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Stop! Look! Listen! Catherine Austen's Reading Recommendation

How old are you?” This is the question that everyone asks best-selling historian Nell Painter when she returns to school at age 64. She retires from teaching at Princeton and pursues her lifelong dream of becoming an artist. Not a dabbler, not a retiree taking a few classes, but a “serious artist.” Art may be all about seeing, but artists are about being seen. Painter doesn’t just want to paint; she wants to get her MFA and be seen as a professional artist.

Stop! Look! Listen! Melinda Burns' Reading Recommendation

I have been a fan of Abigail Thomas ever since I read her memoir, “Three Dog Life,” years ago. I recently re-read it along with everything else of hers I could find. I just finished her latest, “Still Life at Eighty: The Next Interesting Thing,” with a beautiful photo of her multi-lined face on the cover and a beloved dog in her lap. I love her for the way she observes her life in moments, nothing longer than a few pages, exploring how she came to be the person she is. The everyday and the ordinary are her territory, and where her mind goes “when it’s off-leash,” as she says.

Stop! Look! Listen! Kayla MacInnis' Listening Recommendation

Leonard Cohen almost always ends up on my Spotify Wrapped. His gritty, sensual, laconic, husky voice resonates with my melancholic spirit. His music is enduring—sardonic, philosophical, and rhetorical. It’s his refusal to be boxed in that draws me in: his waltzing numbers, pacing and bringing in the unconventional—accordion and string quartets, diverse cultural influences, the dark comedy, and, of course, a relentless inquiry. I’m also a sucker for a good synthesizer.     

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