I’m meant to be writing something else right now. I’m meant to be working on a novel—the novel, the one that’ll kick 2019 off right, attract the attention of an agent, be the first thing with my name on it that people will sit up and notice (or lay back and read; dealer’s choice)—but the thing is just locked up in my head, in rusted, frozen pieces that hit the page like a spill and go nowhere.
2019 hasn’t started off very well, to be honest. I’m anxious and stressed-out and tired, and can’t seem to get my legs under me and get going.
But there are always fits and starts. My hope is that one day, if I can get up enough momentum—enough days of enough pages in a row—the rust won’t have a chance to set in. I ran hot in my early twenties. I got a lot done the year Bird and I lived in Maine. I know it can be done. It’s the doing it that I’m having difficulty with. I was on a roll at the end of December; I was flying. The first of January was like a wall.
So I’m writing this, just to be writing something, and because I’ve been meaning to for awhile. My Grandma Linda gave me the idea last year to write down every book that I read that year, so I could look back at the end and reminisce about a great year’s reading. I think it’s a lovely idea, and I did, and so here is my list of books that I read in 2018. (I’m putting the audiobooks in bold, just because I’m curious. I love audiobooks—they let me read on my long walks to work, and while I’m cleaning and cooking and driving and doing dishes, and I have so many more books in my head than I would otherwise because of them.)
Without further ado, here is Max’s Magnificent 2018 Reading List:
The Book Thief (Markus Zusack)
Sleeping Beauties (Stephen and Owen King)
Misery (Stephen King)
On Writing (Stephen King)
The Dark Half (Stephen King)
Anansi Boys (Neil Gaiman)
Liza of Lambeth (W. Somerset Maugham)
The Hunter (Richard Stark)
After Dark, My Sweet (Jim Thompson)
Babel 17 (Samuel R. Delany)
Fanshawe (Nathaniel Hawthorne)
Dead Street (Mickey Spillane)
Stick (Elmore Leonard)
The Colorado Kid (Stephen King)
Call for the Dead (John le Carré)
Pronto (Elmore Leonard)
A Swell-Looking Babe (Jim Thompson)
The Man With the Getaway Face (Richard Stark)
American Gods: A Full Cast Production (Neil Gaiman)
A Murder of Quality (John le Carré)
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (Lewis Carroll)
Tropic of Cancer (Henry Miller)
We Have Always Lived in the Castle (Shirley Jackson)
Blood and Smoke (Stephen King)
Smoke and Mirrors (Neil Gaiman)
What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (Raymond Carver)
The Curse of Lono (Hunter S. Thompson)
Snuff (Chuck Palaniuhk)
NOS4A2 (Joe Hill)
Big Driver (Stephen King)
Medium Raw (Anthony Bourdain)
The Murder at the Vicarage (Agatha Christie)
Trigger Warning (Neil Gaiman)
The Body in the Library (Agatha Christie)
Soul at the White Heat (Joyce Carol Oates)
The Ball and the Cross (G.K. Chesterton)
Gun Machine (Warren Ellis)
The Thing on the Doorstep and Other Stories (H.P. Lovecraft)
The Corn Maiden and Other Nightmares (Joyce Carol Oates)
Dead Pig Collector (Warren Ellis)
The Exorcist (William Peter Blatty)
The Outfit (Richard Stark)
The Mourner (Richard Stark)
The Score (Richard Stark)
The Jugger (Richard Stark)
Dark Screams Vol. 1 (Various, Stephen King)
Mr. Mercedes (Stephen King)
Eugenics and Other Evils (G.K. Chesterton)
Finder’s Keepers (Stephen King)
Hell House (Richard Matheson)
Jaws (Peter Benchley)
Alone (Loren D. Estleman)
The Compleat Witch (Anton LaVey)
Ellison Wonderland (Harlan Ellison)
Renascence and Other Poems (Edna St. Vincent Millay)
A Few Figs from Thistles (Edna St. Vincent Millay)
The Virgin Suicides (Jeffrey Eugenides)
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)
58 books. Not too bad. One of my New Year’s Resolutions is to beat this number in 2019, with an eye ever on Stephen King’s estimate of the number of books he reads in a year: 70 or 80. Honestly, I’m not even that far off, and given the smoke rising from my well-used library card (tucked safely in its holster on my hip), I might actually manage it this year.
(Especially since Bird and I cancelled our Netflix account this past year, as part of our ongoing war against the screens that seem to be taking control of and eating the lives of most of the people we know. Besides, do you really want “Jane Doe Sure Loved The Great British Bake-Off” on your tombstone?)
I discovered some amazing writers this year: Richard Stark, and his vicious, fast-and-dirty Parker novels; Elmore Leonard, who writes the best dialogue I have ever read, and who has an incredible sense of cool to boot (I’m ripping through his Western novels in the opening days of this new year, consuming them at a pace suspiciously similar to cocaine addiction); Samuel R. Delany, whose Babel-17 made me cry in public on my way to work, and whose delicious luxuriance in language I enjoyed so much that I bought every single Delany book from the shelves of Argos book shop in Grand Rapids (which is a gem, and well-worth the three hours we spent among the dust, and the books, and my favorite smell in the world.
And John le Carré! I read the first two in his series of novels about George Smiley (if you haven’t watched Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, I direct you to it now), and loved them as though they’d been written just for me. Smiley is a spy after my own heart, and le Carré a writer for autumn, when the leaves are only just beginning to turn.
I discovered the melancholy of Edna St. Vincent Millay. The cozy, mug-of-cocoa mysteries—never too harrowing, never too grim—in Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple books.
I discovered Anthony Bourdain the same day the rest of the world lost him, and I’m getting to know him as best I can. Medium Raw felt like a book written for me, which I’m told is common to all of us in the food service industry (along with the book that shook him out of the kitchen and out into the world, Kitchen Confidential, which is on my nightstand right now, waiting for me to get through a handful of Elmore Leonard westerns). He feels like the sort of writer—the sort of person—that I would’ve liked to have walked with all my life, and all I can do now is try to celebrate the pages and frames of him I have, and to remember him with every simmering pot of stock and every emulsion that doesn’t break. Every shot of Fernet Branca that I drink for the rest of my life is a toast to him.
I finally read Jaws (one of the rare cases where the movie is, in fact, better—Benchley seems to care more about interracial sex, marijuana, Helen Brody’s rape fantasies and her cheating on her husband with Matt Hooper than he does about the damn shark, and Brody comes across as a lecherous incompetent until the last third of the book).
I finally read The Exorcist. If you haven’t read it, I recommend you listen to the audiobook that William Peter Blatty recorded for Harper Audio. He does all the voices perfectly (his Pazuzu will haunt your dreams forever), and you really get a feel for how important the cadence of speech is for him, and how much of those rhythms found their way into the 1973 film.
I met Joe Hill. Hill’s been a hero of mine since I read Heart-Shaped Box when I was 20 years old. It was, and is, the scariest book I’d ever read. He signed my third copy (the other two long given gladly away to friends to read), and shook my hand, and talked with me for awhile, and was generally as warm, nice, and cool as you imagine him to be. It was far and away the high point of my year.
I met Loren D. Estleman (because Joe Hill introduced me to him). I’d never heard of him before. I bought one of his books, then checked out three from the library, and now? Now I’m an Estleman addict. If you like detective fiction full of mean streets and hard men, try his Amos Walker books. Start with Motor City Blue. If you like detectives and movies, try the Valentino books. I missed the first book somehow, and started with Alone, listening to it on a long drive up to the Upper Peninsula to see my family. It was the perfect companion for my run through the pines and the hills and the early autumn sun. Whatever you do, though, read an Estleman book this year. As a man, he was funny and friendly and fast as a gunslinger’s draw in conversation. As a writer, he’s pure goddamn gold.
Well, would you look at that.
Our snoring Texas Terrier, or: a big furry bunch of my heart.
Sitting here in the dark of my living room, folk music drifting from the corner by the windows where Bird is researching blood root and hellebore, Trinity curled and snoring softly next to me on the smaller sofa, reliving the memories of the books I read in 2018, I feel better. I feel good.
That’s why I do this: that’s why I write. Because of the power books have on me. Because of the way writing and reading makes me feel. Writing back through the books I read last year is like talking to a long string of old friends again, walking old conversations and old familiar roads. And the best part is knowing how many stories there are left to read. More than ever I could read in a lifetime. In a hundred hundred lifetimes.
Not that that’ll stop me from trying.