An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris is a 50 page book by Georges Perec, but "book" may be generous. Really it's a disjointed list of observations one October afternoon in 1974.
There's nothing brilliant about it; Perec literally writes down what he sees. A good chunk of it is which buses pass the cafe window—"A 70 passes by. A 96. It is two twenty"—or the clothes of pedestrians walking along the sidewalk. The result is a mess, but a poetic one. I loved it.
It's a reminder that there's beauty in the mundane, but also in the cadence and choice of words on a page. I'd forgotten how much I enjoy poetry, even if I don't fully "grasp" it; the aesthetic benefits of just experiencing it is a worthy enough reason to read.
I read a lot of novels, but there's a whole wide literary world out there where people are just trying to be creative. And in many ways they're more powerful, because short form means every word counts.
A list of other things I've read recently:
Why I Write by George Orwell, in which he argues that all writers are motivated by some combination of egoism, aesthetic enthusiasm, historical impulse, or political purpose;
Excerpts from hardback copies of some of my favorite books, to see why they've stuck with me;
A romantasy that some friends insisted I'd love (I didn't);
Short stories in speculative magazines like Asimov's, Clarkesworld, Strange Horizons, and Lightspeed (Here's a recent favorite);
UX articles from Baymard Institute;
Anthology collections like Shoreline of Infinity, The Digital Aesthete, and Tor Fiction Bundle; and
What feels like a million excerpts and studies on creative expression cause, ya know, that thesis of mine still ain't finished.
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