WRITING for the VOID

"In time, all things work to your advantage when you pursue them with an open heart."


This list isn't really comprehensive (I'm not gonna bother including Lego City Adventures: Help is on the Way, a childhood classic), it's only meant to help me keep track of my current reading habits and the shit I'd like to read in the future, as well as to keep notes on the ones I've found to be most influential.


TO READ

  • Don Quitoxe by Miguel de Cervantes.
  • Behemoth by Scott Westerfeld
  • Lord of the Flies by William Golding
  • Johnny Got His Gun by Dalton Trumbo
  • 1984 by George Orwell
  • Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
  • The Motorcycle Diaries by Che Guevara
  • The Torah by YHWH
  • The Quran by Allah
  • The Bible by The LORD, your God
  • Color of Water by James McBride
  • Elements of Style by William Strunk Jr.
  • Cloud of Sparrows by Takashi Matsuoka
  • Art of War by Sun Tzu
  • To Kill a Mocking Bird by Harper Lee
  • Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
  • Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
  • Song of Ice and Fire by George R.R. Martin
  • Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
  • The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne
  • Slaughterhouse 5 by Kurt Vonnegut
  • Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
  • Mulligan Stew by Gilbert Sorrentino
  • A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller, Jr.
  • 2666 by Roberto Bolano
  • Battle Royal by Koushun Takami
  • The King in Yellow by Robert W. Chambers
  • Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer
  • One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey
  • Confessions by Augustine
  • Book of Drought by Rob Carney
  • The Brain That Changes Itself by Norman Doidge
  • A Bloody and Barbarous God by Petra Mundik
  • Famous People by Justin Kuritzkes
  • Wolves of the Calla by Stephen King
  • Moby Dick by Herman Melville
  • Suttree by Cormac McCarthy
  • The Orchard Keeper by Cormac McCarthy
  • Dangerous Visions by Harlan Ellison
  • The Nag Hammadi Scriptures by Marvin Meyer
    • I bought this back when I was on my Gnostism kick and never finished it
  • The Secret Revelation of John by Karen L. King
  • Butcher's Crossing by John Edward Williams
  • No Longer Human by Osamu Dazai
  • Between Two Fires by Christopher Buehlman
  • A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
  • Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon
  • A Gypsy Good Time by Gustav Hasford
  • My Confession: Recollections of a Rogue by Samuel Chamberlain
  • Paradise Regained by John Milton
  • The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri
  • Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick
  • The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea by Yukio Mishima
  • The Life of Jesus by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
  • Rip Tide by Kat Falls
  • Berserk by Kentaro Miura
  • House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski
  • Spider Kiss by Harlan Ellison
  • The Jungle by Upton Sinclair
  • Logan's Run by William F. Nolan and George Clayton Johnson
  • The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
  • Jesus' Son by Denis Johnson
  • The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
  • The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky
  • The Odyssey by Homer
  • The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
  • Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
  • Siddharta by Herrmann Hesse
  • Dune by Frank Herbert
  • Life of Pi by Yann Martel
  • The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
  • A Scanner Darkly by Philip K. Dick
  • Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
  • Dispatches by Michael Herr
  • Jerusalem by Alan Moore
  • Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler
  • The Bell Jar by Silvia Plath
  • Watership Down by Richard Adams
  • The Forever War by Joe Haldeman
  • Judas by Jeff Loveness
  • Art and Artist by Otto Rank
  • The Way of the Samurai by Yukio Mishima
  • The Raft is Not the Shore by Thich Nhat Nanh
  • Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson
  • Honorable Whoredom at a Penny a Word by Harlan Ellison
  • Strange Wine by Harlan Ellison
  • It's Kind of a Funny Story by Ned Vizzini
  • Apostate: From Christianity to Islam in Times of Secularisation and Terror by Joram van Klaveren
  • The Hellbound Heart by Clive Barker
  • The Kingdom of God Is Within You by Leo Tolstoy
  • Roots: The Saga of an American Family by Alex Haley
  • The Invention of Racism in Classical Antiquity by Benjamin H. Isaac
  • Old Path White Clouds by Thich Nhat Hanh
  • No Mud, No Lotus by Thich Nhat Hanh
  • Brown Girl Dreaming by Jacqueline Woodson

My high school english classes weren't all that productive.


HAVE READ (In no particular order)

  • The Beast That Shouted Love at the Heart of the World by Harlan Ellison
    • My favorite collection of short stories, and probably my favorite book. I got this ancient and stained copy for Christmas one year, and I brought it to school everyday and read it during class. It's a very special book to me.
  • Alone Against Tomorrow by Harlan Ellison
  • The Road by Cormac McCarthy
    • It's not McCarthy's best book. In fact, it's probably one of his worst. Even so, this book absolutely breaks my heart. The world it portrays is so dense with hopelessness and despair it edges on unbearable, and it likely would be, were it not for the relationship between the son and the father, each other's world entire. Beautiful fucking book.
  • Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
  • The Passage by Justin Cronin
  • The Twelve by Justin Cronin
  • The City of Mirrors by Justin Cronin
  • Discovering Scarfolk by Richard Littler
  • The Redemption of an African Warlord by Joshua Blahyi
  • Dark Life by Kat Falls
    • In the style of a classic western, but taking place in a post-ecological disaster world at the bottom of the ocean. Childhood classic. I've read it like six times.
  • Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card
    • It's a book I liked a lot as a kid, and slowly grew to hate as I grew older. I think the appeal for me was the fantasy it portrayed of a special boy who "shows them all," with his super special prodigy brain. I dunno, I guess I just grew up.
  • The Enemy by Charlie Higson
    • My favorite book series growing up. In a world where all the adults have turned into child-eating zombies, the kids of the Earth have no one left to protect them. A very nasty and violent book, where very young children are killed and devoured. I haven't read it much in my adulthood beyond the first three books in the series, the second one easily being the best and the third easily being the worst. I loved it as a kid because it provided the ultimate survival fantasy for someone at that age. No more fucking grownups to tell me to clean my room or do my homework, cuz now they're all fucking zombies! But more subtly, I think the groundedness in the characters and storytelling was also very significant for me. The kids were very relatable, ressembling other kids I knew, hitting very close to home in some places. I think I'm only beginning to see the profound influence it had on me.
  • The Short Timers by Gustav Hasford
    • A great little book that hits like a truck, and the novel Full Metal Jacket was based on. It's crazy how much they whitewashed the story when they brought it to the screen. Major characters in the film who are portrayed as dumb, but proud and loyal troopers are raping, drooling assholes treating Vietnam like a playground in the book. The movie also has a hard time portraying military leadership as anything other than overworked, when the book as no problem showing them as malicious, egomaniacal shitheads. The movie protrays the soldier's service as an immense sacrifice, and the book calls anyone who serves more than their first term lifers, who most of the grunts seem to despise. The movie also doesn't seem very interested in the perpective of the Vietnamese at all, north or south, cutting pretty significant scenes from the novel and putting the entire focus on the US troops. Reading The Short Timers really changed my relationship to what was my favorite movie for the longest time. One of my favorite books.
  • The Phantom Blooper by Gustav Hasford
    • Sequel to The Short Timers. Not as good as the first book, but still very compelling. It opens up with the main character from the first book butting heads with a local assemblage of marines calling themselves "the Black Confederacy," led by their dread commander, Black John Wayne. Yes, it's pretty dumb, and I don't really know what the author was trying to accomplish with those characters, maybe other than just showing a movement against the war in the military itself. The author also spends a lot of time earnestly comparing North Vietnam to the American Confederacy (at least I think it's earnest. The first book was supposed to be a fictionalized autobiography, so it's hard to tell how much the main character is supposed to remain a self-insert). He was suppose to write a third book and complete it as a trilogy, but he passed away before he could finish it. He did manage to write a noir detective novel called A Gypsy Good Time before he died, which also stars a Vietnam war veteran. Write what you know, I guess.
  • Vic and Blood by Harlan Ellison
    • A collection of all the stories staring Vic and Blood by Harlan Ellison, barring the screenplay. Great stories, especially Eggsucker. It's what got me into Ellison's stuff in the first place, and probably why I ended up on this long path of pretentious high literature bullshit.
  • Deathbird Stories by Harlan Ellison
  • Leviathan by Scott Westerfeld
  • Musashi by Eiji Yoshikawa
  • Stella Maris by Cormac McCarthy
  • The Passenger by Cormac McCarthy
  • All The Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy
  • The Crossing by Cormac McCarthy
    • My favorite McCarthy novel. Just fucking spectacular. Makes me want to die in Mexico.
  • Cities of the Plain by Cormac McCarthy
  • The Gunslinger by Stephen King
  • The Drawing of the Three by Stephen King
  • The Wastelands by Stephen King
  • Wizard and Glass by Stephen King
  • Book of Five Rings by Miyamoto Musashi
  • American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis
  • Paradise Lost by John Milton
    • Incredibly compelling, which was a surprise for a book written by a guy I'm removed from by about five hundred years about a story I was familiar with before I could even read.
  • No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy
  • Living Buddha, Living Christ by Thich Nhat Hanh
  • Metro 2033 by Dmitry Glukhovsky
  • Metro 2034 by Dmitry Glukhovsky
  • Metro 2035 by Dmitry Glukhovsky
  • The Glass Teat by Harlan Ellison
  • The Other Glass Teat by Harlan Ellison
  • The New Media Epidemic by Jean-Claude Larchet
  • The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas Carr
  • Slippage by Harlan Ellison
  • Conquest of Bread by Peter Kropotkin
    • I joined a Marxist book club against my better judgement.
  • Outer Dark by Cormac McCarthy
  • Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
  • Geronimo's Story of His Life by Geronimo
  • Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky
  • Snail on the Slope by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky
  • A Sacred and Terrible Air by Robert Kurvitz
  • On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft by Stephen King
  • Child of God by Cormac McCarthy
  • Starship Troopers by Robert A. Heinlein
  • Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business by Neil Postman
  • MINI MANUAL OF THE URBAN GUERRILLA by Carlos Marighella
  • War Paint by Bill Goshen
  • Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
  • Going Home: Jesus and Buddha as Brothers by Thich Nhat Hanh
  • I Am Legend by Richard Matheson
  • The Way of the Samurai by Nitobe Inazo
    • I don't know what I was expecting to get out of this one. For the most part, it just kind of made me sad. That haiku about the grieving mother and her dragonfly hunter who passed away actually got me to shed some tears.
  • The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin
  • A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
  • Shadow and Claw by Gene Wolfe
  • The Sunset Limited by Cormac McCarthy
  • Based on a True Story: Not a Memoir by Norm Macdonald