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

Fiction

• 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
The book I like to read when I'm sad. One of my favorite novels. I read an essay that described the book, borrowing from Flannery O'Connor, as "christ-haunted," and I think that's exactly where so much of the beauty of it comes through to me. I'll find myself repeating passages under my breath, "have you a neck by which to throttle you?" and I'll get chills all along my spine. Raging against and begging for a response from a silent and perhaps indifferent God. It was the first McCarthy novel I've read. I got it at Goodwill along with a copy of The Godfather, which kind of bored the shit out of me lol.
• 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
• 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 prodigy brain. The last time I read it I was in high school and it was not nearly as good as I remembered.
• The Enemy by Charlie Higson
My favorite book series growing up. In a world-ending disaster 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 grownups to tell me to clean my room and go outside, cuz now they're all zombies and I get to bash their brains in! But more subtly, I think the groundedness in the characters and storytelling was also very significant for me. The kids were very relatable, hitting very close to home in some places, though quite a few side characters were little more then the tropes they embodied. The violence was not prettied up or glorified in anyway, it is most certainly a horror series. I think it had a pretty profound influence 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. In the film, the worst characters morally are dumb, but loyal troopers who bravely charge into the fray, military leadership is overworked and autocratic, but ultimately compentent, and full focus is on the US soldiers, with little attention paid to the Vietnamese perspective. In the novel, characters like Animal Mother are portrayed as raping, drooling assholes who treat Vietnam like a playground. Military leadership is incompentent if not outright malicious, and the Vietnamese, soldier and civilian alike, are actually humanized. Reading The Short Timers changed my relationship to what was my favorite movie. It's 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 Joker butting heads with an assemblage of marines calling themselves "the Black Confederacy," led by their dread commander, Black John Wayne. It's pretty dumb, and I don't know what the author was trying to accomplish with those characters, maybe other than 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
• 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 read.
• No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy
• Metro 2033 by Dmitry Glukhovsky
• Metro 2034 by Dmitry Glukhovsky
• Metro 2035 by Dmitry Glukhovsky
• Slippage by Harlan Ellison
• Outer Dark by Cormac McCarthy
• Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
• Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky
• Snail on the Slope by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky
• A Sacred and Terrible Air by Robert Kurvitz
• Child of God by Cormac McCarthy
• Starship Troopers by Robert A. Heinlein
• Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
• I Am Legend by Richard Matheson
• 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 Hellbound Heart by Clive Barker
• 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

Non-fiction

Book-length

• Living Buddha, Living Christ by Thich Nhat Hanh
• Book of Five Rings by Miyamoto Musashi
You will find that I am unfortunately the most annoying type of weeb, obsessed with feudal Japan and bushido. I have not lost my V-card.
• The Redemption of an African Warlord by Joshua Blahyi
• The New Media Epidemic by Jean-Claude Larchet
• The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas Carr
• The Glass Teat by Harlan Ellison
• The Other Glass Teat by Harlan Ellison
• Conquest of Bread by Peter Kropotkin
That book club I joined fell through pretty fast. There wasn't much of a plan, and in the end I was the only one who actually finished any of the books we chose lol.
• On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft by Stephen King
• Geronimo's Story of His Life by Geronimo
• Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business by Neil Postman
• Minimanual of the Urban Guerrilla by Carlos Marighella
Also for the book club. Again, no real plan, I think we just thought it sounded cool. Never got together to talk about it, not that there would be much to talk about since it's not exactly theory/philsophy.
• War Paint by Bill Goshen
What a shitty waste of human life.
• Going Home: Jesus and Buddha as Brothers by Thich Nhat Hanh
• 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
• The Evil Creator by M. David Litwa
• The Kingdom of God Is Within You by Leo Tolstoy
• The Raft is Not the Shore by Thich Nhat Nanh

Documents/articles/essays

• On the Origin of the World by unknown
Gnosticism sounds so cool conceptually, then I actually read their texts and realize these guys were essentially the energy-crystal hippies of their time (not that I didn't like it).

TO READ

Fiction

• Don Quitoxe by Miguel de Cervantes
• Johnny Got His Gun by Dalton Trumbo
• 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
• Moby Dick by Herman Melville
• Suttree by Cormac McCarthy
• The Orchard Keeper by Cormac McCarthy
• Butcher's Crossing by John Edward Williams
• A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
• A Gypsy Good Time by Gustav Hasford
• 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
• Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler
• Old Path White Clouds by Thich Nhat Hanh
• Dangerous Visions by Harlan Ellison
• The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
• Watchmen by Alan Moore
• Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
• Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut

Non-fiction

• The Motorcycle Diaries by Che Guevara
• The Old Testament/The Tanakh by YHWH
• The New Testament by the LORD of hosts
• The Quran by Allah
• Elements of Style by William Strunk Jr.
• Antiquities of the Jews by Flavius Josephus
• On Writing Well by William Zinsser
• To Dwell in Peace by Daniel Berrigan
• Confessions by Augustine
• A Bloody and Barbarous God by Petra Mundik
• 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
• My Confession: Recollections of a Rogue by Samuel Chamberlain
• Dispatches by Michael Herr
• Roots: The Saga of an American Family by Alex Haley
• My Religion by Leo Tolstoy

To read, someday

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

Fiction

• Behemoth by Scott Westerfeld
• Lord of the Flies by William Golding
• 1984 by George Orwell
• Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
• Cloud of Sparrows by Takashi Matsuoka
• 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
• 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
• 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
• 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami
• Who Goes There? by John W. Campbell Jr.
• Papillon by Henri Charriere
• Lost Pages by Don Di Filippo
I can't remember how I heard about this book. I only vaguely remember adding it. I don't know how I got the author's name wrong. This must be the Mandela effect at work.

Non-fiction

• Travels to the West of Qiu Chang Chun by Li Chi Ch'ang
• A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier by Ishmael Beah
• Misquoting Jesus by Bart D. Ehrman
• Cambodia 1975-1982 by Michael Vickery
• Native Son by Richard Wright
• The Disaster Artist by Greg Sestero
• Systematic Theology by Paul Tillich
• 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
• Art of War by Sun Tzu
• The Brain That Changes Itself by Norman Doidge
• The Way of the Samurai by Yukio Mishima
• Color of Water by James McBride

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