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books that help

2020-04-14 · review / recommendation · John · 3:31 · watch on YouTube

Topic: Books & writing · mode: Advice & reviews · tags: self promotion, timely hook

On the release day of Sarah's You Are an Artist, John makes book-spine portraits from one of its assignments and recommends books that help him through the pandemic: Why Fish Don't Exist, The Cholera Years, rereads of Sula and The General in His Labyrinth, I Am Still Alive, and poetry by Nicole Sealey and Paige Lewis.

What is said

The parts of the video and what is said in each (★ — how much it matters to the video).

00:00:00 — Release day of You Are an Artist: champagne, book-spine portraits after Nina Katchadourian, greeting

  • ★★★ John celebrates with champagne that Sarah's book You Are an Artist comes out today, wondering if he can drink champagne on YouTube without being demonetized. (playful) — 00:00:00 · You Are an Artist, Sarah Urist Green
  • ★★ Doing the book's assignment from artist Nina Katchadourian, John sorts book spines into portraits: one of Sarah, and a self-portrait about the current historical moment. (playful) — 00:00:13 · You Are an Artist, Sarah Urist Green
  • ★ John says he dressed up to feel like a person. (playful) — 00:00:36
  • ★★ John says Sarah's book gets readers collaborating with friends across time and space and generally engaging with the world in thoughtful and artistic ways, and says he is so glad it is here at last. — 00:00:49 · You Are an Artist, Sarah Urist Green

00:00:57 — Virtual tour tonight; nonfiction, fiction rereads, a YA survival novel and poetry that help in this time

  • ★★ John says Sarah's virtual book tour begins tonight, with more information in the description. — 00:00:57 · Sarah Urist Green, doobly-doo
  • ★★★ John loves Lulu Miller's Why Fish Don't Exist, also out today: what The Anthropocene Reviewed wants to be when it grows up, a personal search for meaning, history of taxonomy and life of David Starr Jordan. — 00:01:03 · The Anthropocene Reviewed (podcast)
  • ★ John says David Starr Jordan was Stanford University's first president. — 00:01:18
  • ★★★ John recommends The Cholera Years, an analysis of the 19th-century cholera pandemics in New York City, a book almost 60 years old. — 00:01:30 · New York City
  • ★★★ John says the book shows 1832 and 2020 are not so different in snake oil cures, conspiracy theories, and blaming victims rather than the structural and political failures that let disease spread. — 00:01:39
  • ★★ John says a chief pleasure of middle age is long-term relationships with certain books, so in hard times he returns to old favorites. — 00:01:53
  • ★★ John recently reread Sula and The General in His Labyrinth, which improve every reading and take him back to past selves: pretentious sophomore, terrified 24-year-old, bleary-eyed new father. — 00:02:02
  • ★★ John recommends I Am Still Alive by Kate Alice Marshall, a YA survival novel about a girl alone in the Arctic wilderness that he reread to ease his anxiety. — 00:02:20
  • ★ Many books feel sad now: a scene in a crowded McDonald's makes John yearn for its halcyon days; I Am Still Alive has none of that. (playful) — 00:02:33
  • ★★ John says he really needs poetry now, like Nicole Sealey's beautiful Ordinary Beast, and quotes its line about a name for the animal love makes of us. — 00:02:50
  • ★★★ John says Paige Lewis's Space Struck gives language to his overwhelming anxiety, as in 'I'm the vice president of panic, and the president is missing'; he calls himself the Vice President of Panic. — 00:03:02

00:03:15 — Asking Hank and viewers what helps them; virtual tour; sign-off

  • ★★ John asks Hank and viewers to say in comments what they are reading, looking at or listening to that helps them. — 00:03:20 · Hank Green

In the description and comments

Threads in this video

Where the stories that moved here went next

Mentioned

People: David Starr Jordan · Sarah Urist Green

Projects: The Anthropocene Reviewed (podcast)

Works: I Am Still Alive · Ordinary Beasts · Space Struck · Sula · The Cholera Years · The General in His Labyrinth · Why Fish Don't Exist · You Are an Artist

Organizations: McDonald's · Stanford University

Terms: doobly-doo

Concepts: cholera · conspiracy theory · Middle age · Taxonomy (biology) · victim blaming

Places: Arctic · New York City

Only in the description or credits: Charles E. Rosenberg · Gabriel García Márquez · Kate Alice Marshall · Lulu Miller · Nicole Sealey · Nina Katchadourian · Paige Lewis · Toni Morrison

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