Since I’m not generating much polished work product these days, I thought we might try tackling the subject of books. I’m thinking I’ll start a series of posts about the books I’m enjoying. Also, links to booktube channels on YouTube where I find great recommendations.

I read more than I write. I’ve read a number of good books so far this year, and I’m currently reading a lot more. My current reading list has gotten way out of control, but it’s all so good that I don’t want to move any of these down to my reading later list.

I guess I’m what people call a mood reader. I don’t stick with one thing and finish it; I read whatever I’m in the mood to read. Also, some books seem to fit into a certain general time of day. For example, Great Expectations is a prime time book. I read it in the evening sometimes, instead of streaming video for a while. The Book of Disquiet, Collected Fictions, and Decreation aren’t novels and they’re better closer to bedtime.

This is my current list of books for 2022. This isn’t my collection, just what what I’m reading now, expect to read this year, and what I’ve recently completed.

I’m currently reading:

Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
The Book of Disquiet – Fernando Pessoa
Season of Migration to the North -Tayeb Salih
Frankenstein – Mary Shelley (1818)
Collected Fictions – Borges
Decreation – Anne Carson
The Iliac Crest – Cristina Rivera Garza
Dowry of Blood – S.T. Gibson
Cathedral of Mist – Paul Willems
Seeking Slow – Melanie Barnes
The Night Circus – Erin Morgenstern
Journal of a Novel – John Steinbeck

Recently Completed Books

The Wind Up Bird Chronicle – Murakami
The Picture of Dorian Gray – Oscar Wilde
Snow Country – Yasunari Kawabata
Snow – Orhan Pamuk
The Book Thief – Marjus Zusak
Pedro Paramo – Juan Rulfo
Autobiography of Red – Anne Carson
Piranesi – Susanna Clarke
Untold Night and Day – Bae Suah
One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
The Sense of an Ending
The Bloody Chamber – Angela Carter

Books Waiting on My Shelves

1Q84 – Haruki Murakami
Letters to a young Poet – Rilke
The Remains of the Day – Ishiguro
When we were Orphans – Ishiguro
The Anthropocene Reviewed – John Green
The Alienist – Machado de Assis
The Waves – Virginia Wolf
Klara and the Sun – Kazuo Ishiguro
On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous – Ocean Vuong
Things Fall Apart – Achebe, Chinua
The Road – Cormac McCarthy
The House of Spirits – Isabel Allende
The Memory Police – Yogo Ogawa
Gravity’s Rainbow – Thomas Pynchon
Dark Tales – Shirley Jackson
The Legend of Hill House – Shirley Jackson
The Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
Ghostwritten – David Mitchell
Quiet – Susan Cain
The Unconsoled – Kazuo Ishiguro
Beloved – Toni Morrison
The Count of Monte Christo – Alexandre Dumas
The Best of Richard Matheson
Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead
The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas – Machado de Assis
Collected Stories of William Faulkner
Absalom! Absalom – William Faulkner
Sixty Stories – Donald Barthelme
Emma – Jane Austen
Northanger Abbey – Jane Austen
Eugene Onegin – Pushkin
Frankenstein in Baghdad -Ahmed Saadawi
The Phantom of the Opera – Gaston Leroux
The Snow Leopard – Matheson
Don Quixote – Cervantes
A Gentleman in Moscow –
Where the Crawdads Sing
East of Eden – John Steinbeck
Love in the Time of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
The Dark Interval – Rilke

Study Shows E-books the Greener Choice | Poets & Writers:

“Given that paper accounts for a quarter of all landfill volume, it should probably come as no surprise that a recent study touted e-books as more environmentally friendly than traditional publishing. A report released this month by the San Francisco-based Cleantech Group found that Amazon’s Kindle device could generate a net savings in carbon emissions—a savings that increases as print consumption is displaced.”

Now wait just a doggone minute. No one is going to believe that books account for a quarter of landfill volume, but as the article plays out, that’s what is implied. It implies that the printing of books is putting paper in landfills.  Baloney.

I have worked in corporate offices, and that’s where a lot of this comes from. Companies print vast tracts of documents – reports, spreadsheets, memos, e-mails – God only knows what – that is actually readable on computer screens. Then they throw it away. Seriously, people print out e-mails, then sit there, at the desk, and read them. This is analogous to packing your dinner in Styrofoam at home, then sitting down and eating it.

And how much of that paper in landfills is junk mail? The amount that I alone receive is enough to make me angry. I pull it out of the mailbox, and before I even climb the stairs, I walk down the alley and toss it in the recycle bin. How many millions of people are tossing it in the garbage instead, and sending it straight to the landfill?

Seriously, how much of the paper in the landfills is books, or even magazines that people paid hard cash for? And how much of what is could be reduced by pounding harder on people’s skulls to get them to recycle?

The article goes on to explore the benefits of using Amazon’s Kindle e-book reader, including the carbon impacts of its manufacture, as compared to the environmental impacts of book and newspaper manufacture. And I’m sure that the Kindle is a nice toy. But as the article says, the study assumes that people who use the Kindle would otherwise be buying a lot more books than I do, or anyone I know. Add to this the fact that at least some people who buy books like to keep them, not throw them away, and that a book can be shared in ways that the content of a Kindle cannot, and we have a different conversation.

The article continues:

As the figures suggest, the study relies on the theory that Kindle owners are reducing an already higher-than-average consumption of printed matter in favor of digital substitutes. “A user that purchasers fewer than 22.5 books per year would take longer to neutralize the emissions resulting from the e-reader,” Ritch wrote, “and even longer to help reduce emissions attributed to the publishing industry.” The report also rests on the probably unrealistic assumption that users will hang on to their Kindles for a full four years before adding them to the growing accumulation of technological waste.

Right. Only people who otherwise read and discard a lot of books could make a meaningful impact by switching to e-books, and they need to keep at it for a long time before throwing the device itself in the trash.

I think if we want to reduce the paper in the landfills, we should slash the amount of unmitigated crap that’s printed out, but which never needed to be stored on sheets of tree in the first place. And by raising public awareness of books as generally contributing positively to culture and personal quality of life. A book can be a worthy, illuminating thing, worth keeping and passing along. Or not.

Finally, it bears noting that if I have three books on my desk at a given moment, at least one very likely came from the local library, and chances are it’s going back. They may have to send someone to pry it from my obstinate clutches; especially since, right now, I’m reading this. Slowly.

I have a lot of books in my house. This is nothing special and neither am I. I’m just saying, I have some books. And then I have some special books, which have certain properties by means of which I might give my mind a jump start, on days when its energy is drained by life’s more pedestrian concerns. Books which impart creative inspiration, is my point.

Among these special books are any of several by William Faulkner, Plainsong by Kent Haruf, The Crossing by Cormac McCarthy, One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and the somewhat more obscure Omensetter’s Luck by William H. Gass.

The latter is not well known, but I would contend that it is a work of sublime inventiveness. I mean this guy filled his writing table with helium and took off, and went strange places in his mind and mine, and did not give a damn – we can presume – for marketing.

The book came out in 1966, and I picked up my copy in Chico about 20 years later, and have kept it close to hand ever since. It reminds me that the rules of writing were – despite all contradictory evidence in my work – made to be bent by lesser writers than myself. I was born to shatter them. Someday.