What We Are Reading Today: The Creative Habit by Twyla Tharp

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Updated 10 February 2021
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What We Are Reading Today: The Creative Habit by Twyla Tharp

In The Creative Habit, Twyla Tharp takes the lessons she has learned in her remarkable thirty-five-year career and shares them with you, whatever creative impulses you follow — whether you are a painter, composer, writer, director, choreographer, or, for that matter, a businessperson working on a deal, a chef developing a new dish, a mother wanting her child to see the world anew.

When Tharp is at a creative dead end, she relies on a lifetime of exercises to help her get out of the rut, and The Creative Habit contains more than thirty of them to ease the fears of anyone facing a blank beginning and to open the mind to new possibilities.

Tharp’s exercises are practical and immediately doable. 

To Tharp, sustained creativity begins with rituals, self-knowledge, harnessing your memories, and organizing your materials (so no insight is ever lost). Along the way she leads you by the hand through the painful first steps of scratching for ideas, finding the spine of your work, and getting out of ruts into productive grooves. In her creative realm, optimism rules. 

And in this inventive, encouraging book, Twyla Tharp shows us how to take a deep breath and begin!


What We Are Reading Today: ‘The Royal Inca Tunic’ by Andrew James Hamilton

Updated 14 May 2024
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What We Are Reading Today: ‘The Royal Inca Tunic’ by Andrew James Hamilton

The most celebrated Andean artwork in the world is a 500-year-old Inca tunic made famous through theories about the meanings of its intricate designs, including attempts to read them as a long-lost writing system.

But very little is really known about it. “The Royal Inca Tunic” reconstructs the history of this enigmatic object, presenting significant new findings about its manufacture and symbolism in Inca visual culture.


What We Are Reading Today: ‘The Evolution of Power’ by Geerat Vermeij

Updated 13 May 2024
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What We Are Reading Today: ‘The Evolution of Power’ by Geerat Vermeij

Power has many dimensions, from individual attributes such as strength and speed to the collective advantages of groups.

“The Evolution of Power” takes readers on a breathtaking journey across history and the natural world, revealing how the concept of power unifies a vast range of phenomena in the evolution of life—and how natural selection has placed humanity and the planet itself on a trajectory of ever-increasing power.


What We Are Reading Today: ‘Semi-Detached’

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Updated 12 May 2024
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What We Are Reading Today: ‘Semi-Detached’

Author: JOHN PLOTZ

When you are half lost in a work of art, what happens to the half left behind? “Semi-Detached” delves into this state of being: what it means to be within and without our social and physical milieu, at once interacting and drifting away, and how it affects our ideas about aesthetics.

The allure of many modern aesthetic experiences, this book argues, is that artworks trigger and provide ways to make sense of this oscillating, in-between place.

 


What We Are Reading Today: ‘The Ant Collective’

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Updated 11 May 2024
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What We Are Reading Today: ‘The Ant Collective’

Author: ARMIN SHCIEB

Ants share a vibrant and complex communal life and remarkable abilities to communicate with each other.

“The Ant Collective” presents the world of ants as you have never seen it before, using hyperrealistic, computer-generated imagery that shows 3D-like views of activities inside and outside a thriving nest of red wood ants.

With chapters on topics ranging from the establishment and construction of the nest to the birth of an ant trail and the relocation of a colony, this one-of-a-kind book brilliantly integrates informative descriptions with the illustrations.

 


What We Are Reading Today: The Shield of Achilles

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Updated 11 May 2024
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What We Are Reading Today: The Shield of Achilles

Author: W. H. Auden Edited by Alan Jacobs

“The Shield of Achilles,” which won the National Book Award in 1956, may well be W. H. Auden’s most important, intricately designed, and unified book of poetry. In addition to its famous title poem, which reimagines Achilles’s shield for the modern age, when war and heroism have changed beyond recognition, the book also includes two sequences—“Bucolics” and “Horae Canonicae”—that Auden believed to be among his most significant work.

Featuring an authoritative text and an introduction and notes by Alan Jacobs, this volume brings Auden’s collection back into print for the first time in decades and offers the only critical edition of the work.

As Jacobs writes in the introduction, Auden’s collection “is the boldest and most intellectually assured work of his career, an achievement that has not been sufficiently acknowledged.” Describing the book’s formal qualities and careful structure, Jacobs shows why The Shield of Achilles should be seen as one of Auden’s most central poetic statements—a richly imaginative, beautifully envisioned account of what it means to live, as human beings do, simultaneously in nature and in history.