That Ten (Make That Twenty) Influential Books Thing

Some friends have tagged me in one of these Ten Life-Changing Books things making the rounds on social media. I believe the rules of the game are No Apologies, No Explanations. I can hang with the former but not the latter, so I decided to blog it up here. The more I thought about it, ten grew to twelve, then twenty-five, then settled back to twenty. 

Some rules and caveats. These are not my twenty favorite books - or a list of Twenty Books Everyone Should Read - but an attempt at mapping out the books that altered my trajectory (a) for the better, (b) still so alter. That last one is important. Books that radically changed my worldview but subsequent information and experience rendered less impactful (Howard Zinn, Tom Robbins, Daniel Quinn, The Tao of Pooh, State and Revolution, many others) are not included. Leading me to a different point (c) they had to hold up under questioning. With the exception of number twenty, I've read each book here at least three times. And finally (d) presented in reverse chronological order. I like the idea of working backwards to see how things went from #1 (1983-ish) to #20 (2016). Plotting coordinates on the map of my life.

And away we go!

20.

A wholly absorbing wonderful story with unforgettable characters about the foundation of British Hong Kong. Too much to get into in just a capsule review like this, but a true masterpiece that deftly covers an astonishing amount of ground. Clavell always referred to himself as "only a storyteller" and dismissed fanciful interpretations of his work. I'm willing to take him at this word, there, but if any of his books rise to something more - an insightful take in imperialism and colonization that - miracle of miracles - resists Marxist cliches - it's Tai Pan.

19.

I read sections of it many times while working at the Rhode Island College Writing Center 2000-2003, but I never read it cover to cover until I did the King's Highway business in 2012-2013.

This:

"For years I dreamed of having the sort of massive oak slab that would dominate a room - no more child's desk in a trailer laundry-closet, no more cramped kneehole in a rented house. In 1981 I got the one I wanted and placed it in the middle of a spacious, skylighted study. For six years I sat behind that desk either drunk or wrecked out of my mind, like a ship's captain in charge of a voyage to nowhere.

"A year or two after I sobered up, I got rid of that monstrosity. I got another desk (and) put it at the far west end of the office, in a corner under the eave. I'm sitting under it now, a fifty-three year old man with bad eyes, a gimp leg, and no hangover.

"Put your desk in the corner, and every time you sit down to write, remind yourself why it isn't in the middle of the room. Life isn't a support system for art. It's the other way around."

had and continues to have a profound effect on how I look at life, art, drink, drugs, writing, personal allocation of time, and external validation. Not just the quote above but the unquoted context around it.

18.

I was a bar manager for the VFW at this point in my life (2009) and we had boxes of donations sitting around the place left over from previous (mis)management. As I was cleaning some of that out, I found this book. For no particular reason I started reading it right there in the room where we had all the donation boxes. Holy moley, what a treasure trove. 

The short story, properly executed, may be my favorite of all written art. (S0 many favorites: Fitzgerald's "Babylon Revisited", Sam Lipyste's "The Wisdom of the Doulas", "Two Guys and a Girl" by Tobias Wolff, Norman Mailer's "The Language of Men," anything by Bobbie Ann Mason, so many more and still more to come in this countdown) These aren't just properly executed; they're perfectly executed. I literally have not looked at life the same way since reading them. This is not an experience unique to Among the Missing - I basically read in order to look at life a different way - but always appreciated when it occurs. That's magic worth noting, and revisiting.

I've yet to read any more of the man's work, which is ridiculous. I will, though.

17.

Although this is a book about architecture, it explains neatly the situation across a variety of disciplines and arenas.

"The creation of this new type of community (the compound) proved absolutely exhilarating to artists and composers, as well as architects, throughout Europe in the early 20th century. We're independent of the bourgeois society around us! (They became enamored of this term bourgeois.) And superior to it! It was the compounds that produced the sort of avant-gardism that makes up so much of the history of 20th century art. The compounds - whether the Cubists, Fauvists, Futurists, or Secessionists - had a natural tendency to be esoteric, to generate theories and forms that would baffle the bourgeoisie. The most perfect device, they soon discovered, was painting, composing, designing in code. The peculiar genius of early Cubists, such as Braque and Picasso, was not in creating "new ways of seeing," but in creating visual codes for the esoteric theories of the compound.

"Composers, artists, or architects in a compound began to have the instincts of the medieval clergy, much of whose activity was devoted exclusively to separating itself from the mob. For mob, substitute bourgeoisie - and here you have the spirit of avant-gardism in the 20th century. Once inside a compound, an artist became part of the clerisy, to use an old term for the intelligentsia with clerical presumptions."

Essential info for the disingenuous times in which we toil. As is:

16.

Similarly, although this is about events in Baltimore in the 1980s, you can't fully comprehend understand contemporary American cops and robbers (even if you've seen the author's other masterwork, The Wire) until you've read this book. Which is not to say that I, having read it, comprehend things fully - far from it - only that it's a vital piece of the conversation. When books like this exist out there, it's unforgivable to ignore them in favor of the platitudes offered up in such abundance in 2018.

Led Me To: The Corner, Homicide the TV series (a show very much worth your time), a re-evaluation of the movie Clockers, and a renewed and ongoing appreciation of "It Takes Two" by Rob Base and DJ EZ Rock.

15.

Space precludes everything I find awesome about A Moveable Feast, but if you want to see a bunch of quotes from it paired with 70s Batman illustrations, I've got you covered. And if you want to see a grown man cry, watch me read this book. 

As for Papa Hemingway, I'll just say this: if you like Hemingway's work in any way, you need to read it. If you're not, you might find it interesting, you might not, but you'll definitely get a hell of a lot clearer sense of the man than anywhere else. Not just a love letter from a friend but a very insightful and ego-free representation of Hemingway's last 20 years.

Fun fact: At the end of his life, Hemingway's insistence that the FBI was bugging his phone led partially to his being committed to the electroshock hospital, and (it is argued in some quarters) it was the electroshock that played a part in his suicide. Of course, now we know, the FBI really was bugging his phone; Hemingway was right! So, thanks, J Edgar Asshole, for directly contributing to an American treasure's blowing his brains out.

14.

A writer (and his hard-drinking Australian friend) try and re-create Cook's travels in the early 21st century. I've read better books on Cook (Captain Cook: The Seaman's Seaman - no jokes please - by Alan Villiers), by Horwitz, too (A Voyage Long and Strange), and in the writer-recreates-famed-figure's-footsteps (many), but this one makes the list as the one that led me to my ongoing Age of Sail preoccupation.

I became a Star Trek fan somewhere around 1980 or so, but it took me to reading this in 2003 to realize how much Roddenberry based so many aspects of TOS on Cook's voyages (and crew, and redshirts.) 

13.

Keillor - even before the an alleged * pattern of sexual misconduct over many years - is a polarizing writer. Whenever I tell fellow English majors (or just heavy readers in general) I'm a Keillor fan, I'd say about half of them react like I just told them I was a flat earther. His long-running Prairie Home Companion on NPR is, to some ears, anathema. I get it, truly. But if there was one book I'd say not only rises above whatever else you think of the guy but is also a worthy contender for American canon, it's Wobegon Boy. 

* "Alleged" not to characterize the complaints as dubious - I have no idea what did or didn't happen. I'm a Keillor fan, though, so I for one would appreciate some sensible closure on the subject.

I read this (or listened to it, rather, on audiocassette) on my 2nd visit to Chicago in 2002. (My 3rd was 2 years later when I moved here). I revisited it (this time on audio-CD) on a recent work trip. Not only does it hold up, it thrives. 

12.

Read this name aloud: Patrul Rinpoche. Patrul Rinpoche? Patrul Rinpoche. 

There! You've just been saved from rebirth in inferior realms. Don't say I didn't do anything for you.

I read this (and Jean-Claude Carrier's book-length interview with the Dalai Lama, Violence and Compassion) a hundred times apiece back in the late 90s. I'd say this spell of Buddhist reading peaked (at least outside the classroom; there was a Zen and the Art of the Literary Experience class still to come) around 2000. Wonderful meditations in here. 

11.5

I thought about including The Psychic Soviet by Ian Sevonius or Society of the Spectacle by Guy DeBord here but decided against it. Well, kind of. 

11.

This is a terrific and moving work. I haven't actually read this one in awhile. I read it a lot in 1998 - 2003 and again in 2006 or 2007. But I've thought about this quote a lot over the years: 

"I was living in that awful stage of life between twenty-six to and thirty-seven known as stupidity. It's when you don't know anything, not even as much as you did when you were younger, and you don't even have a philosophy about all the things you don't know, the way you did when you were twenty or would again when you were thirty-eight."

Truth. It makes me wonder, too, what the thirty-eight to (blank) stage is called. It might even be in Anagrams. Homework for myself. 

10.

Here's another I also haven't read in at least 10 years. Many other opinions of mine have evolved in the past decade; I really should read this again to see what I think of it. But its place on this list is assured either way, as it had such a profound effect at the time I read it. The basic ideas it imparted on me I still believe.

I saw this quoted in a review on Goodreads: "[The book] not only explodes some pervasive beliefs, it affords an invigorating reading of American culture through the last three decades." Hear, hear.

9.5

Crikey, almost forgot this one. I paired a bunch of quotes from it (mostly) with Trek photos if such things float your boat. 

9.

Vonnegut was my favorite writer through various stages of late adolescence and throughout my 20s. But, he hasn't held up too well for me since. The exception is this one (and its kinda sorta sequel Timequake) which is a masterpiece. It's been reviewed and analyzed a million ways in a million places by many more mindful than me. You yourself have likely read it; you likely love it.

The first time I read it I was 18, which seems unfathomable to me, not just being 18 but it seems both too old/ too young for me to have first read it. I got it from the North Smithfield Library - the same place from which I checked out The Stand (the Expanded edition) and a dozen other King books only 18 months before - and read most of it in one afternoon in the park directly behind it. 

Well, it's a park now (below) - it was a bit more rough and tumble in 1993. Where that bridge is in the picture( on the right used to be a rotted-away causeway left over from the Industrial Revolution. You used to have to cross it to get to the other side, and there was no fence and lots of loose stones and a precipitous drop. 

Having set the scene to such a tedious degree, there I am propped up against the library side of said-causeway reading Slaughterhouse Five. Dog Star Omnibus has come unstuck in time!

8.

Oops. I read Brief Lives after Slaugherhouse Five, for sure. I screwed up my chronological backwards journey goes. 

If you haven't read Sandman, you're probably sick of hearing people tell you you should read it. I sympathize. My personal advice would be to override your desire to start from the beginning and read these two things: first the Sandman special above-right (collected in Fables and Reflections, tho you can pick up an inexpensive copy of the Special alone easy enough) and then the Brief Lives tpb. 

Orpheus is an ancient story and has been continually rediscovered from Monteverdi's L'Orfeo right down to the present, as this work bears witness. Gaiman adds both a new twist to the old tale and a sequel. It is a pivotal chapter in the whole Sandman saga that Gaiman wove over seventy-odd issues, but it also works completely as a standalone tale. It's that most improbable, once-in-an-age sort of things: a re-invocation of ancient myth in modern guise.

7.

We've reached 1992 in my countdown. I went to URI that fall and went to the bookstore to get my books and walked out with mostly stuff that wasn't on my book syllabus. This was one of those off-syllabus books.

An essential narrative of the American experience, but definitely worth reading for anyone, white or black, American or non-American. It did a number on my head back then - race politics in this country have become so weaponized that it's sometimes difficult to learn about the past without the distorting lens of 21st century narrative. An account like this (or many others, to be sure) told in the author's own voice and free of such a lens is critical.

6.

I couldn't even begin to describe my love of this book. I've read it so many times over the years that every sentence has become a Zen koan that explains why I love anything. I talked about my love of short fiction up there with Among the Missing; it all could very well have come from my love of The Pat Hobby Stories. They are the Pink Panther Strikes Back of literary short fiction. 

"'Authors get a tough break out here,' Pat said sympathetically. 'They don't want authors. They want writers--like me.'"

5.

I can't say Brave New World was my first dystopian-future book I read. Marvel Comics (and 1984, and many others) got to me first, there. It - like War of the Worlds or The Time Machine or another book still to come in our countdown - is a fascinating look at the British Empire looking at itself. The Victorian and Edwardian eras produced such fascinating literature. Very clear-eyed on many of the contradictions of Empire but still maintaining more than a whiff of a completely outdated (to modern eyes) sensibility. 

Brave New World Revisited is something else entirely. More than any other, it opened my mind up to the possibilities of mass conditioning through media and the knowing application of that through the 20th century. My ongoing interest in its radically increased pace in the 21st is a direct result of reading this (entirely by accident) back in 1991.

4.

A ww2 vet becomes involved in a scientific experiment that successfully establishes contact with a mirror Earth on the other side of the sun. Cool idea - like the Mars Needs Woman sort of stories of this era of sci-fi, made somewhat obsolete by improved technologies, but who cares. What has stuck with me over the years is how much reading this book provided me with a useful, Cold-War-specific (alas) morality. 

It's a very moving book that I read every few years. I love updating the film I'd make from it in my head. Same goes for:

3.

I had to read this in 11th grade English, so we're at the 1990-1991 mark here. Here's another one that had a deep and long-lasting effect on my philosophical attitudes. 

I was always spellbound by the whole experience at Shangri-La, and in particular, the attitude of the protagonist, Conway, but there was always something else tugging on my mind about it, too - a darker undercurrent. I finally read a take on it (David Mamet from his book The Secret Knowledge, excerpted below) that spoke to this dichotomy: 

"In this beautiful fantasy, a British civil servant is blown off course and crashes in the Himalayas. He is rescued and taken to a mysterious, inaccessible lamasery in Tibet. Here he discovers a perfect land - all its inhabitants are artists and philosophers, there is no disease, a person can - indeed, live as long as he wishes and there is no want. The people of the Valley for millennia devoted themselves to the care, physical, material, and sexual, of the folks on the Mountain.

"This is a sweet tale by a great storyteller. It is also, less admirably, a fascist tract. For Mr. Hilton's paradise (he understands, if only subconsciously) can exist only if there are slaves. Here we see the progression from good ideas to horror. The sweet ideas are encumbered in execution by the realization that someone, finally, has to do the work; their adamant practice will quite soon reveal this: "Oh, we will need slaves."

"These slaves may be called (various thing) but they are chosen not for their odious qualities but for their supine or defenseless nature. And they are enslaved to allow the elite not only exemption from work but exemption from thought.

"Originally they are enlisted (fellow travelers or "useful idiots") or convinced (taxpayers) in order to allow the ideological and exemption from toil and the malleable exemption from thought. As the money dries up, the ideologues are easily supplanted by tyrants and the malleable chained to their oars. History provides no counter-example. A country which will not work will fall.

"Our hero in Lost Horizon discovers, midway through the book, that it was no accident which led him to the lamasery; he, like all the inhabitants, was originally kidnapped - chosen for his "readiness" to unquestioningly accept this new, changeless, and perfect life."

Mamet's take provides a whole new spin on the last lines of the book, "Do you think he will ever find it?" Is it a subversive book, after all, looking ahead out of empire and past the war on the horizon? Or an eloquent rationalization of it? I have spent a good portion of my life trying to work that out.

As such, not too bad for a meditation given to me 27 years ago. Come to think of it, I'm still thinking about Ivanhoe, too. I guess Mr. Brodeur for 11th Grade English was all right.

2.

Now we skip all the way back to 1984, the actual year not the novel, when I first read this. It was the first reading assignment in a special reading program in Frau Scharnweber's class. We had to traipse across Rhein Main AFB where they then hooked us up to machines and fed us ingenious potions to make us even smarter, levitate objects with our minds, or set them n fire.

Why Flowers? It could easily have been The Stand in the 6th and 7th grade, a few years later. But this was the first book I consciously remember telling people was my favorite book, the one I tried to engage adults about, etc. It's still a great book. I'm probably due for a re-read actually. 

Years and years later I saw the much-heralded movie and was quite disappointed. The movie in my head while reading it is much better. 

1.

Speaking of firsts here are two of the first non-kindergarten-y books I remember reading over and over. 

You ever read The Babysitter's Guide book? It rocks. There are pictures and descriptions in there that I still mentally reference in 2018. I remember looking at this - and Terror Castle - a lot in 1983, so thereabouts is where we end this little reverie.

Terror Castle is one of the best Three Investigators books of them all. I was in love with that series in elementary school. They started making movies based on them a few years back, but the franchise stalled. Too bad. The Terror Castle movie that was made strays signifcantly from the text, but it had its moments. (Ditto for the Skeleton Island one. I actually quite liked that movie, though; they nailed the spirit of it all quite nicely.) 

~

And in the background of at least #s 1-8: comics both newspaper (The Far Side, Calvin and Hobbes, Bloom County) and four-color (all the Marvels and half the DCs).

There you have it, my friends. The full story. I'm sorry I can't just answer a question like a normal person.

Books I Read in 2016

I had a different Year In Review post planned for today: an interview (fake, obviously) between myself and Chirp Magazine, a kids magazine to which Dawn and I bought a subscription for the girls. I've been joking with her about this fake-interview idea all year, and every so often over 2016 as I built some building-block / Star Wars thing with the kids, I'd take pictures and carry on like I was some kind of children's-crafts-savant.

"McMillan's work repurposes his own childhood via a neo-Bauhaus tradition that emphasizes structure and color interaction," etc.

As jokes go, it was okay. Made the missus laugh a few times, so that's always worthwhile. Somewhere along the way the idea changed to crafting a year-long series of purposefully designed cover photo/ profile pic combos and then doing a post about them. Over the course of 2016, I dutifully changed cover/profile pics pursuant to this idea. But enthusiasm waned after a few months. Seemed a bit much. 

Still, some of them came out okay. Like the above, or:

That's Al Rosen from Cheers for the profile pic, there. Basically, any cover photo you pair him with works out pretty well. ("Pretty weenie, 007!")

Some of the fun even extended to the comments section, such as this one from a stretch of 90210-related cover photos.

Man! If personal amusement was all that counted, this one-two punch of Dylan McKay reacting to his Dad's (faked) death would bring home Olympic gold.

Anyway, I decided for something maybe a little more traditional, so here's a Books I Read in 2016 post instead. I like to read these sorts of things from other people, and it was a fairly successful reading year for McMolo, Inc., so I figured I'd add my voice to the chorus. 

I read only one book (End of Watch) that was actually first published in 2016. I didn't plan it that way, I just seem to be one of those guys who gravitates towards filling in the blank spaces on my own map rather than keeping up with the new stuff. I prefer to keep current and explore/ revisit earlier works if I can. In the meantime, if I haven't seen or read or played it before, hey, it's new to me, regardless of when it came out.

To make this as easy for myself as possible, I sorted my Goodreads shelves by "Date Read" and took screencaps. This yielded the groupings you see below, and I decided just to stick with them rather than regroup them alphabetically or by which ones I liked least-to-most or anything like that. And no point going over any ground already covered in these pages. (You can find those remarks at any of the following posts: From Novel to Film (The Last Unicorn, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Falcon and the Snowman, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes), Elric, Richard Blade, Stephen King, and James Bond.)  

Let's do this, America.

Books of Blood - Clive Barker. I bought this years and years ago, but I never read it until 2016. My edition contains only the first three collections of the Books. There have been a few more come out since this was printed. 

I more or less liked all of the ones here, although some (like "In the Hills, the Cities" - the metaphor of the two towns becoming huge Croatian Shogun Warriors was a little strained) were a little harder to follow than others (like the truly excellent "Sex, Death, and Starshine" or "Rawhead Rex" - one of these days I'll finish watching the movie on YouTube - or "Scape-goats.") The prose is powerful, the imagery and insight in the best horror tradition as well as feeling very 80s-modern. Highly recommended to any fan of horror writing.

Angry Candy - Harlan Ellison. Not bad. With Ellison, you know what you're getting. "Paladin of the Lost Hour" works better as a short story than a teleplay. 

Zigzagging Down a Wild Trail - Bobbie Ann Mason. Mason is a treasure. I love her eye for detail and her subtlety. Every story brings me somewhere here. Interesting timing, too - when I read this, everyone was going on about Hillbilly Elegy. I haven't read it yet, but from what I've heard, it shares some terrain with Mason's fiction. Particularly this one.

Ancient Egyptian Magic - Bob Brier. Brier is my go-to for mainstream Egyptology. His lecture series for The Teaching Company is just about the perfect overview of Ancient Egypt the lay person like me can hope for. This Magic book is a fun addition for my Egypt shelf, but not the first thing I'd recommend to the aspiring reader of the Land of the Pharaohs. 

The Battle for the Falklands - Max Hastings and Simon Jenkins. The Falklands affair is one of the first military conflicts I remember hearing about, during those ten minutes of news that interrupted Saturday Morning Cartoons in the early 80s. It took me until this past year to actually read a proper account of the Falklands, though, and to my surprise, I was totally engrossed from start to finish. Maybe a little too much backroom politics for my taste, but the work was stronger for it. I'd like to read one from the Argentine side next, just not sure where to start. (Also an obstacle: I can't read Spanish, Argentine or any other variety.)

My Date with Satan - Stacey Richter. I didn't know anything about the author before reading this - an approach I always prefer if possible - but I thought most stories in here were fantastic. I definitely need to check out more of her stuff. 

What You Want Is in the Limo - John R. Walker. This book starts off with great promise ("An epic joyride through three history-making tours in 1973 that defined rock and roll superstardom") but by chapter three, the same anecdotes have been repeated two or three times. I hate that. Failed to truly justify its premise.

Civilization and Its Discontents - Sigmund Freud. Every so often I pull a book like this, which claims nothing less than to cast a light on the malaise of society itself, off the shelf to revisit with as critical an eye as possible. Does it still speak to me? I can't hope to summarize Freud in a capsule review like this, but 2016 verdict: Yep, still works. Disastrously so.

Louise Brooks - Barry Paris. An exhaustive overview. I love old Hollywood. It's crazy to think so many of America's earliest films simply don't exist anymore. Louise Brooks was easily as big in her time as, I don't know, Madonna was in the 80s - even if the media context of their respective eras was much different - yet of Lulu's dozen or so films, only two (Pandora's Box and Diary of a Lost Girl) are readily available. 

Oh, for some reason this one didn't show up in the picture up there, but I read it shortly after this Brooks one:

Windstaff was the pseudonym for an unnamed scion of an American manufacturing oligarch who flew for the Allies in World War One, bummed around Rome and Paris in the 20s as a male mistress and painter, then returned to America to try and drink it off. It's an interesting and not always pleasant glimpse of both the Jazz Age from a different angle (i.e. someone not named Hemingway or Fitzgerald) and of PTSD. I can't find anything on the identity of the author. I imagine an enterprising scholar could do so from the military records and flight books, but to my knowledge, no one's done so. 

The Song of Kali - Dan Simmons. Having heard of this novel for years and years, I finally arranged to read it this year. Common refrain for a lot of these books, I guess; I've been crossing off a lot of always-meant-tos the past couple of years. I didn't find it to be the most terrifying novel ever written, as Ellison and King both spoke of it years ago, but I liked it very much. A successful blend of classical horror tropes with realistic 70s/80s feels.

Because It Is Absurd / The Marvelous Palace / My Own River Kwai / Time Out of  Mind / A Noble Profession - Pierre Boulle. I went on a Boulle bender earlier this year. I'd read Planet of the Apes and still mean to blog that one up for the From Novel to Film series. He writes in a clear and provocative style, although some of his insights aged better than others. All of these are great reads, though, especially My Own River Kwai, his nonfiction account of his WW2 adventures and misadventures in Vichy Indochina. Of his short stories, "E=MC2" from Time Out of Mind is spectacular.

Tales of the South Pacific - James Michener. Another one crossed off the list. Exceptional stuff. I had to read Michener's Chesapeake in high school, but I'm not sure if he's still assigned. If not, he should be, particularly this one.      

I've never seen the musical or the movie-musical. It looks... different.

Command and Control - Eric Schlosser. This one, too. (Be assigned, that is.) A nonfiction account of a fuel leak and potential disaster situation at a nuclear missile silo in Damascus, Arkansas, the men who fixed it amidst the chaos, as well as an overview of some of the more Jack D. Ripper-esque aspects of the US Strategic Air Command. And hey, apparently they made a movie of it, too.

A Memoir of the Hollywood Ten - Edward Dmytryk. An essential slice of Hollywood and America in the 20th Century history. An oasis of reason amidst the swamp of self-serving and COMINTERN narratives about the Blacklist.

The Accidental Time Machine - Joe Haldeman. Brilliant, quick, and very entertaining. Can't recommend this one enough. 

Tai-Pan - James Clavell. Really quite an amazing achievement. My instant and sustained affection for this narrative as I was reading it accounts for the other two Clavells on this list. The author considered himself only a storyteller and not a novelist, but if he wrote a book that challenged that notion, it's this one.

The Celts - Gerhard Herm. Herm wrote a book on The Phoenicians that is just great - funny, inspiring, little-known-fact-y, and accessible. I'd hoped this would be its Celtic equivalent, but not so much. Still an informative and engaging enough read, to be sure, just a step down from The Phoenicians.

Voyages and Discoveries - Richard Hakluyt. If you have an Explorers section on your shelf, this primary source is a worthy addition. A resource, though, more than a traditional narrative.

The Killer Angels - Michael Shaara. I'd always heard this book set the standard for War Between the States fiction. I haven't read enough to answer to that, but I loved this. Begun the Great McExploration of Civil War Reading has. More to say in the next section.

The Rising Sun - John Toland. I got this two volume set way back in 1997 at Bonnett's Bookstore in Dayton, OH. This year I finally read it. Loved it - it'd difficult to imagine a better overview of Imperial Japan out there. In English anyway.

Wake of the Wahoo - Forest Stirling. Want to spend an intense few months in an American submarine sinking Japanese shipping in WW2? I don't blame you. Read this instead. (Preferably directly after the above.)

Story of My Life - Moshe Dayan and And Perhaps... - Ruth Dayan. I picked the former up in 2001 (do you sense a pattern here?) and the latter only after reading it this past summer. Ruth is Moshe's ex-wife, so I thought it'd be interesting to read her account of life with Israel's famous general. Moshe's has very little of their personal story, whereas Ruth's offers a fascinating and candid account of both their early days of romance and their later days of estrangement. 

She comes off a little dramatic, if I'm being honest. But I did appreciate the glimpse of interwar Jerusalem and kibbutz life. Moshe's is more statesmanlike, as can be expected from a memoir from one of the state of Israel's foundational personalities. 

Speaking of Israel: 

The Haj / Mitla Pass - Leon Uris. I set out to read Trinity by Leon Uris this year and ended up reading these two instead. These two can safely be labelled "outrageous pro-Israel propaganda fiction." But don't let that stop you. At least with the former. It stacks the deck shamelessly in some areas but punctures irritating misperceptions in others. Its broad strokes (Gideon Asch is clearly a highly romanticized version of Moshe Dayan, for example) are actually quite fun; this is like the Tombstone version of Israeli history, as seen, of course, from the POV of a Palestinian youth (as written by an American writer.) Crazy. But fun reading for sure.

Mitla Pass is the fictionalized account of the author's time as an embedded journalist with Unit 202 (Ariel Sharon's paratrooper brigade) during the Suez campaign in 1956. The first two chapters are Hubris City, the type of swaggering author-stand-in narrative that you just can't believe wasn't called out by someone close to him, or the publisher. In 20 pages, Uris establishes himself as a living legend, epic drunk, lothario, and the Boswell to the Israeli state and therefore eternal Judaism. It's okay, though, because he feels conflicted about it all. (!) Wow. All in this I'm-clearly-swigging-from-this-bottle-of-scotch-and-shadow-boxing-as-I'm-typing 70s-blockbuster style while weaving autobiographical asides in. Just not what I expected at all - entertaining for sure, but perhaps for the wrong reasons. 

The Sentinel - Jeffrey Konvitz. Wasn't a fan. I'd intended to do this as a From Novel to Film entry.

The movie is actually quite good.

Ghost Story - Peter Straub. Very well-written but overcomplicated. I think Straub is the authorly equivalent of Brian De Palma, with his staunch defenders, all of whom have valid points, but both are perhaps acquired tastes, or exclusive to certain palates or something. I say this as a De Palma apologist of longstanding and also as someone who enjoys what I've seen from Straub but always have to work at it. 

Space - James Michener. (Not pictured Rascals in Paradise, which I'm reading now.) What can you say about Michener? If you like his approach, you'll like Space. Even if you don't like his approach, you'll probably like Space, though the author's motive in creating the fictional US state of Fremont for a work of otherwise realistic fiction with real-life characters like Werner Von Braun and LBJ making appearances will not make any sense until the last hundred pages. (And and even then, not much.) I loved it, although I wish someone would publish annotated versions of Michener's work. I like to know who people are based on. John Pope in Space is clearly modeled on John Glenn, for example (which made his recent passing only a few days after I finished Space all the sadder) but who is the real world analog for Cynthia Rhee?

Dungeon Fire and Sword - John J. Robinson. A history of the Knights Templar. I try to read this again every few years just to re-enforce the info, which I find fascinating. So much of subsequent world history, East and West, resulted from the crazy shenanigans that rocked the Holy Land from 1095 to 1291. 

None So Blind - Joe Haldeman. I enjoyed Accidental Time Machine so much that I got this one out of the library without knowing anything about it except that it was a collection of short fiction. I enjoyed it, particularly "The Hemingway Hoax," which I think may have influenced King's "Ur." Not that one is derivative of the other by any means. (If anything, "THH" is slightly derivative of Hotchner's Papa Hemingway in spots. But who cares? More books should probably be derivative of Papa Hemingway.)

Odd Man Out - Matt McCarthey. A year in the life of a minor league pitcher for the Provo Angels, the Angels of Anaheim's lowly Pioneer League affiliate. Some fun anecdotes about future all-stars like Elvis Andrus and life in Utah, but otherwise, meh.

A Season with Verona - Tim Parks. An entry in the surprisingly abundant genre of English journalists who "go native" with a local football club in another country, in this case Hellas Verona FC and Italy/ Serie A. Plenty of "local color." I don't know how anything gets done in Italy, seriously.

By Way of Deception - Victor Ostrovsky. "The book the Mossad tried to ban!" This is one of those ex-secret-agent-spills-the-beans sort of books. I'm of the opinion that the "explosive contents" of any book on the activities of any intelligence community should be treated with skepticism. I mean, if I were running a spy agency, the first thing I'd do is pump out a dozen books like this; control the message, sow confusion, etc. So, take it all with a grain of salt, but still fun reading. 

The Krypton Companion - edited by Michael Eury. A real resource! Those TwoMorrows guys do God's work over there. This was immediately useful upon receipt, by the way, as Evelyn and Lauren had very specific questions about Bizarro Superman that I was able to answer. Not that knowing the answer has stopped them from asking over and over again.

HMS Ulysses - Alistair MacLean. A devastating read. For a war with no shortage of hellish theaters, the Murmansk convoy run sounds like it was the most hellish thing imaginable.

Shogun / Noble House - James Clavell. I liked these less than Tai-Pan, but these practically two thousand pages of text certainly cast their spell. I learned quite a bit of real-world history from reading the former, which closely follows the historical record of Englishman William Adams and the end of feudal Japan. The latter, which picks up the Tai-Pan story 100+ years later, is fun, but... it's a bit much. The mini-series with Pierce Brosnan updates the action from the 60s to the 80s, which jettisons most of the Cold War intrigue (con) but captures Hong Kong in the last full decade of British rule, which is historically very interesting, and of course extremely photogenic (pro).

Ward 41: Tales of a County Intern - John Raffensperger. The guy who wrote this used to be Head of Pediatric Surgery at the hospital I work for. My boss started relaying a whole slew of anecdotes about him at the tail end of one of our meetings that piqued my interest and mentioned he'd written a book. So I looked him up and found he's actually written several. (A nonfiction companion to this Ward 41 collection of stories, and some mystery books written under the name John Luck.) These really surprised me - great mix of autobiographical detail and dramatic effect.

The Passing of the Armies - Joshua Chamberlain. Reading The Killer Angels sent me googling in a dozen directions. I've been avoiding Civil War reading for years for fear of reading nothing-but for years. I still fear this is going to happen. (If so, I apologize for that Books I Read in 20-whatever post; that'll be awfully repetitive.) And while I do have several Civil War books lined up for 2017, the only other one I read this year was this one. Josh Chamberlain was the Maine Volunteer who led the famous bayonet charge from Little Big Top at Gettysburg. (Played unforgivably by Jeff Daniels in Gettysburg; I'm sorry, but no.) When I found out he wrote his own account of the closing days of the war, I had to read it.

It's written in that nineteenth century American style that will either repel or charm you. "Big" prose, as I call it. I found it very readable, although one aspect of this kind of style (and this is evident in Grant's writing as well) is a tendency to play down big events. So, you have to kind of keep another tab open while reading so as not to miss the significance of something on account of the author's modesty in reporting it.

After I finished, I wondered if perhaps his stature as a living legend in Maine put him on King's radar. I googled "Stephen King Chamberlain" and lo and behold, the events of his very first novel (Carrie, duh) take place in the town of Chamberlain. D'oh! Probably should've retained that info. 

~

"There is no friend as loyal as a book."

- Hemingway