Sketching Along with Jill Lepore

I like audiobooks, especially since there is a good selection of them at either the Yolo County Library or, even better, the Sacramento Public Library, which any California resident can join. I can knit complex patterns because the narrative isn’t competing with a chart (though I do pause the audio when I’m counting stitches!).

I’ve been reading Jill Lepore’s The Deadline, a collection of essays read by the author, always a pleasure. (It’s great that they know WHERE to put an inflection, and where the emotion of a memory cracks the author’s voice.) Lepore is a historian at Harvard and has a knack for capturing events past and present succinctly and intelligently, but even more, is good at capturing the feeling, the zeitgeist, that gives rise to these events.

I drew these sketches while Lepore was reading her essay about gun control and the power of the National Rifle Association, sitting at a café in downtown Davis; I found the four-leaf clover on the way home.