The Great Unread

Listen, sometimes it’s just a lot. Modern life. Job hunting. Job getting.

(Of which I am, luckily, in the latter camp these days.)

And so the bellyaching of a 55 year old will have to hold its mud for another couple weeks while I instead decant my mental mustiness by way of exploring the To Read pile.

Which has grown out of proportion.

While I have enjoyed, of late, two Dan Simmons novels, The Terror and Carrion Comfort, and a re-read of Blood Meridian to remind me how small and infinitesimal I am, and both David Foster Wallace essay collections because I’m super basic, I am faced with what to pull from the To Read pile as it teeters positively over leeward.

Wool is the first of the books in the Silo series, which I know about mostly because apparently Rebecca Ferguson is in it, and she is a marker of quality in the entertainment world these days. The Night Market is by Jonathan Moore, who wrote Five Decembers as James Kestrel, which was absolutely one of my favorite novels of the past 5 years, give or take, and so I want to explore his named books.

Colson Whitehead’s Zone One has remained untouched despite it being a high-falutin’ Literature Take On Zombies, which is like catnip to me. And The Wager is just one of those books that it seems everyone was reading, and having downed several Grann books, including The Lost City of Z and the Sherlock Holmes society one, it seemed like I needed to dig into this Erik Larson-but-possibly-better.

On Monsters should be self-explanatory.

The To Read Pile has some rules. First, only one book per author, as I have multiple Martin Amis and Henning Mankel books, but could only pick one for this purpose. Secondly, apparently this doesn’t apply to Elizabeth Kostova.

The themes are clear across the books: horror, dudes talking about being dudes, shipwrecks, classics that I have not yet read, noir, and Terry Pratchett.

I don’t know this The Case Against Satan, but I got it because the Penguin Classics thing is a whole sign of quality, and it had Satan in the name. That’s enough, sometimes.

Alan Moore’s Illuminations I have because, despite his fiction narrative work being substantively too wordy and over-written for me, it has a particularly razor-sharp jab at the comic book industry in the story “What We Can Know About Thunderman,” which The Guardian describes as “savage” and therefore tops my to-read pile.

Frederick Exley’s A Fan’s Notes was a birthday gift from a friend a long time ago and for some reason I never read it, mostly because I got a couple pages in and realized it was dealing with sports in some capacity, interest in which I have none. However! I know it’s supposedly a great book and so I am going to tackle it again.

My wife read Victim by Andrew Boryga and said I need to read it, so there.

The Historian is apparently a new take on the Dracula story. As a writing coach I spoke with Friday told me, NOBODY needs a new vampire book. But maybe I do.

Thomas Pynchon. V. Yeah, I’ll try that one again. I guarantee I will get to Philip George Chadwick’s unsung Science Fiction classic The Death Guard before I get to V. (Note: I had no idea this book is going for nearly $300 on Amazon)

Same for Faulkner, because I really tried hard to read The Sound And The Fury this past week but I got to the end of the first Benjy section and I realized that a stream of consciousness novel about nihilistic despair in a Southern family was not what my brain needs at this particular junction of my life.

Aleister Crowley is there because it was at the thrift shop and why not?

Ordinary Monsters and Chasing the Boogeyman were highly rated and on the sale table at Barnes and Noble, and so may they reign.

My friend Larry said I really need to tackle Martin Amis, so I got a whole stack of his books off eBay and I haven’t started any of them, and so here we are. Kentucky Straight, meanwhile, was a straight-up recommendation via Substack. The first story involves a dog getting its legs broke, though, so I put that one back up. Not sure I’ll steel myself to dive in again.

I’ve seen Walter Mosley movies, like Devil In A Blue Dress, and I’ve read his Marvel Comics mini-series tackling the Fantastic Four’s The Thing (no, really). But I haven’t read this one, White Butterfly.

Ira Levin, same - saw the movie, haven’t read the book.

Chuck Wendig is funny on social media so I need to read one of his touted horror novels.

Look, another Jonathan Moore book. I am a riddle wrapped in an enigma.

John Wyndham wrote The Day of the Triffids, so here is a paperback of The Seeds of Time which apparently is quite legendary stuff in the science fiction world, and so it sits in its peculiar plastic collector’s bag because someone thought it had value beyond the contents of its pages.

I gave away my copy of Good Omens with all the Neil Gaiman bashing. I don’t normally get involved in such bashing, but then I saw a documentary about Gaiman, and the narrative throughline of the entire doc is that he has to keep putting his hand in water because he’s SIGNING SO MANY AUTOGRAPHS. And so, yeah, not great.

But I’ll try this Amazing Maurice thing by Pratchett because it appears to be about a cat and his rodent pals and written in Pratchett’s signature dry-funny Brit voice.

The bottom of the stack is of course the non fiction section with the Dreaming Out Loud and This Is Your Brain On Music twins, who look so similar typographically it feels like I need to read them in some sort of order.

And then Influenced so I understand with some degree of book-learnin’ how social media is destroying me and everything I love.

And then finally Lopate’s massive Art of the Personal Essay to remind me that this sort of list-making newslettering is in-no-way an effective use of my creative acumen and I am lazy for doing this.

My apologies.

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I will be better next week.

Get in touch at nicholas@areyouexperienced.co