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  • Daily Rituals

  • How Artists Work
  • By: Mason Currey
  • Narrated by: Adam Verner
  • Length: 6 hrs and 13 mins
  • 4.1 out of 5 stars (183 ratings)
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Daily Rituals cover art

Daily Rituals

By: Mason Currey
Narrated by: Adam Verner
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Summary

Franz Kafka, frustrated with his living quarters and day job, wrote in a letter to Felice Bauer in 1912, "time is short, my strength is limited, the office is a horror, the apartment is noisy, and if a pleasant, straightforward life is not possible then one must try to wriggle through by subtle maneuvers."

Kafka is one of 161 inspired - and inspiring - minds, among them, novelists, poets, playwrights, painters, philosophers, scientists, and mathematicians, who describe how they subtly maneuver the many (self-inflicted) obstacles and (self-imposed) daily rituals to get done the work they love to do, whether by waking early or staying up late; whether by self-medicating with doughnuts or bathing, drinking vast quantities of coffee, or taking long daily walks.

Thomas Wolfe wrote standing up in the kitchen, the top of the refrigerator as his desk, dreamily fondling his "male configurations..."

Jean-Paul Sartre chewed on Corydrane tablets (a mix of amphetamine and aspirin), ingesting ten times the recommended dose each day...

Descartes liked to linger in bed, his mind wandering in sleep through woods, gardens, and enchanted palaces where he experienced "every pleasure imaginable."

Here are: Anthony Trollope, who demanded of himself that each morning he write three thousand words (250 words every fifteen minutes for three hours) before going off to his job at the postal service, which he kept for thirty-three years during the writing of more than two dozen books...Karl Marx...Woody Allen...Agatha Christie...George Balanchine, who did most of his work while ironing...Leo Tolstoy...Charles Dickens...Pablo Picasso...George Gershwin, who, said his brother Ira, worked for twelve hours a day from late morning to midnight, composing at the piano in pajamas, bathrobe, and slippers...

Here also are the daily rituals of Charles Darwin, Andy Warhol, John Updike, Twyla Tharp, Benjamin Franklin, William Faulkner, Jane Austen, Anne Rice, and Igor Stravinsky (he was never able to compose unless he was sure no one could hear him and, when blocked, stood on his head to "clear the brain").

Brilliantly compiled and edited, and filled with detail and anecdote, Daily Rituals is irresistible, addictive, and magically inspiring.

©2013 Mason Currey (P)2013 Timothy Ferriss

What listeners say about Daily Rituals

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  • Overall
    1 out of 5 stars
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    3 out of 5 stars
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    1 out of 5 stars

Disjointed bombardment

This book will document a famous creative person by choosing there quirky traits, they would only write standing up/lying down or something, and then writing maybe a page or half a page about them, and then moving on. It was like top trumps for artists. There was absolutely no structure/curation that I could comprehend. Imagine it takes 2 mins to cover one persons quirks. Now imagine the length of the book decided by 2mins and thats how the book is structured. Its torture. I think you buy this book in its paperback copy for your daughter who is studying art and like a magazine they can flick through and find interesting facts but reading from start to finish is unpleasant. so it doesn't work on audio. Even then you think they would put sections of writers, sections of musicians or categorise it creatively. but its just hours and hours of disjointed un related bombardment. The author has no function. They don't even introduce or draw out lessons, or themes, or contextualise anything. They just report the stats exactly as they researched them and move on the next. Avoid.

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9 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    3 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    1 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    3 out of 5 stars

Eek! Quality check please!

Great collection of the quirky behaviours and habits of our heroes and heroines spanning many centuries. Only problem being the DIRE pronunciation throughout! Audible: please get a good quality checker! Ruins an otherwise perfectly good, informative listen.

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8 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    2 out of 5 stars

Is there an editor in the house?

The premise of this book is great. It is however not very consistent in its research. The publishers should have considered the subject matter more before they chose the narrator. It clearly called for someone who can pronounce French words... And don't get me started on some of the British names that were absolutely slaughtered. Still, this is a little light listening gem.

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5 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    2 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    4 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    2 out of 5 stars

Nothing of value

This book contains a lot of small anecdotes about famous writers and musicians and how they planned and managed their creative efforts. This sounds interesting but each anecdote is only 2 to 5 minutes long and often based on testemony of friends and family. This book will not help or inspire you to establish or improve your own creative cycle and after having listened the first hour the book gets boring and reptetive. 2 to 5 minutes equals to a lot of uninteresting chapters. No analysis or philosophic contemplations but just matter of factual descriptions of daily schedules like "he wroke up around 8.30, had breakfast with his family around 9 oclock, played or wrote for 3 hours and had lunch with a friend around 12.30, etc." Some of the stories has been spiced up with information about the artists vices and homosexual relationships but nothing that will help ypu understand the creative cycle or add value to your own creative efforts.

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2 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    3 out of 5 stars

Excellent insight to the "creative class"

Where does Daily Rituals rank among all the audiobooks you’ve listened to so far?

Definitly in the top two.

Would you recommend Daily Rituals to your friends? Why or why not?

Yes. This audiobook cmae just at the right time. I was just going part time and freaking out a bit about not having a stable routine. I learned fom rthis book an idea of how to set out on a day of writing.

Which character – as performed by Adam Verner – was your favourite?

Twyla Tharp

Did you have an emotional reaction to this book? Did it make you laugh or cry?

Beethovans habits made me Laugh!

Any additional comments?

Any creative person or curisous person wanting to know what the "greats" did? Buy this audiobook.

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1 person found this helpful

  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    3 out of 5 stars

Difficult to take away from

Would you recommend this audiobook to a friend? If so, why?

I would recommend this to a friend who struggles with finding the time to write. It provides a lot of reassurance to the aspiring writer that successful writers throughout history have struggled with, and worked around the same difficulties.

Would you be willing to try another book from Mason Currey? Why or why not?

Its hard to take away from this book any great observations about the writer, beyond my feeling that this is a lovely theme upon which to base a book.
I would have liked the book to go into more depth on certain writers and artists, to give more psychological analysis, to work out the deep reasons behind their work methods.

However I wouldn't have thought this was an inadequacy of the writer, but more a lack of available evidence about each author.

I think he could have tried to organize the writer profiles into his own themed chapters as it was difficult to identify any particular themes, as there was no coherent order to the way in which the book way laid out.

What does Adam Verner bring to the story that you wouldn’t experience if you had only read the book?

I found his voice quite hard to follow, but i think this could be due to the repetitive layout of the artist profiles.

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1 person found this helpful

  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    5 out of 5 stars

The perfect audiobook

A beautifully narrated book full of short insightful glimpses into the work habits of the great and the good.

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  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    5 out of 5 stars

Great kaleidoscope of rituals

Unbelievable how the habits of so many artists were distilled down into, usually, just a few sentences about each one.
Even more surprising is how different those rituals are. And this shows one, very important thing: there's no "one" way to achieve things, to get creative work done. Every one needs to experiment and find one's own way. Sometimes it will be close to what we usually think - wake up early, get some sunlight, move a bit, focus for a long time. But for some it will be creative chaos that will work the best.
The book shows it great, how everyone is different.

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  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    5 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars

A personal favourite

I've listened to this one so many times, absolutely love these little snippets of moments from some of the greats.

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  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars

My favourite audio book.

I’ve listened to this more than any other audio book. It’s well written and well read. I’m an artist myself and it’s nice to be able to listen to something you can relate to. It’s fascinating.

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