12 Writings You Loved Reading

Input Art of Writing
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Also trying not to repeat anyone. Caveats about poor taste, things that have stuck with me because I read them at formative times, etc.

  • Shriek: An Afterword
  • A Burglar’s Guide to the City
  • Gardens of the Moon (and the rest of The Malazan Books of the Fallen)
  • The Stranger in the Woods
  • The Raw Shark Texts
  • The Jungle Book
  • Leviathan: The History of Whaling in America
  • House of Leaves
  • Last First Snow
  • Wired Love: A Romance of Dots and Dashes
  • The Three Musketeers
  • The Clan of the Cave Bear
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supplementary post of 12 books on other people’s lists I wanted to include on mine

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Jesus’ Son Denis Johnson

The Manuscript found in Saragossa Jan Potocki (forgot the translator)

The Mabinogion (Same)

Classic of Mountains and Seas (Richard Strassberg translation but I think that has a different title)

A New Account of Tales of The World Liu Yiqing / Richard Mather

The Lotus Sutra Kumarajiva / Burton Watson

Death By Landscape Elvia Wilk

The Once and Future World JB MacKinnon

The Taste of Apples Huang Chunming / Howard Goldblatt (I think)

Six Records of a Life Adrift Shen Fu / Graham Sanders (I have not read this translation but I can only assume it’s better than the old Penguin one, published as Six Records of a Floating Life. I bet the older Lin Yutang translation is interesting too)

Chaos and All That Liu Sola (don’t know the translator)

The Golden Peaches of Samarkand Edward Schafer

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shout outs to the sympathizer and voyage to arcturus i just didnt want to repeat anyone elses

honorable mention for The Dark Eidolon and Other Stories Clark Ashton Smith

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The Sellout, Paul Beatty

Don Quixote

Foucault’s Pendulum

Mason & Dixon

The Dead Father, Barthelme

Ratner’s Star, DeLillo

Actual Air

Knausgaard My Struggle

House of Mirth

Remainder

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  • The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin

    • (What a fantastic sci-fi novel… it made me understand Anarchism)

  • High Rise by J.G. Ballard

    • (I’m such a huge Ballard fan it’s ridiculous. One of the most fun periods of my life was when I spent a few summers during college just primarily reading Ballard and urban exploring in Florida)

  • The Player of Games by Iain M. Banks

    • (My favorite of his Culture novels)

  • Animorphs: The Andalite Chronicles by K.A. Applegate

    • (I swear to god I reread this a few years ago and it was still a fantastic pulp YA sci-fi novel)

  • RE/Search #11: Pranks! edited by V. Vale

    • (this book made me laugh and blew my mind wide open. Legitimately illegal suggestions in there for things like manipulating the media and fucking with small town governments that I’m sure would still work today)

  • The Woman in the Dunes by Kobo Abe

    • (features, among other things, the sentence, “The
      morning, pressing its face, like the belly of a snail, against the windowpane, was laughing at him.”)

  • The Ecology of Freedom by Murray Bookchin

    • (this is basically the ur-text of my favorite political philosophy)

  • Lipstick Traces by Greil Marcus

    • (I read this a long time ago and loved it. It was my first intro to Situationism! I haven’t gone back to check but I’m worried that Marcus may have scrubbed the marxism and anarchism out of Surrealism and Situationism though but don’t quote me on that)

  • Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino

    • (Calvino rocks, this is his most fun and imaginative book imo)

  • A Scanner Darkly by Philip K. Dick

    • (way better than the movie, this book took me by surprise with a level of raw emotion you rarely feel from Dick’s work. Extremely accurate, lived-in, and sympathetic portrayal of aimless recreational drug users and burnouts)

  • Blindsight by Peter Watts

    • (I love the way this guy reads cognitive science papers for fun, 75% understands them, and writes utterly bizarre sci-fi stories inspired by them)

  • Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace

    • (I read this book too young and it caused me to write like an asshole in my junior year of high school, but I dug those assignments up recently and they are hilarious to look at now. I also suspect this book is still great and I’d get a lot more out of it now that I’m an adult in Boston but I’m never reading it again)
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Ah, I’m glad someone posted a Le Guin! I’ve reread all the early Hainish novels this month and while they don’t reach the peaks of the Dispossessed and Left Hand of Darkness, they do still work as good SF novels with interesting cultural philosophies and worldbuilding. City of Illusions, in particular, struck me as unusually potent and ambiguous

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I read The Dispossessed in school and barely remember it, I should reread it.

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Leaning p recent here bc i dont trust past self

Architectural body - arakawa and gins
The lizard’s tail - luisa valenzuela
Mumbo jumbo - ishmael reed
The sluts - dennis cooper
The last samurai - helen dewitt
Times square red times square blue - delany
Recitation - bae suah
Women in love - dh lawrence
Pattern recognition - william gibson
Ok sure Moby dick

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Did a quick scan of my bookshelf and these are the ones that have survived, for better or worse.

To Kill a Nation - Parenti
Inside the Third Reich - Speer
Soldaten - Neitzel
East West Street: On the Origins of Genocide and Crimes against Humanity - Sands
Night - Wiesel
The Longest Day - Ryan
Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? - Carver
Cathedral - Carver
East of Eden - Steinbeck
Die schwarzen Brüder - Tetzner
Night Sky with Exit Wounds - Vuong
On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous - Vuong

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  1. Mimesis as Make-Believe by Kendall Walton

  2. The Grasshopper by Bernard Suits

  3. Zen Flesh Zen Bones compiled by Paul Reps

  4. The Dice Man by Luke Reinhardt

  5. Double Game by Sophie Calle

  6. Parzival by Wolfram von Eschenbach (A.T. Hatto translation)

  7. House of Leaves by Mark Danielewski

  8. The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K Leguin (probably my favourite Le Guin I’ve read even if it’s a bit on the nose)

  9. Word Origins …And how we know them by Anatoly Liberman

  10. The Real Frank Zappa Book by Frank Zappa and Peter Ochiogrosso

  11. The Cyberiad by Stanislaw Lem

  12. Performance Analysis: An Introductory Coursebook Edited by Colin Counsell and Laurie Wolf (A textbook/collection of essays from various theorists/practitioners)

These are mostly just books that influenced me strongly at one time or another. ymmv

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I am so excited by the deluge of books. I haven’t even heard of half or more that people mentioned. Folks, reading…is good.

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Silence, by Shusaku Endo
Paratexts, by Gerard Genette
Maus, by Art Spiegelman
Sunny, by Taiyo Matsumoto
Stories of Your Life, by Ted Chiang
Camera Lucida, by Roland Barthes
Vibrator, by Mari Akasaka
Journey to the West, by Wu Cheng-en, translated by Anthony C. Yu
The Diving Pool, by Ogawa Yoko (especially the story Pregnancy Diary)
The Pillow Book, by Sei Shonagon
Tsurezuregusa/Essays in Idleness, by Yoshida Kenko
And Then, by Natsume Soseki

For a minute I had A Confederacy of Dunces, by John Kennedy Toole, on there, but it’s been so long I don’t know how I feel about it now

These just came to me off the top of my head. I’m sure I’m slighting some of my favorite books.

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Oh, good call. I think Ted Chiang’s the best living SF author. I don’t know how he manages to have gorgeous prose, purely sfnal plots, and emotional depth all at once.

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havent read nearly enough books to make even a list of 12 and mostly i like fiction and pretty recent stuff at that

exquisite corpse - poppy z brite
frisk - dennis cooper

im sure ill think of more

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thinking about how i felt about them then vs any kind of retrospective assessment, in order of reading:

the unauthorized autobiography of lemony snicket
dress your family in corduroy and denim, sedaris
the crying of lot 49, pynchon
ficciones, borges
left hand of darkness, le guin
the pale king, wallace
consequences of pragmatism, rorty
gender trouble, butler
the center cannot hold, saks
analyzing freud, h.d. et al
complaint!, ahmed
cain’s jawbone, mathers

left off the information: a history, a theory, a flood because it is, in retrospect, a poor piece of journalism, but it did give me a thus-far lifelong obsession with information theory in my sophomore year of university

i would like to do the all-PDF articles version of this but i need to go through my poorly-filed well-hoarded archive folder for that. i have definitely read more PDFs than any other medium by volume at this point

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dress your family in corduroy and denim remains wonderful and more people should say it

the rorty inclusion also adds a lot of insight into why you continue to put up with me

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I was at the Joan Didion exhibit at the hammer the other day (which was an interesting effort, they’d curated a bunch of pre-hollywood Californian knicknacks and tried to locate them within her writing, a bit less than the sum of its parts but I like the idea still) and I noticed one of the pictures had been lent from David Sedaris’ private collection

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thinking about (the) sedaris(es) reminded me: fuck, i left off hodgman, which is too dishonest an omission.

i was obsessed with the areas of my expertise, the allegations are true

dress your family… probably has outrageously bourgeois politics if i were to go back to it now but the family estrangement captures something intense

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Bonus recs I just thought of:

My Urohs by Emehliter Kihleng

The Edge of Irony by Linda Hutcheon