I did a lot of reading this past year, but then I did a
lot of reading last year; it's kinda my thing. But I feel like noting some of
the memorable reading experiences I had this year. Some books that I read were
great or good; others weren't so much whether I finished them or threw them
away after reading only a few pages. Here then are just a few of the books that
took up valuable time that could be spent otherwise.
Let me begin with where last year ended, with my purchase
of Moby Dick by Herman Melville. In terms of "things to cross off my
bucket list book-wise," this was massive (I also want to tackle the great
Russian writers someday, but not today). For such a weighty tome with a
difficult reputation, the book proved surprisingly fast-paced and easy to get
through, even though it took me six months of on-off reading. And yes, the
white whale is just that, a whale...unless it isn't.
Charles Portis has been a recent addition to my personal
canon of "authors whose every word I must read" (the others being Graham
Greene and Walker Percy). I came across a copy of the great-if-obscure The Dog
Of the South at a used bookstore (this was a great year for me to indulge in my
pursuit of bookstores to spend money at, as my groaning shelves would attest).
Speaking of Greene, his last novel The Captain and the Enemy goes on the list
of "well, now I can say I read it." It's not up to The Power And the
Glory, but it'll do as a last statement from the writer whom I've come to
believe wrote more truthfully about the twentieth century than anyone else.
And speaking of Percy, Lancelot is a fantastically
twisted mindfuck of a novel. I heartily recommend you seek it out.
So far, the list is a lot of books that didn't come out
this calendar year; older books caught my fancy at used bookstores (the 2013
books weren't likely to be there, except as just-slightly-less-than-retail
prices). Don DeLillo is someone whose works I've only taken nips and tucks at
before, apart from a college assignment to read White Noise. Great Jones Street
was the first book of his I've read for fun all the way through; it will not be
the last. Saul Bellow is similarly someone whose work has yet to interest me
enough to seek it out, but I came across Humboldt's Gift for a buck at a
library book sale and decided it was worth it. David Foster Wallace is a
Melville for our time, in that he wrote a book with a reputation for gargatuan
heights of literary fancy (Infinite Jest). I decided to stick with something a
little easier to digest, a short book he co-wrote about hip-hop circa 1990.
Signifying Rappers may not have always made sense (especially with its
dismissal of the early Beastie Boys), but it was one of the best music books to
read when it was reissued this year.
Music played a big role in four of the books I read this
year that did in fact come out this year: Questlove had the most interesting
musician's memoir in Mo Meta Blues, while Rob Sheffield continued his trilogy
of music-as-conduit-for-memoir with Turn Around Bright Eyes. Nathan Rabin went
on the road with ICP and Phish in You Don't Know Me But You Don't Like Me,
while Chuck Klosterman took on the notion of villainy in pop culture with I
Wear the Black Hat. Sports also played a role in my reading this year: Phil
Jackson's Eleven Rings lead me to his previous memoir Sacred Hoops. Basketball
also played a role in the best deal I've ever scored at a Goodwill store: Bill
Bradley's Life On the Run for ten cents. Bradley and Jackson were both part of
the early-Seventies Knicks dynasty, and for some reason that's been my favorite
basketball team to read about lately. Bradley could've been president; Jackson
did become the coach with the most championship rings in NBA history. Football
is another sport I like reading about, and even though he went to the much-hated-in-my-heart
Georgia Tech, Bill Curry wrote possibly the best football book I've ever read
in Ten Men You Meet In the Huddle.
I like to read books in fits and spurts, but sometimes a
good one gets going and before you know it, the clock on the wall is several
hours past where you thought it was. I read Robert Hilburn's Corn Flakes with
John Lennon in a day. Same with Elmore Leonard's 52 Pick-Up (I picked it up
after Leonard's death; I can be a bit of a literary necrophiliac when someone
famous whose work I've never read dies). James Watson's The Double Helix went
by quickly, too, though I think I let it rest a night before I finished it. I
took a week to enjoy Richard Ford's The Sportswriter. Will Leitch's God Save
the Fan was a bargain find at a bookstore where I enjoy a good streak of luck,
as was Will In the World, a biography of Shakespeare that is worth seeking out.
Pat Conroy came back around into my life, almost twenty
years after I had to read The Prince of Tides and tried briefly to get through
his other novels. My Losing Season (about his stint as a Citadel cadet and
basketball player) was informed by the evolution of his relationship with his
abusive father, while My Reading Life was about a shared passion with myself
(books and bookstores). It was a kick to see a familiar name (Bill Koon, one of
my favorite professors at Clemson) mentioned in Reading Life, strumming a
guitar around Paris in the Seventies.
Not everything I read was bought; my worn-out library
card can attest to that. I read a Shakespearen take on Star Wars: A New Hope,
Larry McMurtry's interesting Walter Benjamin At the Dairy Queen, Kierkegaard's
Fear and Trembling, and many more. Probably the biggest thrill for me was
getting Thomas Pynchon's Bleeding Edge and then finding myself powering through
neary five hundred pages of paranoia, conspiracy theories, and
private-detective genre fiction in less than a week. It's easily my pick for
book of the year.
Finally, a book that was a gift: Lester Bangs' Psychotic
Reactions and Carburetor Dung. If there is a patron saint of rock criticism,
Bangs is it: his back-and-forth with the now sadly deceased Lou Reed is
indicative of the love-hate relationship we all have with our favorite artists
in whatever medium. For sheer exuberence with just a hint of chemical
assistance, he's hard to beat. No one can really ever write like him, but I'd
like to think that someday an anthology of my most misbegotten Internet work
over the years (much of that done on websites that are defunct now, but I'm sure
that nothing ever gets lost online) can be cobbled together and put together in
an attractive fashion (preferably while I'm still alive; posthumous literary
fame isn't really something I'd aspire to). Writing about music is something I
enjoy doing (obviously), and I hope I can make a living at it or at least
indulge in it as a distraction from some of the more mundane aspects of modern
life. Lester Bangs got a shout-out on one of R.E.M.'s best songs; it's hard to
beat that.
My apologies to any authors whose work I've left out (now
I feel like I'm getting the wrap-it-up cue) but you know who you are, whether
your books helped me get through the year or whether they just wasted my time
for a brief period. As long as I can remember, I've been a reader, and I don't
see much of a chance of me hitting Literacy Rehab any time soon. It's an
addiction, to be sure, but it's probably one of the healthier ones.
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