Dear Designer,

It’s August and I thought I’d keep it a little lighter this month. Nobody, including me, wants to think about the usual affairs this month.

We'll keep it light, okay?

I thought I would review a few books that have recently moved me or challenged me in some way. As many of you know, I’m not a beach guy so these are probably not “beach reads”, but whatever.

The first is Martyr! (2024), a short novel by Kaveh Akbar and a National Book Award Finalist last year. I picked this book up and put it down numerous times at the bookstore, partly because of the cover, replete with a high contrast black serif type, a bright yellow background, and a little Persian avatar on horseback parading across. (Linda Huang designed the fabulous cover and used Zangezi for the title work, which comes off as playful, unworldly, and strange, just like the story itself.)

Martyr! is written as a series of vignettes, sometimes telling the story of Cyrus, the son of Iranian immigrants to the United States, who seeks to understand himself, his history and his identity. His search yields compounding results over the course of time — leading up to a visit with a painter / visual artist at the Brooklyn Museum towards the end of the story. What I found mostly beautiful about the story was the poetry itself, interspersed between the vignettes, and the way that the various narrators reflected and deflected those poems through prose.

Switching between first and third person storytelling, each of the characters become whole (not always more real but more integral) and we watch Cyrus develop as a person, hellbent on becoming what he feels he was meant to become, as elusive as all of that is for him (and all of us). As a bildungsroman, we can’t help but empathize with Cyrus, and his friends and family, centered as they are in a storm that is not of their own making. (We are told that his mother was mistakenly and unsympathetically killed during a U.S. military mission in Iran.)

Akbar, who has published his poetry elsewhere, writes every word with precision and care. I loved his occasional pop cultural references, which made the book feel lighter and lovelier. I have become a slower reader these past few years; it took me weeks to read Martyr! But it’s actually a fast read in the same way that poetry could be — a tale of personal recovery (Cyrus is in AA) and historical discovery (as a proto-martyr with Persian ancestry).

The second book is by the author Alaine de Botton, who has not only written over a dozen books but started The School of Life, a publisher and platform that schools you in life. I’ve read de Botton on and off over the years. He is a clear and wonderfully candid writer. But I think his earlier books, like The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work (2010), can also read as pretentious and maybe callous. (I am imagining a time when a respected and conscientious editor at Vintage quietly sat de Botton down and, in no uncertain terms, told him to cut the crap.)

Anyway, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work presents, in ten chapters, how people and place come to matter in the work they do every single day – for us. We take for granted the design work that others do — the satellites that connect our calls were made by engineers somewhere, the cookies we indulgently eat in the closet that once sprang from a bakery, the energy that powers are phones trickles from thousands of miles away, etc.

For so many reasons, we are extraordinarily lucky to have so much attention being paid to us all of the time, without our always knowing it. In the same way that neuroscientists believe that we would not be able to handle the sheer volume of sensory information the world hands us every second without the filters of our eyes and our brains, we would be overwhelmed if we knew who, where and how every object that comes into our purview came into our purview.

De Botton travels the globe in The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, interviewing subjects and photographing objects, a melancholic philosopher examining what makes the world tick while we dress and dream and drive. The chapters are short and sweet and are nicely illustrated with the author's own black and white photography. There is a self-consciousness about both the stories and the images, as if de Botton doesn't belong at an accounting firm, a biscuit factory, or the office of a humble career counsellor. Perhaps he think he’s too good for the role, but really, I think he’s just looking for the social theory angle of the journalistic tale. I’m making it sound more erudite than it is. The book is fun to read and a pleasure to digest.

Finally, I’m in the process of reading Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times (2020) by Katherine May. Like Martyr!, I bought this, in part, for the book’s beautiful cover with its sinuous, humanist type set across a single oak leaf in high relief with a white snow-like pattern pitched on an orange background. (Because I ordered it used, I got the much less-good British cover.) May talks about resting and retreating after encountering a series of health issues, financial challenges and breakups. Arriving on the cusp of the pandemic, Wintering did exceedingly well; May’s voice is warm and human.

It’s often an act of privilege to be able to step back from life’s horrendous twists and turns but I’m curious to see how she handles the onslaught and manages her self-care. I can let you know.

That’s it for now, dear designer.

Wishing you a good good week ahead.

Yours,

andrew signature

Before you jet

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