Every Book I Read in 2013

Here's a list of every book I read in 2013. I also included very small reviews for the sake of fun. There are 44 books on this list and they are presented in order of genre.

American:
Naked Lunch, William S. Burroughs 300pgs.
Very strange and confusing, but overall quite humorous and disgusting. Lots of great assplay.

Gravity’s Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon, 776pgs.
Amazing and confusing. I need to read a second time, but this book is the real deal. It's all connected!

Japanese:
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Haruki Murakami, 607pgs.
Lots of fun! Being lonely does feel like living alone in a deep, dark well. A real page turner.

Russian: 
The Master and Margarita, Mikhail Bulgakov, 405pgs
Great, but I wish I knew more about the Russian Revolution. Excellent Christianity satire.

Omon Ra, Victor Pelevin, 154pgs.
Very strange with an amazing ending. Laugh out loud satire of immediately post-communist Russia.

Crime: 
Swag, Elmore Leonard, 240pgs.
Great book about bank robbers and stick-up men. If you want to understand the economics of highway robbery, this is the book to read. Rest in piece to a master of crime.

The Friends of Eddie Coyle, George V. Higgins, 182pgs.
This book has one of the bleakest views of humanity I've ever incountered. Everyone you meet is out to cheat and screw you somehow, without fail. Very little violent crime, all petty money shit. Great book.

Fat City, Leonard Gardner, 183pgs.
A book about boxing but I've read better.

A Kiss Before Dying, Ira Levin, 271pgs.
Absolute edge-of-your-seat thriller about a deranged sociopath. Phenomenally fun to read.

Double Indemnity, James M. Cain, 115pgs.
Really terse, dark, calculated and hard-boiled. Probably one of the best. Very interesting characters in likely the best novel about insurance fraud.

The Big Sleep, Raymond Chandler, 230pgs.
A classic that will never get old. I'll take Chandler over Hammett any day.

The Cockfighter, Charles Wilford, 275pgs.
A god's honest book lauding the cockfighter. Fascinating and bizarre. One of my favorite Weird Crime books, which is a genre I made up to describe books like this one.

Street Players, Donald Goines, 220pgs.
Black urban crime in the 1970s written by a legitimate outsider artist. Goines was a pimp, junkie, dealer and gangster until he was assassinated. This book about pimping gives a compassionate portrayal of all the players.

Caught Stealing, Charlie Huston, 240pgs.
Like a Hitchcock thriller set to the page, this book was a quick, exciting read. Leads in perfectly to it's sequel.

Six Bad Things, Charlie Huston, 305pgs.
The best of the trilogy, our protagonist gets as badass as can be. Perfect twist ending and leads into...

A Dangerous Man, Charlie Huston, 286pgs.
A total letdown. By now, the protagonist has become a moribund, sad-sack loser. Totally lame end to an otherwise good trilogy.

Sci-Fi:
Ubik, Philip K. Dick 216pgs.
Really trippy story about perhaps the first psy-ops task force in literature. One of the best Dick I've read.

The Stepford Wives, Ira Levin, 121pgs.
Interesting satire of the suburbs, if not a little heavy handed. The movie is better.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams, 216pgs
Took me long enough to read this book but I still appreciated it. Very silly, dark, and smart humor.

I, Robot, Isaac Asimov, 273pgs.

This is probably not Asimov's best book. Competent short stories with better ideas than characters/plots.

The Space Merchants, Frederik Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth, 239pgs.
A satire of advertising that looses steam by the end. Pretty funny first 1/3rd though.

Horror/Fantasy:
Good Omens, Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchet, 387pgs.
Hysterical book. Christian satire rivaling The Master and Margarita (I read them congruently). One of Gaiman's most under-rated works, despite a massive cult following.

Carrie, Stephen King, 290pgs.
Compulsively readable, I finished this book in 8 hours. Pitch-perfect characterization of lead character.

The Half-Made World, Felix Gilman, 479pgs
Interesting genre-meld of western, horror, fantasy, steampunk, action. Great world but stops once story really gets going.

The Rise of Ransom CIty, Felix Gilman, 368pgs
The above book's sequel. Written like a fake memoir, still quite interesting. Better than the first book.

Smoke and Mirrors, Neil Gaiman, 384pgs
Gaiman's early short stories and literary experiments. Lots of gems with just as many strange orphans.

Book of Blood vol. 1, Clive Barker, 200pgs Goddammit some of these stories were scary. Really terse writing by someone who mastered the imagery of pain early. A hovel city forming a giant flesh monster will forever haunt my dreams.

Humor:
The Time Machine Did It, John Schwartzwelder, 139pgs. Written by the most prolific Simpsons scripter, this book reads like Homer Simpson fan fiction where he ditches the family, becomes a private eye, and gets a time machine. So obviously, hilarious.

I Am Going to Clone Myself Then Kill the Clone and Eat It, Sam Pink, 115pgs. Very weird book of pitch black prose poems. Highly recommended if you hate the world, everyone in it, and your self (if only even sometimes).

Short Stories/Novellas:
In Persuasion Nation, George Saunders, 228pgs.
My favorite book of short stories I've ever read. Laugh out loud and touchingly sad often on the same page. Saunders is the Vonnegut of today.

Pastoralia, George Saunders, 188pgs.
My least favorite of Saunders' books but still funny. Lots more pathos, a lot less satire.

The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil, George Saunders, 131pgs. Very weird, but also exactly why President Bush was horrifying.

When the Women Come Out to Dance, Elmore Leonard, 228pgs. The ones with plots were super-tense and exciting; the ones that explored characters and dialogue were beautifully written. This dude was good.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, Raymond Carver, 160pgs. Hard to live up to its hype, but I now know for sure it'd be fucking depressing to be an alcoholic.

The Collected Works Vol. 1, Scott McClanahan, 124pgs. Such a great book of wonderful stories from the American South that could truly happen no where else.

Person, Sam Pink, 87pgs. Great, plotless novella of a depressed shut-in who doesn't do anything. Makes me glad I'm not that person.

The No Hellos Diet, Sam Pink, 87pgs Great, plotless novella of a person who works in retail. A life neither really bad or really good.

Non-Fiction/Memoir:
The Braindead Megaphone, George Saunders, pgs.234? Finally read everything Saunders wrote (except the new one). These essays are just as good as his short stories. Crazy access from seeing a new living Buddha, to the super-rich lifestyles of Dubai. Satire in the style of Mark Twain.

Attempting Normal, Marc Maron, 210pgs. A competent book mostly already written in the podcast introductions. A couple really great stories that weren't though. Worth a borrow, not an own.

Men of Tomorrow, Gerard Jones, 384pgs I learned more about 20th century publishing history from this book than any other. If you wonder how comic books, magazines, franchises, and media super-symbols started, this is the book with which to begin.

Telling Stories Again: Scott McClanahan, The Collected Works Vol. 1

When authors write short stories rarely are they writing actual "stories" that anyone would want to say or listen to. Usually, they're writing a short mood, character, or theme. In my experience, "literary" short stories might read like creative writing exercises taken too seriously. Or genre fiction short stories can get really plot-heavy and too far-removed from reality. This doesn't mean those stories are bad, most are fun to read and full of intellectual vigor! But, hardly anybody writes stories like a good story your friend could tell you.

Except Scott McClanahan. He possesses the most effortless writing voice in print. I don't mean lazy, of course, (he released two books and a rock album this year), but rather, McClanahan's voice is so honest, engaged, and precise, you can almost hear a person telling you the words as you read them. David Sedaris' stories achieve a similar affect; perhaps-not-coincidentally, both writers hail from the south. But whereas Sedaris describes the disfunction of a baby boomer suburb families, McClanahan writes Rainelle West Virginia as a strange place of surreal proportions. He's only a little older than I am, so his Virgina is set in the 80s up through today. Another note of comparison:  the real seperation between the two is that nobody talks like David Sedaris (except David Sedaris); I reckon McClanahan's style is more raw. Both are quite funny though, and I'd imagine people who like one would enjoy the other.

McClanahan's stories are quiet, but captivating. Subjects of interest include things that happened to him, local legends, stories about his parents, or sometimes just made up stuff. But with a voice is so compellingly honest, it's hard to tell which is which. This makes McClanahan's stories satisfying for re-reading or casual page-thumbing. You might read the book in one sitting (it's only 130 pgs), but you'll probably read it again a few sittings later.

The Collected Works Vol 1, from Lazy Facist Press, collects the chap-books Stories II and Stories V. Each short story is about 4 pages, none over 8. Most yarns are narrated by the main character, Scott, who is not exactly the book's author, but is pretty darn close. It's hard to seperate the author from the character, the Scott from the McClanahan. Especially since most stories start so colloquially, some start mid-sentence or with an introductory phrase like "So I was...". You know, like a regular story. That's what makes it hard to think of the real McClanahan as anything but an extension of his stories. He writes in clean, perhaps plain, prose.  Rarely does a particular passage stand out from the rest of the story. What makes the stories interesting is what actually happens in them. The characters are well-observed, but the narrative is what allows you to see each person more clearly. For lack of a better word, there's a lot of weirdos in West Virginia, Rainelle especially, and the reserved, but ethically centered, voice of Scott is the perfect recorder.

Scott shares local wivestales, like the life of Randy Doogan, the meth using divorcee who borrows money to buy decongestant medicine. It's funny that McClanahan picked this story as the first in the volume, since his yearning to do good in life is mocked pretty astutely. If you enable an addict, it's pretty hard to write your actions off as simply "good" It's kind of hard to label anything as good, I guess. But it's easy to label things as bad: like when Johnny the logger gets his hand cut off in a logging machine after years of bullying leads to a prank gone too far. These legends are good stories unto themselves but they also reveal the setting of the Rainelle. It's a real place where almost-unreal things happen. Maybe that describes any place--but this place is also in the impoverished rural South, which is not true of all places.

Most of the stories are firsthand experiences. Scott records the times he sees a car crashes, or the  embarrassing details of an encounter with a homeless man while he's out with his girlfriend and her mom. These Scotts try to be good people, but often end up looking like an assholes--whether or not the realize it. However, in the book's two best, and longest, stories, our Scotts just seem like nice people being hurt by the broken system of the world. In "The Prisoners", Scott volunteers at a local prison to teach writing. He meets prisoner he thinks is a good person, but finds out he might just be a phony. Then he meets a guard who claims to be a good person, but he's a huge phony. Scott wonders what prison really is and what it does to the people on each side of the buildings walls, prisoners, workers, and citizens alike. He writes,

"...I lay me down to sleep and sometimes I dream this strange dream. I dream that we're all back at the federal prison except we're outside the prison walls now. We're all there, all the people I've ever known and all the people in the world are there. And you're there too. We're all cold and scared and shivering...They're arguing over this life and what our actions are guided by. No one can figure it out. No one can figure out who the prisoners are and who the prison guards are, and who even the guilty are. And so we're all standing outside the prison walls and we're arguing over this. It's night. And there's lightning--a black and white night..."

Scott oft wonders why bad things happen and why nobody cares. In "Suicide Notes" he tries to pry at the contagiousness of suicide. How when you hear about one person who kills themselves, your ears perk up whenever you hear about more. And how the sadness of it all starts to compound and then it's hard to say exactly why someone might kill themselves or why they might not but really why are you choosing the choice you choose, do you think? It's a story better left read.

McClanahan also writes in detail about this parents. Scott's dad seems like a loving hardass. He works in the produce department of a grocery store and he probably isn't happy with his life but then again who is? Scott's dad sees a man and his daughter get turned away from a restaurant without doing anything, but finds the family walking home to make up for it. Every day, he the same conversation with Rex, the mentally handicapped bagger, during his smoke break ("What time is it?" "11:15."). Every day it's the same conversation. McClanahan's mom seems kind, loving, and superstitious. It is clear that Scott loves her very much. Her roots and origin seem to inform most how Scott relates to the world. McClanahan can communicate the deep knowing of a person in only a handful of pages. It's very impressive.

Finally, there's strange stories. These are almost definitely madeup, but they're still good. Like Scott finding out he can predict the future. Or, my favorite in the collection, a little boy who dresses like a beautiful baby doll, a little girl. He is shunned by his friends and mocked by his teacher, but as a beautiful baby doll he feels more comfortable than he ever felt before. I think this was my favorite story just because it made me feel strange.

I really can't recommend this book, or any Scott McClanahan enough. It's a quick read, but very re-readable. If you want firsthand proof of how great McClanahan's stories are, check out this one published by The Fan Zine. It's about Scott's girlfriend and her experiences as a nurse. It's quite funny, starts by recording the experience of nurses but turns into a meditation on what it means to be sick or crazy. I'll read and write about Scott's new book sometime in the future.

I Am Going to Clone Myself, Then Kill the Clone and Eat It

I bought this book because of the title; the absurd, ego-inflated nihilism of the statement (plus being long but still catchy) made me LLOL. Just imagine, dumping millions of dollars into cutting edge super science, all for the sake of suicide(?) and self-cannibalism! Genius! Sam Pink’s genre-defying, 2007 debut, lives up to the humor of it’s title. It’s chock full of lines dripping with cynicism, loneliness and raw emotion. It’s a lot of fun to read, then re-read when you’re feeling shitty later. Hopefully the reading makes you feel less empty inside, but it probably won’t.

Pink writes in a plain speech minimalism to articulate the omnipresent loneliness of the 21st century. The writing accomplishes this this through a mix of story sketches, dialogues, lists, story variations, and something resembling prose-poetry. It’s not verse-y sounding text blocks, but more terse and depressing sentences. Most lines are one sentence, with space between each one, forcing you to reflect on Pink’s negativity. For example, “And if you don’t hate yourself, no one will” or “Lie down; it’s time for me to walk over you and call you a bridge I no longer need” or “The revenge of the earth is reproduction.” or “If I ever decide to shoot myself, I’ll make sure to stuff my mouth with confetti , so it looks pretty for no one.” Kind of a bummer, but also kind of chipper, it feels like a homeless man walking around Chicago in the winter carrying a broken rake. But it doesn’t feel like that much at all really.

The book’s first page says these writings were from 2007-2009. I suspect some of the stories were self-published in small zines. Most stories reads like a quick, sad-humor piece. Stories like An Incomplete List of the Things I’d Like to Be Reincarnated As show how it’s hard to classify exactly what kind of writing Pink writes. The list calls images of thought “A band-aid with a little bit of blood on it and the blood has become brown from being old...An eyelash of yours that falls to the sidewalk then blows into a discarded aluminum can...A dog that doesn’t worry about anything and just eats garbage all day (and also maybe fucks some other homeless dogs too because eating garbage would suck).” But by foregoing conventional genre, it’s easier to read Pink’s writing on it’s own terms. It’s hard to compare it to other things.

Pink fixates on three topics: boredom, violence, and constant societal judgement. Perhaps boredom is the most acute; Pink writes, “I know different methods of self-destruction but none as intense as sitting still by myself.” Going to the grocery store, is always depressing because it’s always boring. You always buy the same food and always expose your genitals to same employees, offering them $50 to cut your head off with an axe. Nothing ever happens. There is no plot. There is no point. You forgot the beginning and the end’s almost here. Just buy your fruit and get out.

The gratuitous mayhem of cartoons and video games are etched onto the core of Pink’s psyche; any thought is liable to come out at any moment--including murder. What what readers might notice first when reading this book are the schizo-style violence that creeps in every story. Maybe it’s for humor, or pathos or some other feeling I’m too numb to pick up on. The story, What I Am Thinking Right Now is just,  “I wonder if the man in front of me in line at the post office has any clue that I have been considering how many times I would have to stab the back of his skull with my pen, to break through and see his brain” and is exemplary of the violence. I often think about this stuff but rarely tell anyone because I don’t want to go to jail. Pink even goes so far as to hope readers kill themselves after reading his book. Pink’s brain is naked on the page and sometimes it’s kind of mean or gross--but that’s ok because I’m mean and gross too and so are you.

I assume Pink feels intense social anxiety when writing lines like, “I have been an embarrassment to everyone I’ve met and I will embarrass my enemies” or “I think that anyone who likes me doesn’t know everything they need to know.” A constant source of pain for Pink is the inability to meaningfully connect to other people. Perhaps this really is the driving force of Pink’s writing, as his terse style almost begs the reader to connect to what he’s feeling. The loneliness in this book is immediately accessible. 

Help Me, converges all these ideas together in 81 words

“I would like to cut off the fingers from my right hand and replace them all with pinky fingers. I would wave the fingers and my hand would look like an underwater plant. I am willing to pay up to five hundred dollars to have this done by a relatively competent doctor or finger expert or even someone who knows what an underwater plant looks like, so they could be like, ‘Yes’ or ‘No, that doesn’t look like an underwater plant.’”

Sitting around and looking at your hand, imaging gruesome destruction, and being judged by a doctor for not having a freak-hand that looks enough like a sea plant. It’s pretty weird, but it connects with a feeling I feel all the time, usually when I’m scrolling up and down my Facebook feed or checking my email. 

Pink’s book isn’t overwhelmingly sad; in fact, intense cynicism is quite delightful in small doses. Sometimes the writing is really dark, sometimes it’s funny dark, and even sometimes it’s kind of hopeful. Every sentence is like a new moment in time, each moment defined by its own context of feeling--or something...I don’t know. It’s like watching a bug die slowly when you’re the person who stepped on it and you could step on it again but choose not to just so you can watch it die slowly. 

I like this book very much and highly recommend you read it.

Mindsploitation and the Futility of Knowledge

Anybody graduate college if they have enough money.

They could bribe their professors, donate a few million bucks to re-financing, attend one of those private schools that doesn't have grades, or cheapest of all, they could go major in something evaluated mostly through writing papers and pay somebody to write all their papers for them. An industry of cheaters exists for this purpose. You can buy assignments of all scholastic levels, from grade school to phD, off the internet! Hundreds of sites exist where you can buy made to order, academic papers. There's expensive sites that sell papers ranging from good to ok papers, fair priced sites that sell mediocre to bad papers, and really, unbelievably cheap sites that sell awful papers certain to receive Fs--you'd probably get caught cheating if you were dumb enough to turn it in. Mindsploitation, a new book by Wonder Showzen co-creator, Vernon Chatman, shows how bad those cheap essays really are. Mindsploitation also shows how cheaply knowledge and work are valued in our society. And then the book makes you feel a little cheap for reading it, laughing into the ever growing void of exploitation...

IT'S A BARGAIN!

Mindsploitation works this way--on the left hand pages, Chatman writes a prompt to send to a company that writes essays. These prompts are absurd, surreal, subversive and, at their best, force the cheating professional to confront the stupidity of his job.  Prompts include: eulogies to grandparents funerals, death row consolations, a press release for the Shame Parade, recipes using newborn baby diarrhea, peanutclaw, etc. On the right hand pages, the response essay is printed, unedited and exactly how it is "turned in" (?). Usually, they're weird. Sometimes, they're just dumb. But the best ones are when the people try their hardest to satisfy these impossibly strange requirements.

Chatman's prose is really silly. He uses rhymes, hill billy jive, made up slang and shortenin's, all sorts of zany stuff.  Some prompts were so disjointed and bizarre it reminds me of French surrealists or cut-ups. Lol random. All of the prompts were pretty unsolvable. Basically, the only way to write a response is think of a creative, yet academic appropriate answer.  Here's a choice example of a prompt no one could solve--

Last week my Advanced Mathematics professor came over to the auditorium to watch me wrestle for the first time...Well, now my professor claims that as he lay shivering in a widening pool of his own muck, the Grand And Final Equation Of Life Itself materialized and hovered before him. He told me if I solve it, I'll not only get extra credit, but he might do me a favor and stop screaming in agony in my ear. Here's the equation - balls in your court 

GIVEN THAT: a = Truth b = God c = Mother d = Peanuts e = Logic f = Donkey g = Death 

FIND (e+b)/(a(f-d)+g(c+d) = n [solve for n)

The response for that one is boring. But here's a great response where Chatman forces some poor rube to make up weird advertising slogans

Brogurt -- "Creamy midnight packed in a tub. Finally, yogurt for the black!" The Ouija Squeegee --"Let the arms of the dead work for you with the super and natural power to clean your windscreen!...Remote Controlled Baby Stroller -- "Forget to walk the child when you have better things to do? Have it automatically, it is now possible!"  

Eventually, Chatman's silliness takes a backseat to the strange responses of these sad, soul broken persons.  A lot of the responses are mostly likely written by English language learners, probably working in essay "factories"(?) in foreign countries. I say this because a lot of the grammar mistakes seem English language learner-y (dropped articles, wrong verb tenses, strange passive voice) and many responses stressed the importance of Islam in our lives (amen to that!). The fact that Americans are making money selling cheating assignments overseas should be enough evidence that globalized capitalism a violent joke. American privilege is rooted so firmly that young college students have no qualms selling what they're actually paying for--the opportunity to learn something--to foreign laborers who are completely cut off from their work. They receive nothing by writing introductory assignments to rhetoric classes, just like the students receive nothing by taking them--the whole situation is just toothless gears spinning meaninglessly in the machine of capitalism. So while the book certainly doesn't take itself seriously, Matt Stone (of South Park) blurbs the book as "A stunning tour through Marx's alienation of labor" is totally apt. Everyone is looking for the corner to cut to "succeed" in a capitalist system because actually trying to navigate the system sucks too much.

The fact that this book can exist is the most absurd thing about it.

Some comedian once said (I can't remember who) that Vernon Chatman's greatest comedic strength lies in pulling out good performances from other people. This is undoubtedly true for Wonder Showzen. In that show, Chatman makes little kids say the darnest profound existential truths about the sham of existence. In other shows, Chatman's also pulled out some good comedy from Louis C.K. (he produces Louie), Conan O'Brien (he worked on Late Night) and Chris Rock (you get it). But I think Mindsploitation is most like this weird, soft-core porno Chatman called Final Flesh. In  Mindsploitation's acknowledgement's section, Chatman says of Final Flesh it is, "for which he apologizes most of all." But really, that movie and this book have the same sort of idea thrusting it.

For Final Flesh, Chatman found a company that will make a soft-core porno movie based on your script, so he wrote a script that was basically a Wonder Showzen episode and released it direct to a DVD. That project also found a stupid company that embodies capitalist excess and tried to turn it in upon itself. But if you watch that movie (and I don't necessarily recommend you do), it's really sad because you have to see the sadness in these people's eyes as they are exploited. It's not Chatman's fault; everyone exploits them every day (Chatman just wanted to "satirize"? it). But it's still sad just the same.

Mindsploitation, however, attacks the same target but gives the viewer some distance. It makes you think, "I wonder how that dude who lives in India feels when people sell their education just so they can get a certificate of completion" or "I wonder what it feels like to turn something like this in, with your name on it?" It's also laugh out loud funny/silly/goofy, like Wonder Showzen, but it reminds us about the stupidity of knowledge in a consumerist culture.

In short, I can't recommend the book enough; great for reading in binges but also purges, as it may be the perfect bathroom book. The design/illustrations by David O'Reily, a great cartoonist, makes the  book easy to understand, the pictures are weird, and there's small, secret text that are easier to see when re-reading. Oh also, Louis C.K. writes an introduction for the book, but it's 100% skippable as it is totally unfunny and sucks.

If this book taught me anything it's that it doesn't matter if anybody ever teaches you anything, as long as you learn to love the power of money.