Inspirational Reading

For a week or two after I come back from Mondo I am always inspired. I tend to juggle more, write more, read more, and generally live better. Things work easier for me and I tend to be more relaxed. In short, Mondo makes me into a slightly better person. The kind I want to be daily but sometimes fall short of. 

So I decided this year to help that inspiration along so I headed out to the library yesterday to pick up some books. I picked up a self-help title that I've been thinking about for a while and finally decided to read. And then I stopped into the drawing section to see if they had anything good for teaching my poor hand to obey my brain. (There appears to be some sort of disconnect between the two. I can clearly see the idealized image in my mind but the hand can't produce). So I sorted through a ton of books on techniques but didn't find anything that was jumping out at me. 

Now I know they say that you should never choose books based on their cover, but they never say anything about weight. The first thing I remember when picking up Maira Kalman's The Principle of Uncertainty was how heavy it was. It felt like there were full oil paintings on each page. The book is hefty. It is no bigger than a standard hardcover but the pages feel like lead. I flipped through the first couple pages and was hooked. Kalman creates a visual and textual story by simply asking and answering questions (some shallow but most deep) and creating images to go along. She jumps from Spinoza to Einstein to Nietzsche to her family in the pages and somehow it seems to all tie together. 

The book represents a years worth of columns that Kalman did. The images and text blend beautifully to tell a very personal story. Kalman does not shock us with things she reveals about herself but the images she presents of herself is incredibly personal. She offers the reader a view of her idioscyncrasies. She tell us the deep questions and problems of her life. She challenges us to think about answers to the unanswerable. And for me she makes me want to open up. I tend to be a closed person, almost secretive. This book makes me want to take my drawings, which are no where near as good as hers, and offer them to world. She inspires me to open myself and be a more creative and thought-filled person. And for that I'm thankful.