Agent Palmer

Have you ever found a piece of media that works so perfectly in the way it’s presented that you feel like maybe everyone else should stop trying?

Ok, so perhaps it is just me, but “Storm,” the animated short from Tim Minchin on YouTube, is what the medium should be. It’s not clickbait or the start of a rabbit hole. It is a single piece of art. But first, let me explain the animated short and we’ll get to why I feel that way.

Despite all of the incredible television advertising catchphrases that still live in my millennial head, one still has a stranglehold: “The incredible, edible egg.”

Yes, yes, television was supposed to rot my generation’s collective brain, but it seems downright healthy compared to the subsequent generations’ digital diets. But that’s not the health I want to dive into.

In order to discuss paring down one’s own personal library of books, it is important to recognize two important facts, especially for the avid reader. One: there is no such thing as a complete library; and two: having too many books is a binary experience. You either have too few or too many. There is no in between.

So with that in mind, why am I writing a post about purging books? Because I found that I had too many, and so I went searching for ways to decide how to shrink my personal library.

It’s easy to say there were 10 things I learned or was excited to read within The Creative Act. Truthfully, I made 28 notes reading it cover to cover. Perhaps at another time I would have made 18 or 48. This book is unique.

While it is, in fact, a linear read about the inspirations, actions, energies, meditations, collaborations, and many other pieces that form the act of creating art, I kept getting the feeling that this stuff could just be picked up at any time and any piece might hit you as important.