Richard Serra's 10 Favorite Books at T: The New York Times Style Magazine

Want to create mind-bendingly cool sculptures like Richard Serra? You might consider exploring his reading list, which includes poetry by Paul Celan, Harold Bloom's The Anxiety of Influence, Joseph Brodsky's On Grief and Reason, and Pessoa's The Book of Disquiet (our favorite summer beach read, sigh). We'll get you started with the first four books on the list:

“Self-Reliance and Other Essays,” Ralph Waldo Emerson

I read “Self-Reliance” when I was 17 as an undergraduate at UC Berkeley in the ’50s. In this short essay, Emerson takes a stance against conformity and insists on trusting your own judgment, on finding your own path, on living in the present and augmenting what is unique to your own character. These are the principles that have shaped my life and work.

“Camera Lucida,” Roland Barthes

What I find interesting in Barthes’s “Camera Lucida” is the distinction he makes between studium — what anyone recognizes at first glance as the general content of a photograph — and punctum, a very personal emotion or desire evoked by a detail in that same photograph. It is a switch from the objectification of the reproduction on a piece of paper to a purely subjective connection.

“Six Memos for the Next Millennium,” Italo Calvino

This small publication of Calvino’s Charles Eliot Norton lectures given at Harvard in 1985 is divided into five topics: lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility and multiplicity. Each essay is insightful and poetic, lyrical, a joy to read and reread, an enduring primer for me.

“On Grief and Reason,” Joseph Brodsky

“Grief and Reason” is the book I most often return to. It contemplates death as it has been presented in prose and poetry over the ages. The book continually asks the question of whether loss creates a sense of self or destroys it. It also poses the question of whether loss or mourning can bring forth a new artistic language.

Continue at The New York Times.