10 Favorite Books
Here’s a list of 10 “favorite” books. As with all such lists I get to number five then the whole thing becomes a fist fight. They are listed in no particular order.
Cannery Row by John Steinbeck
Slam by Lewis Shiner
Radio Free Albemuth by P.K. Dick
The Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler
Odile by Raymond Queneau
The Tremor of Forgery by Patricia Highsmith
Kalpa Imperial by Angelica Gorodischer
The Fafhrd and Gray Mouser stories by Fritz Leiber
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Lewis Stevenson
Alleys
“Consider the nature of a city. It is a vast repository of time, the discarded times of all the men and women who have lived, worked, dreamed and died in the streets which grow like a willfully organic thing, unfurl like petals of a mired rose and yet lack evanescence so entirely that they preserve the past in haphazard layers, so this alley is old while the avenue that runs beside it is newly built but nevertheless has been built over the deep-down, dead-in-the-ground relics of the older, perhaps the original, huddle of alleys which germinated the entire quarter.”
– Angela Carter, The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman
The Future of Reading in Pictures
Right now I see readers existing on a continuum. At one end we have the addict…
“I read that GRRM novel in two days. You got anything else? Robin Hobb? Joe Abercrombie? Scott Lynch? Brandon Sanderson? Nothing! C’mon, man, I’m dying! What about a World of Warcraft tie-in novel…”
At the other end we have the fetishist…
“… wraparound gold embossed *gasp* slip cover with *pant* waxen end pages and *sniff* mint-tinged book binding glue *squee*…”
Of course both can and do exist in the same person, which is great as long as the overall environment they exist in is healthy. Trouble is that as the distance between poles increases, books cease to be objects we encounter in our day-to-day lives and reading becomes marginalized until it’s either as effortless as eating a tube of Pringles or so fraught with arcana that one expects rites and initiations, along with a full bank account, are required to do it.
Books as addictive substance, or books as art object, support either, but if one side wins it’s likely to be a loss for everyone.
Yesterweird 