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.

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
• 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 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'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. 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. Yeah, 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
This is the book that made me religious.
• 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
• Minimanual 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
• Wolves of the Calla by Stephen King
i hate stephen king
• The Evil Creator by M. David Litwa
• The Hellbound Heart by Clive Barker
• The Kingdom of God Is Within You by Leo Tolstoy
• The Raft is Not the Shore by Thich Nhat Nanh
• The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
• The Triflers by Mumkey Jones
what the fuck it's actually kind of good? maybe i just have dogshit taste in everything
• Slaughterhouse 5 by Kurt Vonnegut

TO READ

• Don Quitoxe by Miguel de Cervantes
• Johnny Got His Gun by Dalton Trumbo
• The Motorcycle Diaries by Che Guevara
• The Quran by Allah
• The Bible by The LORD, your God
• Elements of Style by William Strunk Jr.
• Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
• The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne
• Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
• A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller, Jr.
• One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey
• Confessions by Augustine
• A Bloody and Barbarous God by Petra Mundik
• Moby Dick by Herman Melville
• Suttree by Cormac McCarthy
• The Orchard Keeper by Cormac McCarthy
• 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
• A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
• 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
• Berserk by Kentaro Miura
• Spider Kiss by Harlan Ellison
• The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
• The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
• Dispatches by Michael Herr
• Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler
• Roots: The Saga of an American Family by Alex Haley
• Old Path White Clouds by Thich Nhat Hanh
• Antiquities of the Jews by Flavius Josephus
• On Writing Well by William Zinsser
• To Dwell in Peace by Daniel Berrigan
• Dangerous Visions by Harlan Ellison
• The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
• Watchmen by Alan Moore
• Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

To read, someday

All the books I'd like to read at some point, but aren't a priority.

• Behemoth by Scott Westerfeld
• Lord of the Flies by William Golding
• 1984 by George Orwell
• Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
• Color of Water by James McBride
• 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
• Mulligan Stew by Gilbert Sorrentino
• 2666 by Roberto Bolano
• Battle Royal by Koushun Takami
• The King in Yellow by Robert W. Chambers
• Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer
• Book of Drought by Rob Carney
• The Brain That Changes Itself by Norman Doidge
• Famous People by Justin Kuritzkes
• No Longer Human by Osamu Dazai
• Between Two Fires by Christopher Buehlman
• Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon
• The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea by Yukio Mishima
• Rip Tide by Kat Falls
• House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski
• The Jungle by Upton Sinclair
• Logan's Run by William F. Nolan and George Clayton Johnson
• Jesus' Son by Denis Johnson
• The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky
• The Odyssey by Homer
• The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
• Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
• Siddhartha 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
• Jerusalem by Alan Moore
• 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
• 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 Invention of Racism in Classical Antiquity by Benjamin H. Isaac
• No Mud, No Lotus by Thich Nhat Hanh
• Brown Girl Dreaming by Jacqueline Woodson
• 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami
• Who Goes There? by John W. Campbell Jr.
• Papillon by Henri Charriere
• Cambodia 1975-1982 by Michael Vickery
• Native Son by Richard Wright
• The Disaster Artist by Greg Sestero
• Systematic Theology by Paul Tillich

Return