Sunday Notes // Tablescapes, TikTok, Autobiographies, and Color Coding
Some reflections on books and art
I’m writing this newsletter from a cozy spot on the couch with a cup of coffee in-hand, a hint of incense swirling around me, listening to birds chirping outside the window. For my entire adult life until very recently, I’ve lived in major cities—New York, then Amsterdam, then LA, then Lisbon. I’m endlessly inspired by other people (what they wear, how they present themselves, watching people interact) and by architecture so cities seemed like the logical choice. A few months ago, I left the city life and moved to Évora, a small Portuguese town in the heart of the country’s beautiful and historic Alentejo region. Now I’m inspired by the wild sprouting of flowers everywhere, the sheep and horses I see on morning runs, our elderly neighbor, Hilda, who pokes her head out of her window to see what’s happening on our tiny quiet street.
Many of you have likely read the recently awarded Pulitzer Prize winner Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver, but I’m going to share a passage from the book about living in the city vs. living in the country:
I made my peace with the place, but never went a day without feeling around for things that weren’t there, the way your tongue pushes into the holes where you’ve lost teeth. I don’t just mean cows, or apple trees, it runs deeper. Weather, for instance. Air, the way it smells from having live things breathing into it, grass and trees and I don’t know what, creatures of the soil. Sounds, I missed most of all. There was noise, but nothing behind it. I couldn’t get used to the blankness where there should have been bird gossip morning and evening, crickets at night, the buzz saw of cicadas in August. A rooster always sounding off somewhere, even dead in the middle of Jonesville. It’s like the movie background music. Notice it or don’t, but if the volume goes out, the movie has no heart. I’d oftentimes have to stop and ask myself what season it was. I never realized what was holding me to my place on the planet of earth: that soundtrack. That, and leaf colors and what’s blooming in the road, sweet peas or purple ironweed or goldenrod. And stars. A sky as dark as sleep, not this hazy pinkish business, I’m saying blind man’s black. For a lot of us, that’s medicine. Required for the daily reboot.
I thought it would be nice to start each weekend newsletter off with a piece of well-crafted prose, so there you have it. Now on to the rest!
The Art of Tablescapes
Thanks to The Algorithm, I recently came across Omer Gilnoy on my Instagram feed. She’s a Tel Aviv born artist who lives in Portugal and she specializes in creating tablescapes. I went deep into a tablescape-hole, looking through her feed and then her website. While her output is a well-designed table, what she’s doing is tapping into nostalgia and imagination to create a setting that immediately places people in a scene from a movie or piece of art. Lately I’ve been feeling a little stuck trying to think of how I want to design an upcoming event and her work gave me a bolt of creative clarity—maybe it can do the same for you.
TikTok May Start Publishing
If you follow news about the publishing industry you’ve probably seen this headline, but it’s worth sharing (and of course, I can’t help but share my own opinion). As you know, #BookTok is a thing. For the most part, I think it’s changed the industry in a good way—it has opened the eyes of publishers who may have previously thought a book wouldn’t sell well because it has “too niche” of a readership (i.e. isn’t in the category publishers cater to with commercial books, the 40’s-60’s white woman), it has shown publishers the marketing power of reader recommendations, and it has earned some authors a lot more money than they would have gotten without TikTok. Increasing diversity and author royalties is a win. But when a friend sent me a ByteDance job posting for an acquisitions editor a couple months ago, I was skeptical. I’m intimately familiar with the learning curve required to start a publishing company with no background in publishing. It may look easy—you just find a few talented authors, get them to write books, and then you post about the books!—but I assure you it’s rife with complexities and nuances that take time to learn. I wonder about the balance of brazenness and humility of TikTok’s executive team. Do they know how much they don’t know, or do they want to pretend as though none of what came before matters and they’ve got the answer no one has thought of before?
The most important question for me, though, is how they’re going to treat authors. Will they offer advances? Will they be bigger or smaller than typical publishing advances? How will they approach royalties? Will they give their authors a leg up in the algorithm? I’d love to hear your thoughts on this one…
The Various Autobiographical Structures
If you’d asked me a few months ago if I liked autobiographies, it would have been a firm no. I would have told you that I’m not interested in someone’s perspective on their own life, I’m much more keen to read about how they were perceived by someone who researched them, spoke to their peers and family. Now I’m cursing my narrow-mindedness because I recently realized that some of my favorite books have been creative forms of autobiographies. I just finished The Grand Hotel Europa and loved it. It’s a fictionalized autobiography, which I wouldn’t have known by name but then realized is the same genre that two of my favorite books, Shantaram and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, both fall into.
I also realized that a “living autobiography” is a genre thanks to Deborah Levy’s series (Things I Don’t Want to Know, The Cost of Living: A Working Autobiography, Real Estate). I picked up Real Estate in a Parisian bookstore and instantly fell in love with her writing. I went back and read the other two in the series and my love for her style deepened. Now, she’s going back to a good ol’ fashioned novel structure with her forthcoming release, August Blue, and I can’t wait to dive in. Also, how gorgeous is the cover?!
Searching for Books by Color
The most recent Monocle Weekend Edition revealed that in Scandinavia, one of the regions biggest online retailers lets customers shop for books by color. This enables people to curate and add to their home collections based on aesthetics vs. content. You could view this as disheartening, knowing that some people value the design over the writing. If you think about it, though, a home library really is a work of art. First, it’s expensive—if you have 100 books and the average price of a book is $20, that’s a $2,000 collection. Second, it’s a reflection of your values—what you read and display on your bookshelf says a lot about you. The first thing I do when I go to someone’s house is beeline for their book collection: do they read mostly fiction or non-fiction? Which authors do they love? Are there recurring themes or moods?
How do you approach your book collection? Do you also inspect other people’s bookshelves?
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Finally, we’ve got a content-filled week coming up. We’ll explore why reader engagement is so essential to your book’s success, how to build this reader engagement, and give advice on whether or not you need an agent.
Enjoy the rest of your weekend!