FIFTY FAVORITE BOOKS

A Facebook Friend recently posted a link to David Bowie's list of his 100 favorite books.  I am amazed that anyone can have 100 favorite anything.  I thought I would go through my library and see if I could find 100 favorite books but I could only come up with 50, and that was a bit of a stretch.  Not all of them are favorites because they are good - in fact some are favorites because they are so very bad, crazy or bizarre - but all of them have been or continue to be a significant influence on me in some way.  Many of them are novels which stand out in my mind as superior or unique, to which my mind often returns.  There are other books which have also been great influences but are not now in my library - this is just what I have on hand.  They are presented in the order in which I found them, with no annotation or description, the downy cheek of the best next to the scaly jowl of the worst.

The Avadhuta Gita of Dattatreya

An Autobiography - Mahatma Gandhi

The Androgynous Christ - Edward L. Kessel

Systemantics - John Gall

Optimism One - F. M. Esfandiary

How to Think Straight - Robert H. Thouless

The Greatest Adventure - John Taine

Beast In View - Margaret Millar

The Devil is Dead - R. A. Lafferty

The Manuscript Found in Saragossa - Jan Potocki

est: Playing the Game the New Way - Carl Frederick

The Greatest Power in the Universe - U. S. Anderson

A Small Classical Dictionary - E. H. Blakeney 

Meditations - Marcus Aurelius

The Enchiridion - Epictetus

Etidorhpa - John Uri Lloyd

Galaxy 666 - Pel Torro

The Clones - P. T. Olemy

Werner Erhard - W. W. Bartley III

Oahspe: A New Bible

Hawkers and Walkers in Early America - Richardson Wright

The Mound Builders - Robert Silverberg

Dictionary of Symbols - Liungman

The Real Rain Man ... Kim Peek - Frank Peek

Neo-Tech Power - Frank R. Wallace

The Omega Seed - Paolo Soleri

The Bathroom - Alexander Kira

Alice in Wonderland etc. - Lewis Carroll

Star Maker - Olaf Stapledon

Wanda Hickey's Night of Golden Memories and Other Disasters - Jean Shepherd

Sunset Magazine's New Western Garden Book

Joe Gould's Secret - Joseph Mitchell

The Split Atom: The Last Human Pair on Earth: A Whirling of Ideas - Dr. B. Belove

America Betrayed - Albert D. Nelson

The Three Christs of Ypsilanti - Milton Rokeach

The Plungers and the Peacocks - Dana L. Thomas

The Bridge on the Drina - Ivo Andric

Mucusless Diet Healing System - Prof. Arnold Ehret

Enzyme Intelligence: Whence and Whither - Nels Quevli

Kitsch - Gillo Dorfles

Mayhew's London

Cut It Down To One Page, I'm In a Hurry - John Believer

Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds - Mackay

Hard Cash - Charles Reade

Nightmare Abbey - Thomas Love Peacock

The Book of the SubGenius

Kooks - Donna Kossy

Ritual in the Dark - Colin Wilson

Marjoe - Steven M. Gaines

Dare To Be Great - Rudy Maxa

BOOKS, GO TO HELL!!!

I have kept quiet about this for a long time.  When there first started to be ebooks lots of people had a lot to say about how wonderful "real" books are, how they look, how they smell, how they feel and how tragic it is that because there are now ebooks apparently all that will vanish forever.  Which it actually won't. Well let me tell you I have read books.  I have read far more books than the average literate person.  I may not have read more than you, dear reader, because I am fortunate in knowing some pretty damn literate people, but I know for sure I have read books you have never even heard of.  I know I can get on any city bus or walk into any supermarket and I have read more books than every person there combined will read in their entire lives.  My sister and I spontaneously began reading at age 4, and starting at about 14 I read books every day for over 30 years.  So I have had some experience with real books.  I have had so much experience that I actually began to run out of resources.  I had read everything I wanted to read that was readily available.  I got to the point that I was sending off by interlibrary loan to a university library in Montana or West Virginia just to read Life In London by Pierce Egan, in which the character names Tom and Jerry originate; or Philip Dru, Administrator by Col. E. M. House (said to have been President Wilson's eminence grise) - a future fantasy in which the concepts of the League of Nations and the U.N. allegedly first saw the light; even an obscure novel by John Lymington, maybe the eighth version of the same story he wrote over and over again; all just because I needed to see those things for myself.  Finally I ran out of steam and for the past three or four years I read fewer than half a dozen books a year.

Then I had some experience with ebooks.  My sister-in-law sent me her old Palm pda, an already outdated piece of hardware that looks vaguely like a big clunky smartphone of some sort.  I let it sit around for a while and didn't really do what I had wanted to do with it, put ebooks on it to read.  Finally I started by loading a few things from Project Gutenberg onto it.  It took over a year for me to really use it but in the past few months I have read more books than I did in the preceding year.  Just obscure bits of popular culture, nineteenth century stories of Scientific Crime Detection  or French Master Criminals that I had seen mentioned off and on for years.  I got caught up on Sherlock Holmes.  I read Sophocles and Aeschylus and a couple of their contemporaries I can't even remember the names of.  I read a novel about a young go-getter who saved the mayor's daughter from runaway horses and became the youngest ever advance man for a traveling theatre company.

I have also seen a hell of a lot more movies than most people and one thing for certain is that when things finally start to seem okay, look out.  The guy driving the dynamite truck looks over at his pal and says, "You know, this ain't such a bad job.  I've just got this feeling that everything is going to work out fine." Then the tire hits a rock and over the cliff they go.  Just when I was really enjoying ebooks and reading them every day, the machine died.  Right in the middle of When the Sleeper Wakes by H. G. Wells, Oscar Micheaux's autobiography, and The Case of the 16 Beans by Harry Stephen Keeler.

 I know what books look, smell and feel like, and from the very beginning of the ebook thing, reading those essays lyrically acclaiming the effect of inhaling the dust of oxidized cellulose and fondling grubby old bindings I thought, "Here we go again.  The same thing they went through when card catalogs were replaced and when CDs started outselling vinyl."  Sorry, but I have got no time for nostalgia because I have lived in the past and I am alive now and now is better.

We have got ten thousand books in this house, and that is not using ten thousand as just a big number, but literally and factually we really do have ten thousand books in this house, or more.  We have books in every room of this house except the bathrooms and the breakfast nook - hundreds of them per room.  I don't want to read any of them.  The ones I have already read I don't want to read again and the ones I haven't read I never shall read.  For some reason even though I don't have the slightest bit of use for them as books I am stuck as their guardian for the rest of my life just because somebody sometime might want to read them.  When I got done with an ebook I deleted the file, not because I needed the space - I could have put hundreds of them on the little memory card the size of a two-cent stamp (that's another thing nobody wastes their time rhapsodizing over any more by the way) - but because I was done with them and wanted them gone.

Books.  They come into the house every week, by the boxful.  They sit on the "dining room" table in stacks eternally.  They come up to my studio in stacks to be repaired and go back down to sit on the table some more.  They go into my wife's office to be listed for sale, and they go down into the basement to wait until someone buys them, and they come back up again to be packaged and sit on the table until they are taken to the post office.  More come in than go out, and half of the ones already here aren't even for sale and will stay here.  I am chained to them for the rest of my life and I have already planned exactly how I would burn this place down, if I did, which I won't ever do.  I promise. 

I don't think any of the people who wrote maudlin essays about the tragic loss of the dear old library card catalog even remember they did that.  I think right now they are browsing their local library online and putting stuff on hold to go pick up later this week.  I don't think anybody wishes their mp3 player came with five thousand twelve-inch-square pieces of mold-splotched basementy smelling cardboard, or that they could enjoy taking their mp3 out of the cardboard sleeve and then out of the paper sleeve and then carefully wipe the surface of it with an mp3 cleaner and blow the fluff off the mp3 needle just to hear one song, and then do it again for the next song they want to hear.  If you do, you are an idiot and get off my planet.

I have read books, and I have read ebooks.  I have searched for books in card catalogs and waited for them to be brought up from the stacks, ordered them by interlibrary loan and waited two weeks for them to get to the library so I could go there and get them.  I can get the same books online right now in five seconds, read them, and be rid of them.  Did you notice I put links up there to a couple of them?  I'm not sure the Egan book is the same one because he wrote a bunch of them, but still you can read them if you are as crazy as me which you are not but even if you did you would not have those books cluttering up your place for the rest of your life.  You can't get everything you want as an ebook, but you can't always get it as a book either.

I have read books and I have read ebooks, and ebooks are better.  BOOKS, GO TO HELL.

Books - The Overton Window "by" Glenn Beck

The Overton Window - Glenn Beck  I had seen this at the library a few weeks ago and had been thinking of it ever since.  Kook novels are a field of special interest for me because they contain ideas which I am unlikely to encounter anywhere else, usually packed in an especially mediocre form of utopian/dystopian fantasy.  I was in the mood for something easy to digest and I knew this couldn't have been written by Beck himself (if it had, it probably would have been 600 pages), so it would be a standard ghost-written page-turner which hit all the notes at the right time.  When a kook novel is written by the kook him/herself it can be challenging, if not impossible, to read and I regret that among the many on the shelves here at the Kooks Museum I have only read most of them.  Any book I can rip through in four hours is a well-crafted piece of formula fiction, and that's what this is.  Steeped in kook lore as I am, I got all the Global Political Conspiracy references and was pleased to be introduced to some pretty interesting social engineering concepts, including the eponymous Window - ideas acceptable to the public are within this so-called window, and to change what is accepted one introduces extreme and unacceptable ideas, which automatically widens the window making less extreme ideas palatable.  This is similar to less well-defined ideas of my own, that the existence of an obviously insane extremism makes it easier to introduce unusual or uncommon ideas which seem more reasonable by comparison.  This is a classic and very useful fallacy of argument which actually operates subliminally to alter people's ideas without their knowing it. The irony of Beck's use of the Overton Widow concept, to me, is that he doesn't appear to realize that he has been used for exactly that purpose - as a public loony introducing crank extremist theories in order to make a less radical deliberate thought control agenda more palatable.  After finishing The Overton Window I opened another book I got at the same time, the first volume of  Robert Musil's The Man Without Qualities.  I knew by the time I got to the second paragraph that I held in my hands a work of genius.  The sad thing is, I am not sure I will be able to read it.

Books

Bleak History by John Shirley. I admit not having read a whole lot of John's work because I don't always find the general tone resonates with me personally, and I tend not to seek out things which, like many of his recent books, are media product spin-offs. I was impressed by the quality of thought that went into Bleak History, the way in which people's inner lives and character are portrayed, and the fact that it isn't a simple jumble of cliches strung together in a formalistic plot. I was surprised by the direction the story went and the things that happened, not just leafing through a plot where things go the way you want them to. It's an action/adventure story and not so imbued with philosophy that it is a life-changer, but there is originality and hints of greatness in there. As a bespectacled scholarly middle-aged man I found little in the characters I could personally identify with, and wondered more than once (as I often do) why these things have to happen in New York City and not Topeka or Dubuque, but I found the matter-of-fact presentation of magical and occult events entertaining, and appreciated the way the ideas were not over-played. John Shirley hasn't written a book for me yet, but I got little bits of this one.

Strange and Stranger - The World of Steve Ditko by Blake Bell

This is as fine a book as anyone could ever expect on the life and work of a highly influential figure in recent popular culture, as well as a complex and baffling man. Filled with excellent examples of his startling and innovative artistic style, and ably describing his rise and self-orchestrated fall. As a kookologist of long standing, having spent decades in the study of people who dedicate their lives to the promulgation of a personal ideal or philosophy, Ditko appears to me to be a classic example of the self-disabler. Rarely has such a talented, respected and admired artist more completely destroyed his career and even crippled his own artistic skill in the service of an unreachable idealism. First by making reasonable demands of his dishonest employers, then progressively unreasonable demands of people whose sincere desire was to help him achieve any goal he wished to attain, he ultimately made it impossible to do the one thing he most wanted to do - communicate his ideas through the skills to which he had dedicated his entire life. I believe he discovered and enacted this principle: the only way to always be right is to always make everyone else be wrong. His idealism was a form of perfectionism impossible of existence in this world, a philosophy of pure black and white which can only be enacted in fantasy - since in this world dichotomies and true "black and white" are manufactured by the mind and have no natural existence. His Objectivist idealism compelled him to literally deny reality, a direct contradiction of its fundamental principle that reality is what IS, and not what we wish it to be. Most telling is the complete absence from this book of the slightest mention of his having any personal, emotional, or romantic relationship with another person - not even to say that such a thing was absent from his life. If, as I write this, Steve Ditko still lives, he lives in a world of his own creation - poverty and obscurity, unable to afford even to self-publish, surrounded by hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars worth of his own work which his principles will not permit him to sell, and looked on from a distance by dedicated admirers who are willing and able to publish anything for him, if he would only let them. What an opera it would make.

Annals of Klepsis by R. A. Lafferty

I try to re-read a Lafferty novel once a year. I doubt that I shall live to see the day he is fully appreciated as one of the great writers of the 20th century, inventor of a unique literary style, a sort of doggerel prose. His books aren't the sort of book that you can say what they are about; they contain more ideas, more characters, and more things happening than a dozen normal stories, but only the uncertain things are certain. It doesn't really convey much about the book to say that Klepsis is a pirate planet without a history which provides free transportation to all one-legged irishmen, that all its kings still live as ghosts each in his own tower of the castle, that the residents of Klepsis celebrate an Old Fashioned Slave Sale by barbecuing a whale whole, or that most plants and animals but only one type of short-tailed human have the ability to jump spontaneously from one planet to another. Lafferty creates a sort of simultaneous duality in many of his books - some things or people or worlds there are actually two of, which are often impossible to tell apart although they are opposites and one may be invisible. Slaves own their purchasers. it may be the end of the world or the beginning, and everything may be just an image in the mind of a hunchbacked dwarf who has been asleep for two hundred years or in the mind of the one-legged ghost of the planet's pirate founder. Depending on which Lafferty novel I read, I sometimes only read a page every few days just because there is so much in it. I have quit recommending R. A. Lafferty since I don't believe he is a taste which can be acquired. If you are supposed to read something by him, you probably will.

The Secret Power by Marie Corelli

Marie Corelli was an extremely popular Victorian author of occult and metaphysical romances, and many of her books were reprinted in inexpensive odd-size paperback by flying saucer guru Ray Palmer's Amherst press, of which this is one. This was a VERY hard book to finish because it is so atrociously written. People are constantly delivering impassioned monologues about LOVE. Still I wanted to see where she would go with her protagonists, a male supergenius living in a hermit shack in California who created some sort of superweapon to end war forever, and a female supergenius in a palace in Italy who created a fabulous airship to find the legendary Brazen City in the middle of the Sahara Desert. Not nearly as exciting as it sounds - sometimes I could only read a couple of pages before becoming exhausted at all the dozens of exclamation points. Pretty awful, especially compared with the readability of Steinbeck.

Books I Never Meant to Write

While poking around in my filing cabinet I found this list of book titles and blurbs. I have no idea when I wrote it or what I had in mind when I did.

One Lonely Broad - Simon Spite, Hatemaster, gets his kicks from killing chicks. "Brutal and ugly" - Librarian's Journal

Murder Out the Ass

Stupid Little Bitch - She only had one thing on her mind, but she didn't know what it was.

The Thing From Space - No-one knew what it was or where it came from, they only knew it was here.

Swamp Robot - An escaped convict and a lusty negress come face to face with the inexplicable

Hillbilly Homo - Luther didn't know his ass from a hole in the ground, but nobody seemed to mind, least of all the Sheriff!

Butcher My Baby - Simon Spite, Hatemaster

Pardon my Chainsaw - The wild, poignant and gory adventures of an emergency room intern

The Monster In Your Nose - The nation's number one health hazard may be clinging to the inside of your nostrils!

The Awesome Power Of Your Fists - Learn how to get anything you want using the world's oldest management tool

Shut up! Shut up! Shut up! - Ripped from the pages of tomorrow's headlines, the shocking story of the fed-up generation

Rustlers from the Stars

I'll Kill You, You Bastard (Hatemaster)

The Burning Wind - A stirring novel of forbidden passions unleashed, "Has all the ingredients." - Book Review Weekly

Garden of Love - Strips away the veil of secrecy and lays bare the until-now hidden secret world of vegetable passion

The Wayward Bus by John Steinbeck

One of his less-known and more hard-edged books. It's just a bunch of people on a broken-down bus, but each one is a unique and fully-realized character. Eventually there is something a bit admirable and extremely human in even the worst of them. Steinbeck is always easy to read, and always impresses me by creating such depth of place and character.