I rarely read critical reviews of fiction. The main
reason is, simply, I only have so many hours on this planet and I’d rather read
a new book than someone’s opinion on a book (and at the end of the day, no
matter how well-reasoned, any criticism of fiction is subjective. Non-fiction
is another ball o’ wax.) This is not to say I think critical reviews of fiction
don’t have a place. They do. At their best, they can bring a whole different
context to the work in question, provoking questions and viewpoints you’d never
thought of. In academia, I would imagine they are essential. For students, they
help build a structure of critical thinking, something that is eroding way too
fast in western society of late.
But they can also be pretentious, ludicrous, and force
weight on a story that was never meant for any purpose beyond entertainment.
And in this they can be dangerous—they can turn people away from reading for
pleasure. Too often, they reflect the author’s biases and adopt a tone of
condensation that reveals the author’s insecurity and apparent need for vindication
or, at the worst, ego-stroking. It’s a strange hill to want to be king (or
queen) of, but to each their own. For me, as a both a voracious reader and
sometimes creative writer, the only question that matters is: did I dig it?
This can take many forms, from a breezy read that leaves as soon as I close the
book but gave me joy while reading to a read that makes me uncomfortable,
challenges me, and sticks in my mind long after. Both experiences and the
ground between are essential. It’s not an either/or.
The review as a promotional tool—essentially a function
of the marketplace—is altogether different. I read these reviews to get a sense
of what the story is about, which is necessary since I only have a few friends
who read in the areas I do and book discovery is a consistent challenge. I
generally discard the opinion of the review (unless it’s one of the
aforementioned friends or, on occasion, an author list I find intriguing) and
do my best to read between the lines and get a feel for whether I want to check
the book out or not. I almost never write reviews, because one man’s trash is
another’s treasure (though I do on occasion, when I think even the tiny signal
boost of a Goodreads review might aid discovery.) What works for me may—even
likely—doesn’t work for you. Which isn’t to say I’m not full of opinions about
what I read (or watch, or listen to.) I just recognize that those opinions
don’t reflect anything deeper than my reaction to the work in question.
I quite enjoy looking over what I’ve read each year. This
is the third year I’ve written scattered thoughts on the year’s reading (you
can find
year
one here and
year
two here) and I hope you enjoy it. These are just the random opinions of a
guy who loves to read and sometimes picks up a pen and throws a few words onto
the paper. Nothing more, and if we could discuss these or other titles over a
beer someday, well, that’s the best way to have the discussion, no?
But you are far away and I’m here, so words on
a screen it must be.
Read in 2016 (plus a couple from late December 2015)
The Troop, Nick
Cutter
Thinking Horror: A
Journal of Horror Philosophy, Volume 1
The Martian
Chronicles, Ray Bradbury
Collected Works, Flannery
O’Connor
From Hell, Alan
Moore and Eddie Campbell
The Case Against
Satan, Ray Russell
The Dark Country, Dennis
Etchison
Broken Mirrors/Broken
Minds: The Dark Dreams of Dario Argento, Maitland McDonagh
Space Chronicles:
Facing the Ultimate Frontier, Neil deGrasse Tyson
A Head Full of
Ghosts, Paul Tremblay
The Visible Filth, Nathan
Ballingrud
Smoke Gets in Your
Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory, Caitlin Doughty
Last Days, Adam
Nevill
Furnace, Livia
Llewellyn
Facing the Other
Way: The Story of 4AD, Martin Aston
2666, Roberto
Bolano
Trouble Boys: The
True Story of the Replacements, Bob Mehr
The Brief Wondrous
Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Díaz
The Dark Domain, Stefan
Grabiński
Season of the
Witch: Enchantment, Terror and Deliverance in the City of Love, David
Talbot
The Fireman, Joe
Hill
Lesser Demons, Norman
Partridge
The Shrinking Man, Richard
Matheson
End of Watch, Stephen
King
The Last Final
Girl, Stephen Graham Jones
Mongrels, Stephen
Graham Jones
Hex, Thomas
Olde Heuvelt
The City of
Mirrors, Justin Cronin
Strange
Fascination: David Bowie: The Definitive Story, David Buckley
The Nameless Dark:
A Collection, T.E. Grau
After Dark, Haruki
Murakami
Disappearance at
Devil’s Rock, Paul Tremblay
The Elementals, Michael
McDowell
Satanic Panic:
Pop-Culture Paranoia in the 80’s
The Talisman, Stephen
King and Peter Straub
My Damage: The
Story of a Punk Rock Survivor, Keith Morris
The Spider
Tapestries, Mike Allen
The Lure of
Devouring Light, Michael Griffin
Burnt Black Suns, Simon
Strantzas
Enter Night, Michael
Rowe
Every House is
Haunted, Ian Rogers
The Brief History
of the Dead, Kevin Brockmeier
Concrete Island, J.G.
Ballard
Slaughterhouse-Five,
Kurt Vonnegut
Damn, that’s a long list. I’m surprised, considering what
a difficult year it was on a personal level. Reading is as essential as
breathing. Support your local library, my friends.
The Two Most Important Books I Read in 2016
While I read many fine, enjoyable books this year, two
titles loom above all in terms of emotional impact, provoking thought and
spiritual contemplation. These two books—one fiction, one
non-fiction—encapsulate the craft and art of the written word at its most
transformative. I read both early in the year, and all these months later they
still echo and reverberate in my head and my heart.
Every year I read at least one long, intensive and, for
lack of a better term, literary novel. And each year I give thanks that such
novels still exist, because I honestly don’t know who the audience, beyond
possibly a handful of academics a few freaks like me, for these books are.
Books that tackle all the chaos, past and present, of our sprawling, messy world
and chase after the grand themes of life are a hard sell with the decline of
the novel’s cultural impact. And yet Robert Bolano spent the last days of his
life writing 2666 and left the world
with an ostensibly unfinished, first draft of a book that no single writer
could touch today even if they spent years woodshedding.
2666 is angry.
It is sad. It is hilarious. It is political. It is existential. It is grounded
in the everyday and completely abstract. It is hard to read and impossible to
put down. It is a seething mass of contradictions. It contains multitudes. It
has more to say about the disposableness of life, the passion of the heart and
creativity than anything I’ve read in…I don’t know, I can’t even think of what
other work you’d compare this novel to. Honestly, I’ve been trying to think of
what to say about this book for ten months now and I’m still at a loss.
There are five sections to the novel, and they are
handily labeled as such: The Part about the Critics, The Part about Amalfitano,
The Part about Fate, The Part about the Crimes and The Part about Archimboldi.
All are brilliant, but The Part about the Crimes is the hardest to read, the
most politically-charged and angry piece of fiction I’ve read in years, and it
accomplishes this without hectoring, without a lecture, leaving you despondent
at how we fail those whose lives are on the margins (it covers, in a barely
fictional sheen, the
female
homicides in Ciudad Juárez where an estimated 370 women and girls have been
violently murdered or disappeared since 1993. I had never heard of these crimes
until I read this book and was devastated to learn that they are real—and
ongoing.) For as harrowing as this section is, it is but one part in a larger
tapestry—the book is circular, the connections tenuous and incidental, one
story spinning into the next. I was enraged, I cried and I laughed. Is it a
messy book? Yes, tremendously so. And yet the rawness of the first draft
carries an emotional weight and power that I’m not sure could have withstood
polishing and organization. For some, writing is about craft. For others, it is
about the story. For the rare few, it is an absolute expression of their soul
and the soul of the worlds they inhabit. That is what
2666 is, and if this book was discussed in the living rooms of
America, we’d live in a different world. Great writing doesn’t belong tucked
away in dusty classrooms. It lives, breathes and seethes with our daily struggle
to live and rise above our personal faults and the failures of our systems.
Smoke Gets in Your
Eyes & Other Lessons from the Crematory is a memoir of one woman’s
journey through the death industry in the United States. A large part of the
book covers her first job working in a crematorium and extends into a powerful
meditation on the funerary practices and culture in America, which Doughty
believes need reforming. It ends as a call to re-think our entire relationship
with death and how we say goodbye.
I think about and write a lot about death, but this book
opened my eyes to how little I’ve thought about modern funerary practices. I
didn’t realize how
recent many of our
practices are. A cornerstone—maybe
the
cornerstone—of my personal philosophy is that your death should inform your
life. I talk to my death all the time. I have a journal I write to it in. And
yet in all of this I’ve thought very little about what should or will happen to
my body when I’ve gone, my point of view being essentially that I’m dead and
won’t care, let my loved ones do whatever they feel the need to do.
Smoke didn’t get in my eyes, it opened
my eyes that I need to take a greater responsibility for my death, and that if
Western society did this as a whole, we’d have a far healthier relationship
with death. Caitlin’s work to pull back the veil and stop the death industry’s
whitewashing of our final passage is admirable and deeply important. After I
finished
Smoke I discovered all of
the great work and information sharing she (and many others) are doing via
The Order of the Good Death.
Their mission statement:
“The Order is about
making death a part of your life. Staring down your death fears—whether it be
your own death, the death of those you love, the pain of dying, the afterlife
(or lack thereof), grief, corpses, bodily decomposition, or all of the above.
Accepting that death itself is natural, but the death anxiety of modern culture
is not.”
Smoke is the
best kind of memoir—funny, sad, self-aware, insightful, passionate—and I have
nothing but total respect for the important work Caitlin is doing. Read the
book. Check out The Order of the Good Death. Change your life and your death.
Notes on a Selection of Novels Read in 2016
Discovering Paul Tremblay was a reading highlight of
2016. A Head Full of Ghosts answers
the question of whether there is such a thing as truly great modern horror
novel with a resounding YES! Suspenseful and engrossing, Ghosts manages to engage pop culture and the reality TV phenomena
on a complex level while telling a story that you won’t be able to put down.
It’s a balance that is near impossible to pull off and Tremblay does it
beautifully. A must read… Disappearance
at Devil’s Rock, Tremblay’s latest, is just a shade less brilliant, meaning
it’s still a tremendously enjoyable read. The ending is a tad muddled but the
fully-shaded characterizations and the complexity of familial and friendship
bonds make reading this novel time well-spent. I hope Tremblay finds a wide
audience; he’s already transcending genre and is one the finest fiction
novelists writing today…
Another resounding success as a modern horror novel is Thomas
Olde Heuvelt’s
Hex. More of a
“traditional” horror novel than
A Head
Full of Ghosts,
Hex inspired me
to write a rare
Goodreads
review just so I could rave about it. I’m going to quote part of that
review because it states as clearly as I’m able how much I loved this book:
“Hex
is not only one of the best, if not the very best, horror novels I've read in a
long, long while--it's also a thoroughly modern horror novel that is actually
scary. The story works with several classic tropes of the genre and instead of
getting cute and meta with them, it actually tackles the question of what would
a classic horror tale set in today's world be like? Sure, there are echoes of
classic works here: Pet Sematary, Blair Witch Project, The Monkey's Paw--but
Hex is a unique tale that is both modern and ancient. I loved the characters,
and when things started going south, I felt their sorrow and pain. The tension
builds up at a perfect pace--this novel should be given to young writers to
show how to do it right.”
I wanted to love The Last Final Girl but the structure
was just too meta and too clever by half for me. There is a fun story behind
all the cutesy tricks, especially if you love 80s slasher movies, but your
ability to find that story and derive enjoyment will depend on your tolerance
for metafiction…Much more successful, I’m happy to say (because I truly respect
Stephen Graham Jones’s considerable talent) is Mongrels, the most focused novel by SGJ I’ve read and a real
breakthrough. Episodic in nature, it suffers from some padding (it reads like a
novella stretched into novel length at times) but I found it compelling and a
fast, breezy read in the best sense. I think Stephen Graham Jones has a
brilliant novel in him (if you haven’t checked out his short stories, do
so—they *are* brilliant) and I sincerely believe it’s not that far off…
Is there such a thing as a “mainstream horror novel”
these days? The kind of book you’d see back in the 80s on drugstore racks, in
airports, in mall bookstores, even at grocery stores? That kind of market is
surely dead, but how about the style of book? A book that does not cater to a
niche audience, easy to read but full of gripping, thriller-like elements, not
afraid of big ideas but largely character-driven, likely to get made into a
movie? I ask because over the last four years as I read Justin Cronin’s Passage
trilogy it continually struck me that it was the very model of a sprawling
mainstream horror novel—in 1988. Hell, my local bookstore doesn’t even put it
in the horror section; it’s in general fiction. City of Mirrors is a satisfactory conclusion to the trilogy, a
gripping enough read in its own right even if you haven’t read the first two
but really--you should. The book could stand to lose its epilogue and a little
trimming of the side stories wouldn’t hurt, but I enjoyed it and the trilogy as
a whole. Yet I can’t help but compare it to the other great trilogy of the
decade, Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach. The Southern Reach trilogy, in
addition to being a fantastic read, feels like something new—a turning point
for weird fiction, opening a path that pays respect to some of the roots but
suggests a whole new storytelling framework, one that feels very much of the
world we live in at this moment. The Passage trilogy, by contrast, feels archaic,
which is not to detract from its considerable charms. It’s the type of major
publisher mainstream book that is becoming increasingly rare, at least for
horror; whether that is good or bad (or both) is a matter of individual
preference…
The first half of Adam Nevill’s debut novel, The Ritual was fantastic but then it completely
fell apart in the second half. Still, I came away thinking Nevill has too much
talent to give up on, so I had some expectation and trepidation when I picked up Last Days. My faith was justified; Last Days is a fine novel about a fictitious late sixties/early
seventies cult that seemingly comes to an end after a massacre in 1975 and what
happens when a modern-day documentary filmmaker tracks down the surviving
members. Crucially, it gets the uneasy feel of the seventies right…It’s sad
that it took me so long to discover The
Elementals by Michael McDowell. A Southern gothic tale with quirky memorable
characters, it’s essential reading for horror fans…For the love of all that is
good storytelling, someone explain to me why there is so much acclaim for The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.
The worst book I read this year and one of the worst in recent memory, I don’t
understand the adoration one bit. Only a dogged sense of duty allowed me to
even finish it. To each their own… The
Brief History of the Dead features an interesting premise about what
happens after we die and how we live in the memories of all whom we’ve known.
It’s also a book about the end of humanity. I quite enjoyed it even though it
just kind of petered out at the end, dropping several subplots so abruptly that
I ended up questioning why they were in the book at all. But life is not a tidy
narrative, so why should death be any different?...
Ok, let’s talk about some of the famous names, starting
with the most famous of them all, Mr. King. I’m
on
the record as being suitably unimpressed with the first two entries of the
Bill Hodges trilogy. The final installment,
End
of Watch is the best of the three but it’s still a relatively weak SK book.
The latter half, in particular, feels like autopilot King. It’s not terrible,
but it’s only for hardcore fans and it’s territory he’s mined better elsewhere…The
*only* 1980s King book I had somehow never read was
The Talisman, his first collaboration with Peter Straub (the man
responsible for
Ghost Story, one of
the finest novels of the genre and in my all-time top five.) I didn’t miss
much. It probably felt a lot fresher then, but now it reads like a dry run for The
Dark Tower series. I didn’t like Jack, the protagonist, at all. He was far too
unbelievable and holy hell, was he whiny! Honestly, most of characters in
The Talisman spend their waking hours
bitching and moaning. It gets old real fast. I suppose I’ll read
The Black House someday but it’s at the
bottom of my King list...It’s official: I give up on Richard Matheson. I’ve
tried so hard to like his work, and it’s undeniable how influential he was, but
his writing is colorless and boring, and in the case of
The Shrinking Man, misogynistic. I’ve no problem with unlikable
protagonists, but Scott Carey is a self-pitying, predatory asshole with no
redeeming features and the story itself is so dated now it has nothing to give.
Matheson was better suited to writing for television (I would never deny his
best Twilight Zone stories.) He may have helped ushered in a realistic, more
mature style for horror/sci-fi, but pretty much everyone who followed did it
better…Joe Hill’s
The Fireman was an
enjoyable read, building on the progress he made with
NOS4A2. Although I did have the same thought I had about
City of Mirrors, it really belongs in
the 1980s and is archaic in style and tone. It doesn’t really detract from the
book, but Joe’s got so much talent that I hope he doesn’t settle for mere
variations on what has come before. The immense promise of
20th Century Ghosts (along with Kelly Link’s
Magic for Beginners my favorite short
story collection of the last 20 years) is still there; perhaps a return to
short work? He is starting to succumb to the bloat and plot holes that plague
his famous father. But he’s always readable, enjoyable, and that great modern novel
may yet come. I’m not giving up hope…Kurt Vonnegut is required reading for
anyone looking to understand the 20
th century. It had been years
since I read him, and somehow I’d never read his most famous work, so
Slaughterhouse-Five became the first
post-election novel I read. Appropriate timing and sadly its themes are not
dated at all…
Quickly on a few others: After Dark is the weakest thing I’ve read by Murakami. It’s not
bad, exactly, but it was non-descript, the plot didn’t exist (which he usually
turns to his advantage but failed to do so here) and the characters were
unmemorable. Might have worked as a short story…Concrete Island can’t help but be dated but J.G. Ballard’s cold
prose still holds power…Enter Night
started with promise but by halfway through it was largely falling apart, and
as such any emotional resonance in the ending was drained. I’d check out
another book by Michael Rowe though, there is a potentially interesting voice
there.
Notes on a Selection of Short Story Collections Read
in 2016
Let’s start with the curdled cream of the crop, shall we?
(Sorry, I’ve been re-reading EC comics this week and I’m starting to talk like
The Crypt-Keeper.) T.E. Grau’s
The
Nameless Dark: A Collection was the best collection I read this year, and
I’m extremely excited to see where this dynamic young voice goes. It also
inspired a
brief
Goodreads review, which I’m going to nick:
“Fantastic.
Fantastic! The best stories in The Nameless Dark are as good as weird short
fiction gets, and the other stories are not far behind. There's not a weak
story in the bunch. Grau has a gift for complex, sometimes touching
characterizations which makes the darkness in his stories resonate. It's not
that Grau is necessarily doing anything new with weird fiction tropes; he is
wielding them like a master in the service of stories that do not leave you
when you are finished reading (a much harder trick in this jaded age.) I can't
pick one highlight, but I am certain I will not read better stories than
"Tubby's Big Swim," "Beer and Worms," "Twinkle
Twinkle" and especially "Love Songs from the Hydrogen Jukebox"
this year. May the future bring us many more stories from this exciting voice!”
Did I mention it was fantastic? ‘Cuz it was fantastic.
That blurb was written last summer and I still have not read any better short
stories this year. Do not miss it if you have any interest in weird fiction at
all…The Lure of Devouring Light caused
some genre drama earlier this year that had nothing to do with the collection
or author (and inspired this piece’s opening paragraphs). Griffin is a fine
writer of quiet horror. Not every story works, but “Far From Streets” and (at
least until the last few pages) “The Black Vein Runs Deep” mine a rich vein
(heh-heh) of character-driven surrealism that, to me, encapsulate what the
modern weird tale is all about. Kind of reminds me of early Barron at times,
but Griffin has his own voice…Burnt Black
Suns is a solid collection that peaks with the title story, which explores
personal loss and the inability to reconcile the past in an emotionally intense
narrative before veering into wild Lovecraftian territory. It shouldn’t work,
but it absolutely does and Strantzas writes clear, lucid prose with a firm hand…
Sometimes I suppose you come to things too late, and I
just didn’t think Dennis Etchison’s The
Dark Country was very good. Perhaps if I’d read it in the 80s when it came
out? He’s undeniably influential but this collection was by turns too quiet or
too thin on plot ideas, and the writing itself was pedestrian. Is there
something better by him I should try? I feel like I’m missing something given
how well-regarded he is…It’s kind of cheating to include Flannery O’Connor’s Collected Works here since I’d read
about half of the material before, but if you haven’t read “A Good Man Is Hard
to Find,” “The River” or “The Life You Save May Be Your Own” then you haven’t read
a perfect short story. Much as I like Faulkner, he can’t touch O’Connor when
she’s at her best…The Spider Tapestries
I don’t feel I can judge because it became clear to me as I read through it
that it simply wasn’t to my taste. So I’ll take this opportunity to again plug another
Mike Allen’s collection, Unseaming, my
favorite collection of 2014 and one of the best in recent memory. And while The Spider Tapestries wasn’t for me, I’d
be remiss if I didn’t point out that it has some absolutely beautiful language…Which
is something I could also say about Furnace
by Livia Llewellyn. Her 2011 debut collection Engines of Desire gut-punched me and immediately became one of my
favorite books of the 00s, holding up over multiple re-reads. So perhaps my
anticipation was simply too high for Furnace.
I had trouble connecting with the stories, with two exceptions: “The Last
Clean, Bright Summer” and “And Love Shall Have No Dominion.” Both these stories
have strong narratives, and I guess that’s what I was missing in the other
stories, which are frequently draped with gorgeous language and imagery but
dissolve in my hands before I can feel their beating heart. And that’s probably
a matter of taste, so please don’t think I’m down on this collection. Llewellyn
continues to grow as a writer, I’m just not sure if her trails are ones I want
to ramble down. I may give Furnace a
revisit in another year and see if it hits me different. Curious to see where
she goes next…
“Don’t judge a book by its cover” the saying goes, but it
was the cover that first drew me to
The
Dark Domain by Stefan Grabiński because
Franz Stuck is one of my
favorite painters and
Sensualité
one of my favorite paintings. But the stories therein more than lived up to the
cover. Calling Grabiński the “Polish Poe” or the “Polish Lovecraft” misses the
point—neither of those authors have the rich veins of eroticism and surrealism
running through their works as Grabiński does. It’s a failure of history that
he is not as well-known as Poe or Lovecraft; his best material is just as good
and perhaps even more unique. A treasure and a truly wonderful discovery from a
local bookstore. Support your local library and if you can afford to do so,
support your local, independently owned bookstore…I quite enjoyed Norman
Partridge’s novel
Dark Harvest a
number of years back, and was pleased to find his short work in
Lesser Demons was just as good. A
confession: I don’t really care much for pulpy genre mashups, like horror
western or horror noir. But Partridge’s stories are so good that when such a
mashup occurs, I don’t even blink. His work is unsettling and veers into
outright brutality at times without ever be exploitive. That’s a skill I very
much admire in a writer. I need to get caught up on his other work…
Notes on a Selection of Non-Fiction Read in 2016
Trouble Boys: The
True Story of the Replacements by Bob Mehr was the best music bio I read
this year and one of the better ones I’ve read overall. If you’re a fan of the
band, you’ll be angry at them as often as you’ll cheer for them (no band was
better at pointless self-sabotage) which really was the experience of being a
‘Mats fan. Everything about the ‘Mats was a mess, that didn’t make them
brilliant (though they certainly were at times), it made them real. Our band
could be your life, indeed. It’s also a deeply sad book for those same reasons.
It caused me to see the records in a new light, amazing considering I’ve been
listening to them since the eighties. Exceptionally well done and few lines
ring more true than the ones on our family chalkboard: “God, what a mess/On the
ladder of success/When you take one step/And miss the whole first rung”… Season of the Witch purports to be a
history of San Francisco from the 40s on, at least as told through
events/personalities selected for—well, I don’t honestly know, because the book
really doesn’t know either. Written by the founder of Salon.com (a website that
I have read steadily since its inception in the late 90s and that I have a
love/hate relationship with), his love for the city shines through but the book
itself seems disjointed—I think it’s trying to present SF as a microcosm of all
facets of American cultural upheaval since the 60s, but it goes about it in a
muddled way. Early on he brings fresh angles and insights into key movements
and figures—Jim Jones, The Diggers, Patty Hearst—but the book really goes off
the rails structure-wise in the last third, which robs the otherwise
devastating, moving section on AIDS of its context and ludicrously suggests the
49ers saved the city by winning the Superbowl. I couldn’t even finish that
chapter. A mixed bag, to say the least. Can’t really recommend…
FAB Press publishes some of the best cinema books ever to
see the light of the day but with
Satanic
Panic: Pop-Culture Paranoia in the 80’s they have, by way of boosting small
publisher Spectacular Optical (who published a limited first edition) ventured
into the wider terrain of cultural studies. Do you remember the Satanic Panic?
I sure as hell do, and this book examines many different aspects of the phenomenon,
from
Michelle
Remembers to
Jack T.
Chick to
Ricky Kasso
and all points in between and beyond. The
notorious Geraldo special, the
Dungeons
and Dragons controversy,
Bob
Larson…it’s all here and so much more. With so many contributors the tone
varies wildly and it works in the book’s favor. Not every essay is perfect,
which makes the story that much more human (no demons to be found, sorry) and
many are worth more than one read. Just a great book, and I still think the
scariest thing is Dee Snider’s hair. No, wait, it’s Geraldo’s mustache. That
thing gives me nightmares.
My friends, we are over 5k words here. My thanks to you
for having the patience to read this far. It’s funny—after such an intensive
reading year I find myself here in the second week of December needing a break
from any new reading. Instead I’ve been re-reading my favorite of the many
biographies of Sylvia Plath,
Rough Magic.As always, it inspires and saddens me in equal measure. Sylvia is one of my
three cornerstones (the other two being Stephen King and Raymond Carver), her
work is embedded so deeply in me it’s part of my DNA. Writing is rough magic,
but reading is transcendental magic. It teaches and comforts, yells and
whispers. I will never be able to read every book I’d like to in this lifetime,
but I’m damn sure going to try, no matter what the circumstances my life is in
at any given moment.
I will close with Sylvia Plath reading one of her best
poems, The Applicant. (I’ve never found a recording of her reading The Moon and
the Yew Tree, which is my favorite but all her later work moves me profoundly.)
See you next year.
