Gay.
I love it.
Come on, we're moving along.
Well now, this is my LP
or record collection.
It's not huge, but it is I
believe an amazing selection.
I've got some first printings in here.
I have, of course, Miles Davis.
I've got Chopin, I've got Beethoven.
I have Amy Winehouse.
Eve Pin-ya, Billie Holiday.
Probably my favorite though is,
that's such a tough choice.
So difficult, Chet
Baker I think that's it.
This is such a beautiful,
beautiful album, Chet.
He's not singing on it.
It's all, it's trumpet pines,
so emotional and so amazingly beautiful.
I also have Paris Review interviews,
really, really helpful if you're a writer.
Just getting in the mind of other
really well known amazing writers.
All right, moving along.
We have, oh by the way,
I'm gonna put links to a
lot of these books below,
everything that I mention,
I'll try and put a link below.
So if you're really curious
and didn't catch what I said
or you wanna look into
something in more depth,
then check out the links below.
This is my like inspiration
or creativity section.
So we have the quintessential
Artist's Way by Julia Cameron.
Also have this amazing
book, Creativity, Inc.,
which is written by the president
of Pixar and Disney animation.
I have what every artist
I believe should own,
The Crossroads of Should and Must:
Find and Follow Your Passion by Elle Luna.
This is a subject that,
there's a lot of literature about.
A lot of it is fluffy, a
lot of it is not helpful,
but this is helpful and it's also got
these beautiful illustrations.
Elle Luna is an artist herself.
This is extremely helpful.
You don't even have to
be an artist to read it.
If you're just wanting to,
you're having trouble
following your passion
and you're stuck in a job you hate, boom.
This is your text.
I have so many good ones.
I wish I could read you
the titles of all of 'em
'cause they're so good.
I'm like, oh, I gotta say that one.
Oh, gotta say that one,
and I just don't have time.
You don't want to sit here
and me listing them all,
but remember, every week
I'm gonna be talking
about in depth one of these
books, so get excited.
All right, coming down here,
we have the beginning of my art books.
Yeah, there's a lot of
amazing art books in here.
A lot of photography, so for
those of you who don't know,
I was a professional
photographer for many years,
and so I collected a lot
of photography books,
but there's other things
in here, like painters.
Here's an autobiography
by Marina Abramovic,
who is I think the most
important contemporary artist.
But this book, oh wait,
I'm just gonna show you this one.
I will probably review this later,
but this is Twilight by Gregory Crewdson.
And his photographs look like stills
from a surrealistic movie.
Gorgeous, gorgeous work.
We have some Nan Goldin,
some Edward Hopper.
I can use this, that much Edward Harper,
Harper, excuse me, Edward Hopper books,
because I love his story telling.
Without words he's able to just get
a slice of the story which is
I think as a writer myself, in fact,
I would actually open up randomly
to a page like this one
and just tell that story
that I see in that book
and it was a way to like
practice my writing.
So many stories in his work, I love him.
All right, then moving on.
So there's a bunch of,
there's three bookshelves
full of art books.
Come on over here, this is
kind of a menagerie of stuff.
It's mostly like self-development,
self-improvement books.
We've got Grit.
We got the famous, The 4-Hour
Workweek by Tim Ferriss.
Yeah, so oh, and yeah.
Okay, so coming down here.
This is just like everything left over
that doesn't really
make sense in the genre.
There's some literary criticism.
There's some photography,
like Photoshop stuff, color correction.
And so, moving on down to
here we have these four,
that's four right, writing,
three, these three are
all of my DVDs, movies.
I'm old enough to remember a time
before streaming was a thing.
And I like a lot of movies
that aren't available for streaming
and couldn't be found through streaming.
It's getting better, but it's still
difficult to find some of this stuff.
So yeah, let me just pick
out a couple for you.
Goodbye Solo.
If you haven't heard of that one
by the director and writer, Ramin Bahrani.
Amazingly beautiful.
Beautiful movie about a
African immigrant
who is a taxi cab driver
and he picks up this older man
who is thinking of killing himself.
And it becomes like this taxi cab driver
over the next few weeks, I think,
and gets to know him, it's beautiful.
All right, and now we're
gonna come over here
to my final bookshelf area.
All right, so in this final bookshelf,
this is mostly fiction.
And this is all my
novel and short stories,
this entire bookshelf right here.
I have things like As I
Lay Dying by Faulkner.
So there's some classic literature,
but I also have things
like The Graveyard Book
by Neil Gaiman, I love this book so much.
Oh, it's so good.
You need to see it, or
read it, I should say.
I also have the classic, The Outsiders.
So it's a lot of classic literature,
probably because I
studied English literature
and love classic literature,
but it's got some contemporary
works in there as well.
We have, for example,
The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern.
You'll love this so much.
And this behemoth down here is Proust.
I have not read the entire thing.
I've only read the first volume.
In Search of Lost Time.
It's, I don't know,
some ridiculous 3,000 pages or something.
And there's a few up here,
Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five.
Up here, by the way, is my record player.
And I've got these
beautiful white speakers.
Obviously I have to have a typewriter.
I mean, you would expect that
because I love antique things like
typewriters or antique cameras.
So, I have to spread
them all over my room.
And down here, this might
surprise you a little bit,
but I love these so much.
This right here are my
illustrated children's books,
which I have a beautiful collection of.
Some really unique stuff
as well, like this.
This is like probably one of
the most unique books I own
is called The Black Book of Colors.
And it's actually in Braille.
And the drawings are in raised,
they're raised so it's really meant
to be a book to be felt instead of read,
really I think teaching
children, and even adults,
and that's what I love about
a lot of these children's books,
I think they tell important lessons
and they're very moving,
that even adults can read them
and gain something from them.
What's an old one that I love?
Oh, the classic, Where
the Wild Things Are.
But I'm gonna definitely cover
a little bit of these
in my own book reviews.
I think they're just so beautiful
and I love them so much.
Down here, my graphic novels.
I famously have The
Sandman by Neil Gaiman.
Don't have them all.
I've got the first four.
Definitely need to get all of
them though, they're amazing.
Diary of a Teenage Girl, amazing.
Yeah, and so those are all my books.
Actually, that's not true.
What you didn't see up here
are maybe the most beautiful,
also oversized books.
This one, for example,
The Night Life of Trees
is absolutely gorgeous.
It's unbelievable.
I'm gonna make a video just on this book.
But I also have,
I just wanna show you every book I have,
a book (murmurs) a long time.
This is probably one of
my most unique books.
It is called Act of Love:
A Visual Dictionary of Animal Courtship.
And literally every
page is about a species
with an unusual courtship.
So let's go on and see, this one.
This one looks like birds.
The great crested grebe
and they've got a dance called,
that we call the dance of acceptance.
And so it just like talks
about what the dance is
and what it's meant to do.
It's so unique.
You'll also notice here,
I've got this really
comfortable rocking chair.
So what I'll do is I'll turn on my light.
I will just sit in this corner and read
and I'll be so comfortable,
and I'll be in this
creative, imaginative space
that I can just get lost.
And I've missed that
the past number of years
as I was living in the basement.
And I just love this room, this area,
that I'm amongst my books,
which are an extension of who I am.
I've got so many more
books I need to read.
If any book lover doesn't have
at least 20 books on his
shelf he hasn't read yet,
then he's not a true book lover.
But yeah, I hope this was a,
I hope you're excited about me talking
about these books more in depth.
If there's any book that you're like,
ooh, what is that, I
saw that, what is that?
Or I said something and you
want to know more about it,
let me know in the comments below.
Yeah, and if you're new to my channel,
don't forget to subscribe
'cause you're probably
here 'cause you love books.
Well, I'm telling you, I'm about,
every week I'm gonna be
talking about a new book.
How amazingly exciting is that?
And there are books all over the place.
You know novel, like next week
is gonna be a novel, Siddhartha,
but the week after
that, it might be poetry
or it might be an art book,
or I might show you one of my
children's illustrated books.
It's gonna be different every single week.
And yeah, I hope you stay
tuned and you're excited.
So please do subscribe.
I tell videos every Monday,
Wednesday, and Friday.
And yeah, and as I say in
every video, I love you.
I love you, I absolutely
without question, love you.
Don't forget, your existence
matters, it really does.
