The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Musings of a Curious Aesthete by Leonard Koren

Leonard Koren’s Musings of a Curious Aesthete reads like the work of a practiced conversationalist who has spent a lifetime whispering provocations into the ear of design and culture. Part memoir, part aesthetic tract, the book collects short, nimble essays that move from recollection to critique with the lightness of a sketchbook and the stubborn insistence of an axiom. It is, in other words, a book by someone who wants you to see differently, not to agree. (Published 2020; illustrated by Marco Koren; Imperfect Publishing.) 

Formally modest — short chapters, aphoristic gestures, occasional cameo anecdotes — Musings models the aesthetic condition it describes. Koren seldom builds grand, cumulative arguments; instead he composes a field of observations, each an insect pinned and labeled, so that a reader can walk the shelf and choose which specimen to examine. This approach is both the book’s greatest asset and its delimitation: the fragmentary form frees him to roam from bathing magazines to wabi-sabi, from the ethics of taste to the dignity of “making nothing,” but it also asks the reader to supply connective tissue. For those who relish lateral thinking, that invitation is a joy; for readers who prefer sustained thesis, it can feel like a refusal. 

What animates Koren’s essays is a persistent preoccupation with the moral texture of beauty. He is neither a naïf nor a cynic about beauty’s powers — he delights in the small, stubborn capacities of an object to alter attention — but he is alert to beauty’s social and ethical contours. Questions recur: when is beauty complicit in harm? when does “good design” erase human particularity? — and Koren’s answers tend toward the skeptical humanism of the practitioner who mistrusts easy prettiness and prizes resilient imperfection. The tone is often mischievous; the judgment, economical. 

Stylistically, Koren is an aesthete who remembers to be clear. His prose is economical, elliptical at moments, aphoristic at others — a language of aside and margin note that privileges insight over ornament. These are essays meant to be reread; they offer more on second pass, not through accumulation of facts but through slow recognition of recurring motifs. The illustrations by Marco Koren are faithful companions: spare, frequently comic, and strategically placed so that image and text tickle one another rather than illustrate in wholesale. 

If the book has a weakness, it is the occasional insularity of its references: Koren writes as someone steeped in design history and magazine culture, and so some asides will land best with readers who can call up the same frames of reference. Yet that insularity is also a virtue — the voice of a practitioner-critic who knows the terrain intimately — and the book’s modest length (roughly 160 pages) keeps the intimacy from calcifying into self-indulgence. 

Ultimately, Musings of a Curious Aesthete succeeds as a manifesto of attention. It does not teach you what to like; it teaches you how to look. For readers who approach objects as moral actors and who delight in the ethical stakes of design, Koren offers a short, pointed education: how to be wary of spectacle, how to value stubborn scarcity, how to accept the quiet heroism of imperfect things. It is a book to return to between projects, a pocket companion for anyone who wants their tastes interrogated rather than confirmed. 

Recommended for designers, writers on aesthetics, and thoughtful readers who enjoy compact, essayistic reflections. If you come to the book seeking a systematic theory, you will be disappointed; if you come prepared to be provoked and charmed in equal measure, you will find Leonard Koren’s curiosity to be contagious.