Daily Rituals: How Artists Work

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.

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.

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.

Definitly in the top two.

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.

Twyla Tharp

Beethovans habits made me Laugh!

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

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.

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.

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

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.

All routines described in this book are fascinating. It is clear that each artist had some sort of internal resistance for the muse to realise itself thru their work. It was mostly a painful experience. Each artist had developed a routine, taboos, rituals and processes to overcome this internal hurdle to keep creating.
I really enjoyed the narration by Adam Vernet, it was very captivating. Overall this book made me feel more human and humble.

Amazing to hear the variations and similarities in people's work habits, which gives me faith to continue on the journey to my ideal, offbeat routine.

Really nice to have in the background while doing errands. However I wouldn't list it as a favourite. Didn't have me riveted but it made for some interesting conversation starters around friends.

The book gives a fascinating snap shot of the lives of diverse creative people. It feels a bit like a cut and paste job but nonetheless interesting and at times, inspiring.

There are many howlers in terms of the pronunciation and French words are read like a caricature. I'm not sure why they can't have some quality control there.

Each piece can be brief and they fly by when you listen so as an audiobook it doesn't entirely work. It's a book which would be good to browse now and then.