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While I can't vouch for anything beyond Just Kids (which is spectacular), here are some other ferociously good reads on the lives of artists:

* Ernest Hemingway - A moveable feast

* David Lipsky - Of course you end up becoming yourself

* David Sylvester - Interviews with Francis Bacon

Hemingway agrees:

"I had learned already never to empty the well of my writing, but always to stop when there was still something there in the deep part of the well, and let it refill at night from the springs that fed it." -A Moveable Feast

A Moveable Feast is another good one from Hemingway with themes that strike me as oddly similar the millennial generation.

Just hoping I can’t say the same thing about Steinbeck’s books in the next few years.

Slouching Towards Bethlehem (Joan Didion)

Flowers for Algernon (Daniel Keyes)

The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds (Paul Zindel)

The Things They Carried (Tim O' Brien)

This Side of Paradise (F. Scott Fitzgerald)

Something Wicked This Way Comes (Ray Bradbury)
Essentially a children's sci-fi novel, but it doesn't read that way.

A Moveable Feast (Ernest Hemingway)

My personal favorite (along with his short stories, which I highly recommend), but if it's your first time reading Hemingway, might be better to go with The Sun Also Rises.

Revolutionary Road (Richard Yates)

On the Road (Jack Kerouac)
*One of my personal favorites, but most people either love or hate it, so maybe save this towards the end.

On my own reading list:

Speedboat (Renata Adler)

Money (Martin Amis)

Love in the Time of Cholera (Gabriel Garcia Marquez)

I can't provide exactly what you're looking for, but I would disagree with outright repetition as a means of learning to do any kind of writing. If you repeat bad practices due to inexperience you will be training to a bad job with confidence. Hemingway said that being a good writer means being a dedicated reader and that reading is the activity of training to write (heavily paraphrased from A Moveable Feast). If you want to write good technical documentation, there is nothing that will prepare you as well as experiencing the difference between good and bad examples. If you can get your hands on some real-world examples of what you want to write then you will develop a critical eye as you read them. I am sure that there are some that would make you eager to throw your money in the ring and there are probably some that would embarrass you if you were a part of the pitch.

For a more minute suggestion, look into cognitive ease and how it is affected by language (Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman is a personal and HN favorite). If you are trying to be persuasive, don't use weird words like people do when they are writing their first resume, forgo words that you have trouble pronouncing and use jargon judiciously to inspire a positive and confident reaction.

Also, here's a Quora thread[1] that suggests the exact opposite approach and also gives a book recommendation. While I disagree with that advice it may not matter because, as pointed out there, these documents are proprietary.

1. https://www.quora.com/Where-can-I-view-real-world-business-p...

Which Hemingway would you like?

You know how it is there early in the morning in Havana with the bums still asleep against the walls of the buildings; before even the ice wagons come by with ice for the bars?
- To Have and Have Not

He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish.
- The Old Man and the Sea

Then there was the bad weather.
- A Moveable Feast

In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plains to the mountains.
- A Farewell to Arms

Robert Cohn was once the middleweight boxing champion of Princeton.
- Fiesta: The Sun Also Rises

Each one of those opening sentences asks more questions.

Is that really what it was like in Havana?
Why hasn't he caught fish for so long?
Where was the weather bad?
Which river, plains and mountains?
Why did his boxing career stop at Princeton?

I do enjoy Hemingway, but especially I find his opening lines compelling.

I hope that someday cafe culture makes a comeback. As much as I love sitting in a cafe working on my laptop, the current iteration of cafes is but a pale imitation of what they were in the past.

Revolutions were plotted, art movements invented, and history made in places like Cafe Central in Vienna. I recommend reading literature from the 1880s-1930s to get a sense of how important they were for the time period. A Moveable Feast by Hemingway is a good start.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coffee_culture

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coffeehouse

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Café_Central

By the way, for anyone who's interested, Hemingway was not only a syntactic minimalist (i.e. using simple language) but also a semantic minimalist -- he chose to leave things out of his stories, which he likened to icebergs, where only the top is visible, but whose bulk can be inferred if the writer has done his job properly -- this is his so-called "Iceberg Theory" of writing [0]:

In 1923, Hemingway conceived of the idea of a new theory of writing after finishing his short story "Out of Season". In A Moveable Feast, his posthumously published memoirs about his years as a young writer in Paris, he explains: "I omitted the real end [of "Out of Season"] which was that the old man hanged himself. This was omitted on my new theory that you could omit anything ... and the omitted part would strengthen the story." In chapter sixteen of Death in the Afternoon he compares his theory about writing to an iceberg.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iceberg_Theory#Definition

For those that enjoy this story, I'd strongly recommend A Moveable Feast, Hemingway's autobiographical tale of his time in Paris. It feels more "real" coming from him directly, even though he claims that much of it is fiction.

He specifically speaks mournfully about loving two women at the same time, and it's clear in the writing how much it impacted him -- even many years later. A Moveable Feast is the last thing Hemingway wrote before he took his own life.

>Hemingway - I read just The Old Man and the Sea (or actually was forced in school to read it) - and this was a short novel about basically nothing, boring as it can be

I'm not sure why schools tend to fixate on that particular work. Hemingway may not be to your taste anyway but I much prefer A Farewell to Arms, A Moveable Feast, many of his short stories, etc.

Most recommended:

- Ted Chiang - Stories of Your Life and Others.

- Lawrence Weschler - Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees. A quality biography of Robert Irwin based on interviews over decades, and helps you learn to appreciate minimalist art to boot.

- Jane Austen - Pride and Prejudice

- Kurt Vonnegut - Breakfast of Champions

- Burton G. Malkiel - A Random Walk Down Wall Street

- Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie - Americanah. Saw myself in several of these characters

- Nikos Kazantzakis - Zorba the Greek

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Also good:

- Jack London - John Barleycorn: Alcoholic Memoirs. Illustrates all of the interesting ways in which a person is tempted to drink: when someone else buys you one, when it's cold outside, ...

- Danny Bowien - The Mission Chinese Food Cookbook. Lots of stories between the recipes.

- David Byrne - How Music Works

- Meg Jay - The Defining Decade

- Ernest Hemingway - A Moveable Feast

- Magdalena Droste - Bauhaus 1919-1933

- Arimasa Osawa - Shinjuku Shark

- Zadie Smith - Changing My Mind

- Chinua Achebe - Things Fall Apart

- Oscar Wilde - The Picture of Dorian Gray

- Marie Kondo - The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up

- Haruki Murakami - The Strange Library. A fifteen minute read.

- Tim Ferriss - The Four-Hour Workweek. Good tactics for saving time; bad business advice.

- Kurt Vonnegut - Cat's Cradle

- John Berger - Ways of Seeing

* The Unconsoled (Kazuo Ishiguro)

* Never Let Me Go (Kazuo Ishiguro)

* Influx (Daniel Suarex)

* Sputnik Sweetheart (Haruki Murakami)

* Apex (Ramez Naam)

* One Second After (William R. Forstchen)

* Anna Karanina (Leo Tolstoy)

* Neuromancer (William Gibson)

* A Farewell to Arms (Ernest Hemingway)

* Crux (Ramez Naam)

* A Moveable Feast (Ernest Hemingway)

* Hardboiled Wonderland and The End of the World (Haruki Murakami)