Last year, I finally began compiling a list of books I have read over the years. While I am sure it is incomplete; the approximate dates I’ve given are inaccurate as I go further back; I have not included many of the young adult (or younger) books I read; and I didn’t individually list books that are in a series, it has still been informative for me to have this list and remember how much I’ve liked getting through a book over the years.
Around this past Thanksgiving, I started on a reading rampage like I haven’t seen in myself for years. I finished three books throughout the month of December, and have finished two thus far in January. I should easily have a third finished before February rolls around.
It has been fun. What I’ve enjoyed most is finding new books I normally would not come across. For years, I bought just about every book I read, discovered by perusing the aisles at Barnes and Noble or a recommendation found online. I have finally switched to using eBooks from my local library system, and this has allowed me greater flexibility. Since I find something to enjoy in almost every book I read* I typically had little worry over the books I purchased; yet, removing the financial obligation has given me the ability to explore even further. I now go to the Literature category in my app and sort by “Random”; then I arbitrarily scroll a little until a title catches my eye. If its rating is more than 2.5 stars, I give it a whirl.
My reading binge started with Neurmancer by William Gibson. I discovered this via the /r/AskMen subreddit, which has a monthly book club. It was described as novel which laid the foundation for modern Sci-Fi and Cyberpunk, in that it created the term “cyberspace.” It took me a bit to get into it, but I still recommend it, especially if you like Blade Runner mixed with The Matrix.
Then I read Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel. This has been a critical and commercial success for good reason. Published in 2014, it is a just-after-the-apocalypse novel, where “the apocalypse” is a deadly strain of the flu. It explores what happens in the moment of an apocalypse occurring, and what happens to civilization 20 years later. I read it in two days.
Inspired by this quick turnaround, I figured I should finally move onto the library. I went to the website What Should I Read Next? and came up with The Book of Speculation by Erika Swyler. This one was stranger than most books I’ve read. It’s about a librarian and carnival workers. It is still up in the air whether the supernatural has anything to do with it. I finished this one in two days as well.
I moved onto a a WWI spy novel, where the “spy” is an actor with Freudian-like sexual issues at the beginning. Entitled Waiting for Sunrise by William Gibson, I actually thought I was reading an entirely different book until about halfway through; I believed I had rented a fantasy novel with a different title and was rather confused. It was still really enjoyable.
Just this weekend I finished The Rabbit Back Literature Society by Pasi Ilmari Jääskeläinen. Wonderfully Scandinavian (it takes place in a small town of Finland), it also walks the line of supernatural and is just plain weird. It is broadly about a group of writers who were trained by a (locally) famous children’s author. The town is very into forest-based mythology. This one was found via my random searching.
The book I have just recently begun is Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer. On principle, I do not read anything about a book except the first sentence or two of a synopsis found online. So, the only information I have about this book is that the main character’s name is Jonathan Safran Foer; this character is not to be confused with the author. This little bit of humor was enough to hook me in.
Reading is fun, and it certainly makes me want to write more as a result. At some point I’ll try to write another piece of fiction. My recent outlet for that was a text adventure I wrote for OHAC (and I will soon be writing another one), yet I really want to try my hand once again at proper fiction. I used to enjoy it thoroughly, and I think college beat it out of me; I began to believe essays are the highest form of literature. While my two years writing mathematical proofs has made my literary imagination somewhat limited, it’s something I still aspire to do.
*The only book I have ever read which I actively do not recommend to people is Portrait of a Spy by Daniel Silva. The book is so poorly written that I have sworn off the author for now. And this was about five years ago I believe. The plot itself was actually wonderful. I had just finished reading the Mitch Rapp series by Vince Flynn (I highly recommend it if you’re into Jason Bourne-type novels, but with an even more invincible and badass protagonist) and the plot in Portrait of a Spy is based around art history and espionage. A more refined spy book, if you will. And yet, it seemed Daniel Silva was very against describing any definitive action. I remember finishing it and proclaiming to my dad “This was an 800 page summary of a trilogy.” I do not recall any specific dialogue or verb used in the present tense. Every single paragraph was a past-tense, brief description of a heroic deed. It was like taking the Wikipedia plot summaries of the TV show 24 and making each season a chapter of a book. Even five years later this is etched in my memory, and I am getting physically upset over it again. Don’t read it.