Two books I didn’t really like and one I really did

On May 10, 2025 By Luther M. SilerIn Reading, Reviews2 Comments

I have spent a couple of days trying to think of a time where I thought a story-within-a-story structure worked for me, and for the life of me I’ve been unable to come up with one. The main character in Nnedi Okorafor’s Death of the Author is– get this– a Nigerian-American female author who lives in Chicago and is in a wheelchair due to a childhood injury, and at the beginning of the book she writes a science fiction novel that is a massive success. A massive, massive, massive success, propelling her to J.K. Rowling or Stephen King levels of fame. Portions of the book are given over to excerpts from her book, Rusted Robots.

The problem is Rusted Robots is terrible. It’s unreadable. By the end of the book I was skipping all of the Rusted Robots sections, and I generally don’t skip or skim parts of novels. And, man, it’s really damn hard to read a book that is all about how amazing and life-changing some other book is, especially when they keep giving you parts of that other book and you keep skipping them. The obvious self-insert doesn’t really make any sense (Okorafor doesn’t use a wheelchair, but had a surgery for scoliosis go bad as a young woman, and she needed crutches to walk for a long time) and Zelu as a character is generally unbearable. She’s selfish and impulsive and her family is terrible, so you’re confronted with a situation where you don’t like the main character and think her family treats her poorly and think they’re mostly right even though they’re terrible about the way that they’re right.

It’s also really weird to read about the various ways Rusted Robots affects Zelu’s life, because as an actual science fiction author Okorafor has to know that this isn’t how this shit works. Okay, granted, Nigerian women in wheelchairs aren’t terribly common sights, and Nigerian women with the experimental leg exoskeleton devices she acquires midway through the book are even less common, but Zelu gets recognized repeatedly every time she leaves the house, by people who a lot of time are reading her book right at that very second so they can shove it in her face to sign. Zelu’s relationship with her Internet fans makes more sense, especially as the wait for Book Two of her unplanned trilogy gets longer, but no debut author has ever gotten this famous this fast. It’s nutty.

I three-starred it on Goodreads because despite my complaints it’s still an Okorafor novel, and it was one of those books that despite not liking it very much I didn’t want to put it down, but a twist at the end very nearly made me knock it down to two, and I still might.

Sigh. I really like all three of the authors in this post! Scalzi, in particular, is someone who I have referred to as “one of my favorite authors” more than once, but When The Moon Hits Your Eye marks his second miss in a row after Starter Villain, which was mostly underwhelming.

The biggest problem is that When The Moon Hits Your Eye actually is the book that Scalzi’s online detractors want to tell you all of his books are– it’s slight (I read it in three hours or so, and not because it was so amazing I couldn’t put it down), all of the characters feel exactly the same, and all the dialogue is bantery and quippy in a way that’s okay for one or two characters in any given book but not for damn near everyone. The concept of the book is that the moon suddenly turns to cheese, and the book talks about the next thirty days after that. There’s no main character, although some people are revisited a few times, but Day Fourteen might talk about a character that you never see again, or you might jump back to the people from Day Three on Day Twenty-Two and it’ll take you half of the four-page chapter to realize you’ve seen them before.

Oh, and I knew a girl once whose nickname was Mooncheese, for reasons I no longer remember, and I spent the whole book thinking about her, which wasn’t entirely unwelcome but was kinda distracting.

I dunno. The whole concept of the book is kind of deliberately dumb, and you can take something like that and play it kind of straight if you want to, but the characters in the book keep talking about how fucking stupid it is (those exact words) that they have to take the idea of the moon turning to cheese seriously, and after a while it’s really wearying. It’s just … it’s blech. It’s not very good, and it pains me to say that about a Scalzi book.

This, on the other hand. Go buy this immediately, and if you haven’t read the first book in what are apparently called The Ana and Din Mysteries, go grab it right now; it’s called The Tainted Cup and it’s really damn good too. The series hails from one of my favorite subgenres, “Sherlock Holmes, but …”.

This time our crime-solving pair are representatives of an Empire on a fantasy world with lots of biopunk “grafting” tech and occasional attacks by what are basically kaiju but they call Leviathans. Jackson Bennett leans heavy into body horror here– the victim in the first book died when a literal tree suddenly grew out of his body– and the Holmes of the series, Ana Dolabra, is a drug-addicted and probably genetically modified ubergenius who wears a blindfold because she can’t handle the constant visual input of the world around her. Dinios Kol, the Watson, is an Engraver, possessed of perfect recall but with a neat little twist where he needs to anchor his memories with scents to be able to describe them in a way that makes sense to anyone else. Ana is delightfully nuts and the world itself is fascinating as hell, and the Macguffin of this book is Leviathan marrow, which is just a great thing for characters to be chasing around and trying to find. I love this series, and right now this book is on my shortlist for 2025.

#C2E2 Roundup

On March 1, 2020March 1, 2020 By Luther M. SilerIn Geek, Photography3 Comments

We had a good time! Other than having to park a full 27-minute walk away from the venue, that is. That’s a decent length for a walk in the cold, and my watch asked me on the way to and from my car if I was working out or not. No! I’m just trying not to die.

Also, when we got there, there was absolutely no signage that there was a security line or a bag check to go through? Just literally a few thousand people all milling around being confused, because no one knew why they were there but everyone stood in the huge mob because they felt like they ought to?

We had our badges already, and they were already activated, so I literally moved a barrier aside and the three of us went in. Somebody tried to follow us and got sent back, and tried to get security to go get us too, but they didn’t. For some reason I found that hilarious. I didn’t find out until after the show that we’d actually dodged the security line; as I said, no signs at all, just a lot of confused people in a herd. I wouldn’t have jumped out of line if I’d have known that, but … whatever, I guess. I thought it was will call, I swear. 😀

I feel like there were a ton more people at the show than the last time, but more on that in a few minutes. I had goals! Nerd goals! First one: meet Gail Simone and Al Ewing. Well, Al wasn’t at his booth at all on Saturday, which was a bummer. But I met Gail!

So, interesting detail: Gail follows me on Twitter. And the account belongs to Luther, which, remember, isn’t my real name. So the fact that I automatically went into “I’m at a con” mode and told her to sign my graphic novel to Luther took me by surprise. Then I found out she was selling scripts and snapped one of those up too– that issue of Tony Stark: Iron Man contains what might honestly be my favorite single-panel joke in all of comic book history:

Gail’s husband accidentally told me something VERY COOL that might be coming out and I was immediately sworn to silence, but I wasn’t told not to tell you that I know something cool now. Which I do.

Authors! We ended up leaving before Robert Jackson Bennett’s signing, but my wife got Sam Sykes to sign a book, and I got autographs from John Scalzi and S.L. Huang:

By this point, I’d set precedent that books were signed to Luther, so I decided to roll with it. John was nice enough to let me take a picture with him, too:

On the Charizard: the boy put it on the table, and John immediately volunteered to sign it if he wanted, which he declined, not knowing who the hell John was. We only talked for a minute or two but he was very nice– in general, everyone was, unsurprisingly.

Also, I bought stuff:

New leather dice bag! Forgive the vast amounts of cat hair on the piano bench, there; it’s one of Jonesy’s favorite spots and I’m not about to retake the pictures somewhere cleaner.

Leather dice tray! It was either this or a tower, and I went with this instead, because of…

…the super fuckin’ cool obsidian dice I bought, which the salesperson made sure to point out are made of glass, and thus, honestly, are probably not the best choice to make dice out of? The price of the set, plus the box and the tray was frankly ridiculous, but much more reasonable compared to the first set I looked at, which were made of Damascus steel and priced at four hundred dollars. But fuck it: twelfth/third anniversary and we both saved up to buy cool shit at this show and I was ferdamnsure going to buy cool shit.

Oh, and I ran into my friend Verna Vendetta, who I met at Starbase Indy a million years ago:

The only real fail of the show, at least for me, was the sparse number of cosplayer pictures I took. Turns out that 1) it’s way easier to get people to let them photograph you when you’re at a booth, and 2) it really was hugely crowded, so most of the time if I saw somebody I might have tried to get a picture of in other contexts, the ridiculous number of people in between us made stopping to do so practically impossible. So I missed out on, say, the guy in the 12-foot-tall Bumblebee costume, because despite being near him there was no way I was going to get him to stop. So I didn’t get nearly as many pictures as I thought I was going to, but I did get a handful of them:

So, yeah: didn’t get arrested, spent lots of money, met cool people, walked seven miles, Achilles tendons currently really painful. I’ll call that victory! If you’d told me at fifteen that I’d not only eventually attend a nerd convention with a hundred thousand people there but that I’d have my wife and son with me and we’d be doing it on our anniversary, I’d have called you a liar. It’s good to be a geek.

Two quick #reviews and an update

On October 20, 2018 By Luther M. SilerIn Geek, Reviews4 Comments

Unknown REVIEW THE FIRST: Doomsday Book, by Connie Willis. This is going to be one of those reviews that is mostly complaining but then I tell you to read the book anyway, so just be prepared for that– it’s just that the weird stuff is more interesting. Doomsday Book tells a story of a time traveler sent from 2048 to 1320. In this future, time travel is part of how historians do their jobs, for the most part, although certain periods are considered too dangerous to send people back, and the machines they use to do the time travel are calibrated in such a way as to deny people travel if sending them back will cause paradoxes.

So Kivrin, one of the main protagonists, gets sent back to 1320, and then all sorts of shit goes wrong, including an epidemic in the “now” timeline (causing a massive quarantine) that may have been caused by sending her back. Which is impossible, which kind of complicates things.

This book was published in 1992, but reads like it was written in the fifties or sixties, in that other than time travel and some weirdly inconsistent advances in medicine the author appears to have anticipated exactly zero societal changes that were actually brought on by advanced technology. Like, the internet existed in 1992, even if it was mostly AOL and local BBSes at the time, and most houses had a computer. Willis appears to have believed that computers were a fad that were going to go away. So her notion of future is kind of weird and charmingly retro, but her notion of past is excellent– the bits of the book set in the fourteenth century are phenomenally interesting, enough to make it much easier to ignore the weirdnesses of what is supposed to be 2048 where they seem to still be using rotary phones. Which never work. At times it almost seems like they’re going through operators to connect phone calls.

It’s also enormously and charmingly British, so be prepared for that. The book won all sorts of awards, and it’s a great read, but be prepared to chuckle condescendingly at it in a couple of places.

51SX5APRP1L._SX327_BO1,204,203,200_ The second book of John Scalzi’s Interdependency series, The Consuming Fire, is out and I finished it today. I liked the first one a hell of a lot– no surprise, as Scalzi has been a favorite for years– but didn’t write about it here. The Consuming Fire suffers from a slightly meandering first third and takes a bit to get its legs underneath it but once it does it’s off to the races. I like the basic premise of this series a lot– the Interdependency is an intergalactic human civilization (no aliens in this universe) headed by an Emperox, who is both a political leader and the leader of the church, and the different smaller human societies are joined by what are called Flow streams, which (more or less) are wormholes that connect one chunk of space to another and allow a properly-equipped ship to move substantially faster than light. This has allowed the Interdependency to exist, as many of their civilizations can’t fully provide for themselves and so trade is absolutely necessary for their society to exist.

In the first book, the Flow streams started collapsing. This is Bad. In this book, it becomes clear that what first started out as a couple of lone scientists screaming about the slow-moving ecological and societal catastrophe (sound familiar?) has now become a real and present danger to human civilization. The good thing is that the Emperox is on the side of the scientists. The bad thing is that virtually no one else is, and the political machinations going on throughout the book are complicated and (ultimately) really satisfying. Scalzi’s humor is on point throughout, although he’s kept a trend from the first book of giving spaceships really weirdly anachronistic names– there is a ship called The Princess is in Another Castle, for example, and I feel like there was one in the first book named after a Beatles song.

Still. S’good. Read it.

spiderman_negative UPDATE: I keep almost abandoning Spider-Man PS4, to the point where I’ve declared myself done with it at least twice and I keep going back to it. It’s one of those frustrating games that keeps having bits that are entertaining and fun as hell and then four seconds later you’re screaming at the screen because of the absolute bugfuck stupidity of whatever Goddamned dumb thing the game is insisting you do next. The research missions, in particular, so far are damn near unforgivable– they can be ignored, but I’m bad at ignoring shit in games like this and so far each research mission has found a new and different way to be absolutely insanely annoying in some way or another. I’ll be perfectly happy to make it through the rest of the game without another fucking car chase, too, which are never not terrible.

Also: I think I mentioned this in my previous piece about this game, but guys? Spider-Man doesn’t kill people. Ever. The only character more fanatical about not killing people than Spider-Man is Batman, and even that is only true for properly understood versions of the character.

This game has a reward for knocking 100 people off of buildings. Like, there are occasional big fights on top of skyscrapers (in itself, kinda dumb) and the easiest way to be successful is to use moves that knock the bad guys back a lot because most of the time they’ll go sailing off the edge of the building and they’re dead.

No.

I will probably end up finishing this, but much like The Witcher 3, another game that I hated initially and only completed out of spite, I’m going to hate it about half the time I’m playing it. But Read Dead Redemption 2 comes out in a few days and I need this one done and dusted by then. So I need to beat it this week.

On audiobooks

On October 8, 2016October 8, 2016 By Luther M. SilerIn Geek, Reading5 Comments

I have always suspected that I would not like audiobooks. There are a number of reasons for this; chief among them are the facts that I read way, way faster than anyone could ever read out loud and don’t have the patience to wait for someone else to take four or five times as long to read something as I would, and the fact that I really enjoy the physicality of reading. I have drawn this distinction between my wife and I a few times in this space, I think; we both enjoy reading, but I like books. I have thousands of them. I think she’d be content with an e-reader for everything for the rest of her life if it weren’t for the fact that I buy so many books that there’s always something for her to read. I generally only read ebooks if I’m traveling (which doesn’t happen very often) or if I have no other choice, such as when my indie author friends have released new books. Even then I prefer to get their stuff in print if I have the chance.

All that said, I’ve never actually tried to listen to an audiobook. Enter John Scalzi. Scalzi is one of my favorite authors, probably in the top five, and is also a guy who has served as a major influence on my own style. I get everything he releases immediately, no questions asked, and I’ve never not liked one of his books.

John just released a new novella solely as an audiobook. There’s a print version coming eventually, but for now, if you want to read The Dispatcher, you have to get the audiobook. At first that sounded kinda shitty, at least for me– John can do what he wants with his work, obviously, but that doesn’t mean that I have to like it– and then I found out that Audible.com was letting everyone download the book for free. So I did. And I started listening to it in the car this morning, on my way to work. A one-way trip to work is 20, maybe 25 minutes, so I figure that’s a decent chunk of time to digest a bit of an audiobook. That said, the entire thing is about two hours and ten minutes long– even round-trip, that’s several days of driving. I’m in, like, Chapter Three.

Well, after day one, I still don’t like audiobooks. In fact, weirdly, I’m finding that I don’t like the book, which I’ve never said about a Scalzi work before, and I’m trying to suss out whether it’s the book itself that’s bad or whether I dislike the format itself so much that it’s bleeding over into the actual story. Zachary Quinto seems fine as a narrator, I suppose, but what’s getting me is that he’s clearly reading a book as opposed to telling a story, and it all feels really unnatural. I just discovered that there’s an option to double the speed he’s reading at, and I’m going to enable that tomorrow and see if it helps things. Because right now, this experiment is a failure.

Do you listen to a lot of audiobooks? Do you read a lot of John Scalzi? If so, wanna download this thing right quick and tell me if I’m nuts or not?

Review, sorta: LOCK IN, by John Scalzi

On August 24, 2014August 24, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn Reading, Reviews, Uncategorized1 Comment

How’s this for a first sentence that should cause deep, creeping dread in any author: my favorite thing about Lock In, by John Scalzi, is the cover.

That’s the greatest damning-with-faint-praise sort of sentence of all time, right? But seriously: I love love love the cover to this book. I’m not sure what it is about it that I like so much other than the fact that it stands out from everything else on the shelves so well, but… damn.

(EDIT: Scalzi himself has popped up on Twitter to let me know that Peter Lutjen is the artist who did the cover; he was also responsible for the cover for Scalzi’s Redshirts. He doesn’t appear to maintain his own site or I’d link to it, but he does a lot of work for Tor. There’s a neat article about the production of the cover here.)

Weird detail: my copy (which I got in a signed edition through Subterranean press; the rest of you can’t even buy this until later this week MWA HA HA) says “A NOVEL OF THE NEAR FUTURE” across the bottom of the book. There are images on Google that say “A NOVEL” in the same place, but I can’t find an image of the actual cover my book has anywhere– including on Scalzi’s own website. Which is weird.

But anyway. Scalzi is one of my favorite working authors, and his work is especially near and dear to my heart because I think when I’m writing at my best he and I sound a lot alike. I’m a huge China Miéville fan, right? I couldn’t write like Miéville if my life depended on it. I love Alastair Reynolds’ work, but I couldn’t write Reynolds-style books either. Scalzi, on the other hand, and for whatever reason, is a writer whose works I tend to thoroughly mentally dissect as I’m reading them, because I think he and I have similar senses of humor and we want to write the same style of books. I finished Lock In overnight. My last book before that, Scott Lynch’s Republic of Thieves, took a week.

I’d rather write books you can read overnight. 700-pagers aren’t my style. I am a fan of the semicolon; John just wrote an entire book in which he ruthlessly removed all of them on purpose, partially because he thought he liked them too much. (Yes, I did that on purpose.) We both tend to be dialogue-heavy as opposed to description-heavy. Things like that.

(I should be clear: he’s way better at all of this stuff than me. I’m not saying I’m as good as Scalzi, although I certainly aspire to be. Just that if I had to pick a pro author and say “I”m gonna be that guy when I’m rich and famous!” it’d be him.)

Anyway. Right: the book. Lock In is a bit of a departure for Scalzi because it’s not a space opera, the genre that the majority of his books have fallen into. It’s a near-future detective novel, taking place in a world where a disease called Haden’s Syndrome has imprisoned a certain percentage of the world’s citizens in their own bodies. He’s taken that simple premise, extrapolated forward an extra twenty or thirty years to give society a chance to mature a bit, and then written a murder mystery.

Which is an awesome way to do a science fiction novel, because it lets him stretch into another genre (crime fiction) while still staying in his wheelhouse of sci-fi as he’s doing it. This is not my favorite Scalzi book (that would be a tie between Old Man’s War and Redshirts, which is one of a very small number of books that actually made me cry while I was reading it) but it’s still a book that I think most of you should be reading. The setting is deeply interesting, the characters are fun, and the mystery/procedural itself has enough twists and turns in it that it felt like a seasoned pro was writing it and not someone who was trying his first novel in the genre. I gave it five stars on Goodreads. You should give it a look.

(Yeah, I just talked about myself for 500 words and the book for 150. That’s why it says “sorta” in the title up there. Shuddup.)

Schadenfreude pie

On June 15, 2014June 15, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn Cooking6 Comments

More details later. Not my recipe.

EDIT: The details, including an explanation of the name, can be found here, a link that’s worth clicking on and reading through even if you don’t intend to make the pie. The short version: Dark corn syrup, brown sugar, molasses, kahlua, chocolate chips, eggs, cinnamon, butter, and pre-made graham cracker crust. Eat a very small slice at a time (oh my god so rich) preferably warm and with a large glass of milk.

Delicious. But I’m totally diabetic now.

PS: It’s called schadenfreude pie, remember. I will be enjoying a piece during Game of Thrones tonight. 😉

On discomfort with entertainment

On March 19, 2014March 20, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn Music, Politics, Stories4 Comments

AZ1XOjJCAAAgir_.jpg_large Lemme tell you an uncomfortable story. I don’t particularly like this story but it’s relevant so I’m gonna.

It is, oh, probably late 1998 sometime. I’m in my first quarter as a grad student at the University of Chicago. There are a lot of things I was good at in college; going to parties was never really one of them. It is odd, therefore, that I am at a party right now, and furthermore a party full of people who I only barely know, as our program has only just started, and– wonder among wonders– I am having fun. Quite a bit of fun, as it turns out, as several other people at the party have turned out to be huge fans of late eighties and nineties-era hiphop, and it is blaring on the stereo as our story begins. I am sitting next to another guy who has also just started at U of C and is loosely in the same Divinity school program I am; I haven’t talked to him in many years, but I suspect he is either a college professor or a stylite now.

(EDIT: Looked him up. College professor.)

We are having a grand old time. Pimpin’ ain’t easy by Big Daddy Kane comes on the rotation. We both have the song memorized. We are rapping. There is nothing better than Divinity School students rapping, by the way.

Do you happen to know this song? You may know where I’m headed right now. I need to emphasize this: we are being loud. It’s a loud party, mind you, but we’re on our third or fourth song in a row at this point and whoever is choosing the music is clearly egging us along.

We hit this verse:

I see trim and I bag it, take it home and rag it
The Big Daddy law is anti-faggot

There was not actually a needle scratch at that time, and the party did not actually come to a screeching, silent halt. That said, the beat drops away for the words “anti-faggot,” so they’re especially pronounced and hard to miss. But the two of us stopped, as what we had just said hit both of us at the same time, just in time for the next few lines of the song:

That means no homosexuality;
What’s in my pants’ll make you see reality
And if you wanna see a smooth black Casanova — BEND OVAH!

“My God, that’s terrible,” one of us said. I think it was me.

That was fifteen years ago (Jesus!) and I’m still more than a little ashamed of it.

Relevant: the hostess of the party was the first out lesbian (first “out” person of any gender, actually) who I’d ever called a friend*. I’m going to say this now without any idea of whether it’s actually true, but it was my perception at the time: IU had had a decent-sized gay community, but there was an unofficial “gay dorm” at IU and while I had known a couple of gay people through class I didn’t hang out with any of them. Alicia and I were talking about working-class lesbian bars during our first conversation, so the atmosphere was a trifle different at U of C.

(* 24 HOURS LATER EDIT: this is not true; I had at least one good friend who identified as gay in college. I had forgotten because the last I checked she was dating a guy. But in college she was definitely at least mostly into girls.)

Also relevant: I’m pretty sure it was her music collection we were listening to. There’s a small chance she’ll read this, as we’re Facebook friends; she can correct me if she wants. I don’t remember paying any particular social penalty for what happened– I’m pretty sure she and the other guy are still friends, and no one appeared to get mad at us. But it stuck with me anyway.

Here’s what got me thinking about this story, and yes, I’m using Scalzi to generate a post again. I’ve talked several times around here about where my personal lines are on what sorts of entertainment and what sorts of businesses I’ll support with my money. But John’s focus on what “problematic” (his word) artifacts you have enjoyed got me thinking. This isn’t about refusing to see Mel Gibson movies or eat at Chick-Fil-A; it’s about stuff that I know is fucked up and I like anyway. I can’t really listen to Big Daddy Kane anymore because the subject matter gets to me. But I can’t stop myself from rapping along if, say, something comes up on random play– and I should point out that It’s a Big Daddy Thing and Long Live the Kane remain on my hard drive, along with no doubt any amount of other problematic rap songs, a lot of which don’t have “It was 1989!” to excuse them any longer.

I dunno. I don’t play them around other people and I won’t be letting my son listen to them. I don’t– well, not often– deliberately choose to listen to them. But it ain’t like it would be difficult to hit delete and I haven’t done that yet either.

The last time I read The Lord of the Rings I did it with a particular eye toward looking for racism. I know that Tolkien catches a lot of abuse for the racism in his books and having read them a thousand times I find it overblown. One of my other favorite authors, on the other hand, is H. P. Lovecraft, who was undeniably a big ole’ racist and I love his stories anyway. Then again, they’re both dead, and they’ve both been dead a long time; long enough that if I’d used extra Os in the first long there nobody would criticize me for it. Does that excuse them? Does it excuse me?

I dunno. I hope so?

(Also: While a lot of the music I was listening to in late elementary and middle school and high school and since then was horrifyingly homophobic and sexist, I feel compelled to point out that I was eating up the anti-white/Afrocentric stuff just as much as everything else. Professor Griff got a lot of rotation from me back then, along with X-Clan and a few others. So I didn’t necessarily shy away from stuff that was critiquing me. I don’t know what that says about me or if it’s relevant but I may as well throw it in. I would not be the person I am today if I hadn’t started listening to Boogie Down Productions in fifth grade. Hiphop, for whatever it’s worth, is baked into my soul in a lot of ways. That includes both the good stuff and the bad.)

(Also also: the most recent example of liking problematic things? True Detective, clearly, which was, to put it charitably, unkind to its female characters and utterly dismissive toward people of color. I recognize these things, will not argue with people who disliked the show because of them, and loved the show regardless. Which is an expression of my own privilege, granted. I’m recognizing it, admit it, and… don’t really know what to do about it, if indeed I even need to.)

The 8 Non-SF/F Books that Meant the Most to Me

On January 13, 2014January 13, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn Reading3 Comments

…yeah, I’m stealing from Scalzi again. What of it? Thinking about this stuff is fun. You may remember this post, which focused on science fiction and fantasy books; he’s just redone the premise, except focusing on books that aren’t science fiction and fantasy. He appends the suffix (as a Writer) to his post; while some of the books I’m going to mention definitely influenced me as a writer, I’ve included some that had no real effect on my writing because of the way they affected the rest of my life. I’m also only doing eight, not ten, although I reserve the right to go back and add more if I smack my forehead and remember something obvious later.

The timeline I’m working with here, by the way, is “through college.” Books are in alphabetical order by author.

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Illusions: the Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah, by Richard Bach. This was– drink every time you see this phrase in this post– first given to me by my Uncle David, when I was in middle school, I think, and getting used to the idea that I really wasn’t ever going to be a Christian. It had a rather profound effect on my psyche and my ideas about how the world worked for several years afterward. I reread this book this year for the first time in probably a decade or two, and I’ll admit I’ve outgrown it; it seemed awfully silly to my jaded older self and I’ll admit that of all the books on this list this is the one I hesitated the most to include. But… man, at that time in that place? I was copying quotes from this book into a notebook. I’ve never done that before or since with any other printed work, not even the LOTR books, and I’ve got lines from those tattooed on myself.

Who Wrote the Bible? by Richard Elliott Friedman. I can pinpoint this one pretty precisely: I read this my senior year in high school. When I started the book, I was sort of planning on majoring in journalism in high school (see two later entries for more background on this) and planning on Uncovering the Truth for the rest of my life. By the time I finished it I’d already started becoming the kid who was going to go through four years at Indiana University without so much as setting foot in the journalism building. Who Wrote the Bible? rewrote my entire future on the spot, taking my preexisting mild interest in religious studies and blowing it up into a full-scale obsession that was going to dictate the course of my studies for the next six years of my life– I ended up triple majoring in Religious Studies, Jewish Studies, and Psychology with dual minors in Near Eastern Languages and Cultures and Anthropology, then heading off for a Master’s degree in Hebrew Bible from the University of Chicago before realizing that reading was more fun than research and stopping my program before moving on to the Ph.D. None of that would have happened if I hadn’t randomly found this book on a shelf in a friend’s house and asked to borrow it.

Hm. This book is responsible for, like, 2/3 of my student loans. Never mind. This book sucks.

A Prayer for Owen Meany, by John Irving. Two guesses who loaned me this one, and the first one doesn’t count. Yep! Uncle David. This is another book that influenced me both as a person and a writer; not only is Prayer a great story with a fascinating set of twists and turns and a somewhat unexpected supernatural bent to it, but it taught me how to be a newspaper columnist– Owen Meany runs a column called VOICE, written in all caps, throughout most of the book.

I had a column in our school newspaper my junior and senior year. What was it called? VOICE, of course, although I didn’t write it in all caps, mostly because no one would let me. I also never told anyone where I got the name from, and I don’t think anyone ever noticed. I haven’t reread this book in a while; maybe I should add that to the 2014 rereads list.

Misery, by Stephen King. One of my many ongoing reading projects (which didn’t go mentioned in the post the other day) is to reread every Stephen King book, in order. It didn’t make the post because I don’t really care if I get it done in 2014 or not. Very, very few of those reads will be new; I read Rage for the first time a couple of months ago but I’m pretty sure I’ve read 95% of King’s actual novels already.

The first one? Misery. I don’t remember exactly how old I was, but… well, I wasn’t what was probably considered old enough to be reading Stephen King. Maybe fifth grade? Sixth? Somewhere around there. I was at my grandmother’s house and rather bored– my brother and I may have been spending the night, actually– and I came across her copy of it and picked it up. By the time she noticed what I was doing I was already too hooked for there to be any chance of talking me into putting it down or distracting me with something else. I still have that exact copy; she never got it back.

An Introduction to Biblical Hebrew, by Thomas O. Lambdin. What? You can’t see anything in the image of the cover? That’s on purpose; Lambdin’s Hebrew grammar features blood-red foil stamped into a dark grey cover, and it is a forewarning of what you are getting into: you are going to bleed for this book, and it’s letting you know before you even open the cover that it is a bad evil motherfucker and you probably ought to leave it on the shelf like a sensible person. I had this book with me everywhere I went in college for two years and everywhere I went in grad school for two years after that; it taught me to study in a way that no textbook and really no class ever did or has since. Now, granted, a loooooot of the credit needs to go to my first Hebrew professor at IU, Bernie Levinson, who was hands down one of the finest educators I’ve ever met in my life, but there was still something about this damn book. I’ve still got it; if my house burns down I’ll rescue my copy, if only because I don’t actually think it can be destroyed and I would hate to see what the book I referred to as “the Lambdin” for years would do to human civilization if freed from its earthly shell.

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One More Time: The Best of Mike Royko, by Mike Royko. This one, I’ll admit, is in some ways a bit of a cheat, as I didn’t get the book itself until well after college, when I found both it and its sequel For The Love of Mike on a shelf in a Barnes and Noble together and bought them both immediately. I’m including it because Mike Royko was my writing idol in high school; our local newspaper syndicated his column and as far as I was concerned getting to read Mike Royko’s columns was the entire reason my parents were paying for the paper. The school newspaper, and journalism itself, were a really big deal for me in high school, as you may have already picked up on, and the fact that I wanted to be Mike Royko when I grew up had a lot to do with that. The guy was brilliant, simple, direct, understated, and wrote like he had scalpels for fingers, a simile that may only make sense to me but still seems beautifully appropriate anyway. I still pick this up and leaf through it from time to time, although probably not often enough, and I miss the hell out of getting to read Mike’s columns a couple of times a week.

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Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, by Hunter S. Thompson. Speaking of journalists, and speaking of people I miss the hell out of: this one is absolutely an “as a writer” entry, as I worship at Thompson’s altar and every word I’ve written since I first read this book has had his stamp on it somewhere. I firmly believe Hunter Thompson to be one of the finest prose writers who ever lived and the finest writer of invective who ever lived; my greatest regret is that George W. Bush outlived him, because that means I’ll never get to read the obituary Hunter Thompson wrote for George W. Bush.

His Nixon obit, of course, is brilliant.

This is yet another Uncle David recommendation, which will surprise no one; half of everything important I’ve read in my life came from him somehow.

Weirdly, I don’t remember when I read this book for the first time– I can’t even pin it down to “high school” or “college” or “before then” or anything like that. I suspect I was probably in high school, as my parents generally weren’t ever too prone to taking anything I was reading away from me but I can’t imagine they’d have overlooked something as full of drug references as Fear and Loathing.

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The Autobiography of Malcolm X, by Malcolm X and Alex Haley. The Autobiography of Malcolm X is beyond a doubt, without a question, no ifs, ands, or buts, the most important book on this list and the most important work of nonfiction I’ve ever read in my life. I first read this in sixth or seventh grade and the damn thing blew my goddamn mind. Malcolm is my idol in a lot of ways; there’s a poster of him hanging up in my office that I’ve had in every home (and most of the classrooms) that I’ve lived in for years. He’s one of my two favorite human beings; the other is Abraham Lincoln. My son came very close to being named Malcolm Michael; if we have another kid (unlikely) and it’s a boy (hopefully not; if we have two I want a girl) he’s going to be named Malcolm Abraham. There are not many books that I literally think everyone should read. Every living human being should read The Autobiography of Malcolm X. Period.

I’m going to stop at eight, if only because some of the other choices I thought about feel like cheats for some reason or another. Let’s call three other books Honorable Mentions: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, by Robert M. Pirsig (another Uncle Dave loaner, by the way), Integrity, by Stephen Carter, and, well, the Bible, which I feel weird putting in bold. I feel compelled– unnecessarily, I suspect– to point out that I really don’t mean The Bible Meant A Lot To Me in the way most people would. I suspect most of you have been reading me for long enough to know what I’m getting at, and if not, well, reread this piece a time or two, because there’s hints.