Back at the start of 2014, I challenged myself to read 40 books over the course of the year. In the end, I completed 42. For a while, I was overconfident, thinking I could push it to 60 or so (I was power reading on the bus every morning), but once my PhD started, my novel reading prowess had to take a back seat to speed reading course materials.
A couple of thoughts came to mind about a few of the books I read this year:
Michael Adams and his quest for the worst movie ever made reminds me of my average Sunday afternoon as I peruse youtube with my brother, looking for shit to watch, while eating Indian food and drinking copious amounts of Black Label beer. I wasn’t all that surprised to learn that I had already seen most of the movies he writes about.
I read a solid 10 novels from Henning Mankell this year. I had previously read Faceless Killers and enjoyed it, but something about rereading it got me hooked on that man’s prose and the ridiculous, tragic, realistic events in the life of Detective Wallander. The final novel in the series, The Troubled Man, might have been the most heart-wrenching novel I have ever read, particularly because certain elements of Wallander’s of aging, and losses, struck a little close to home.
Times without Number by Brunner definitely gets the prize for “most difficult book to find”. I had somehow discovered it’s existence on a Wikipedia article about time travel in fiction, and was intrigued by the premise. Unfortunately, the bastard’s been out of print for a while so finding a second hand shop that sold it (over Amazon, no less) was an ongoing challenge. In the end, it’s story was less interesting than it’s ambitious themes, but the themes and thoughts alone were worth the treasure hunt.
The book that challenged and moved me the most was definitely Althaus-Reid’s The Queer God. A well-read, bixesual, latino woman, who was also a liberation theologian, applying Queer theory to Christianity and given no fucks about typical academic methodology? Talk about a wild time. I don’t think I will ever be able to write an academic paper the same way.
Worst book I read might have to go to Stephen King with The Wind through the Keyhole. I love most of this work, but talk about an unfortunately long-winded wreck of a book. The prose were smooth, but fluffly, the plot and structure ambitious in concept, but made pointless through their execution. Oh well, one can’t be expected to write killer fiction for 40 years without a few bags of crap along the way.
Anyways, here’s the list of books I read in 2014:
Kafka – The Trial
John Fante – Ask the Dust
Leo Brent Robillard – Leaving Wyoming
Don Delillo – White Noise
King – The Langoliers
Vonnegut – Gold Bless you Mr Rosewater
Henning Mankell – Faceless Killers
King – Secret Garden Secret Window
Camus – L’etranger
Michael Adams – Showgirls, Teen Wolves, and Astro Zombies
King – The Mist
P.D. James – Talking about detective fiction
Mankell – The Dogs of Riga
Mankell – The White Lioness
King – The Library Policeman
King – The Sun Dog
Chester Himes – A Rage in Harlem
Steinbeck – Cannery Row
Mankell – The Man who Smiled
Heinlein – The Puppet Masters
Mankell – Sidetracked
Mankell – The Fifth Woman
Wells – The Isle of Doctor Moreau
Mill – Utilitarianism
Vonnegut – Breakfast of Champions
King – The Wind through the Keyhole
Mankell – One Step Behind
Mankell – Firewall
Mankell – The Pyramid
Mankell – The Troubled Man
John Brunner – Times without Number
Marcella Althaus-Reid – The Queer God
Abbie Reese – Dedicated to God
Pierre Boulle – Planet of the Apes
Orwell – 1984
Fleming – On Her Majesty’s Secret Service
Burrus – Sex Lives of the Saints
Jay Johnson – Peculiar Faith
Hammett – The Thin Man
Fulton J. Sheen – The World’s First Love
David Mitchell – Cloud Atlas
Gibson – Neuromancer
