When the Facebook thing came around asking about books that stuck with me, I didn’t think of all my favorite books right off. Having a book stay with you is a hallmark of something great, so it makes sense that lists of favorite books and lists of books that stuck with a person look the same a lot of times. But for me, it meant something different. The books tied to an experience.
Here’s a list of 10 books that stuck with me. They aren’t all books that you should read. It’s definitely not a reading list by any stretch. There are some that stuck with me for good reasons, others more dubious. You’ll see.
Okay then. Enough preface.
“A Thousand Deaths” from Flux by Orson Scott Card
A friend handed me a book in middle school and told me to read this one story.
In the story, a guy is in some kind of future where they have the multiple-death penalty. So say you did something super criminal. Instead of the death penalty, you get 10 death penalties. You get the chair, then they revive you in a cloned body, then you get the lethal injection, and on and on.
The first death in the story is by hanging. When I was a kid, suffocating or drowning were the scariest. Dying by not getting breath. It was so horrible. I think it’s because it was all still new to me, the idea that bodies aren’t much more than machines that have to keep running to keep us alive. That always seemed unfair.
The guy in the book, it felt like he was hanging for a couple hundred pages. The veins bulging, his eyes popping out of the sockets. He shits himself.
There were other deaths too. Torn apart by attack dogs. Shot a few times and bled out. Tied up and threw off a one-story building over and over again.
I’m in Sixth grade. It was the end of the day. I was still so small that when I wore shorts the bottom of my backpack would rub against the backs of my knees. And here I was, sweating at my desk and reading. The desk was the kind with the little pencil groove at the top for fuck’s sake. There was a point where I thought I was going to pass out.
That death, those deaths, stuck.
When you’re a kid, you read these books about wizards or homework machines and you don’t really think about the guy that wrote it. You might know a name like R.L. Stine, but I never thought much about what he was like in real life.
With “A Thousand Deaths” I couldn’t stop wondering what brought someone to think about such horrible stuff.
I never read it again. It’s sad, but if you are a fan of Orson Scott Card, I highly recommend NOT looking into his personal life whatsoever. Trust me on this one. Just enjoy the books. And steal them so he doesn’t get your money.
~
Maximum Velocity by Bruce Jones
For this to make sense, you need to know a little something about me. The man before you who abuses his library privileges on a regular basis was not always this way.
I fucking hated reading. I hated it. It just seemed boring. It wasn’t hard for me. It wasn’t like I had some syndrome, something that made me say I hated reading when the real problem was that my eyes were running all up and down the page. It was a pure and real disdain.
In junior high there was this teacher who had us create reading contracts every semester. What you had to do was declare how many pages you were going to read. There was a certain amount of pages for an A, a B, and you get the idea.
Some broken part of my brain, and THIS I consider a true disability, made me think it meant something to get good grades in school. So I signed up for the A.
I hated books and loved movies, so me and the teacher worked out a deal. It was okay if I read novelizations of movies just so long as the movie hadn’t come out yet.
I don’t know if this is still a thing. It seems that now most movies are based on books that are already a couple years old. People finally wised up and decided that they could just cherrypick the ten books people were the most interested in, churn out a movie, throw in a celebrity butt if it’s a grownup movie or a dragon made from computer code if it’s a kid movie.
So I don’t know if this is still a thing, but what used to happen is that a new James Bond movie would be coming out, and a month before it hit the screen you could go into the grocery store and pick up a novel that was based on the plot of the unreleased movie. This isn’t a book that existed before and got a new cover with the Pierce Brosnan. This is a novel based on a screenplay with a few pages of still images in the middle.
After typing that I realize how absolutely bananas the entire idea is. To give away your entire movie before it’s even out. And besides myself, I have no goddamn idea who was buying this stuff. They must have had a huge market spike in Northern Colorado.
There are dry periods for movie releases. Everyone wants to have this kind of movie near Oscar time, that kind of movie for the holidays, and the summer is all about action. So there were times when the grocery store shelves were a little spare.
My last pages for the semester came down to two possible choices. On the one hand, Bitch Factor. The only things I knew about this book were that its title was hilarious and that I would get to write the word “bitch” a bunch of times in a book report, which was appealing.
[note: just because we’re already taking a trip down memory lane, I dug up the book description for Bitch Factor:
Houston bounty hunter Dixie Flannigan is a legend in the jails and courtrooms for her combination of brains, cunning, and macho style. But she’s about to learn that there are limits to even her toughness.
Parker Dann, accused of killing a child in a drunk-driving accident, is a bail jumper, fleeing the prospect of a long prison term. Dixie tracks Dann to the wilds of North Dakota and has him safely cuffed and shackled in the back of her Mustang, when a massive Blue Norther blizzard hits.
It will take every ounce of Dixie’s Superbitch abilities to get them back to Texas in one piece, preferably before her bitch facade cracks…and before she starts believing that Parker Dann–drunk, child-killer, and bail jumper–is innocent.
Dixie Flannigan indeed]
The other possible book was Maximum Velocity. Now, being dumb, I confused this book. I thought it was the basis for the Charlie Sheen skydiving movie. Which, for the record, is called Terminal Velocity.
I had a deal with the teacher about not reading movies that were already released, but it’s not like he’d know. What kind of English teacher has seen Terminal Velocity? The guy told us that at home he kept his TV in a closet so he and his wife had to roll it out if they wanted to watch something. Not kidding. I figured as long as I really read the book, it would be cool.
The book and the movie share 50% of a title, and that’s where the similarities end.
Maximum Velocity, in my memory, is about a guy. He’s married. Then some other guy from his wife’s past shows up. An ex who turns out to be some kind of insane special forces guy who starts right in on a slow-mo home invasion thing where he’s banging the wife. Sort of.
It’s hazy, but one crystal clear memory is the special forces nutto explaining to the husband how they should double-stuff his wife. He says something about how there’s no greater sexual sensation than having your penis inside a woman’s vagina, and through her inside walls feeling another penis which is in her ass.
Let me take a moment to clarify my position here.
8th grade. I needed an anatomy chart to really understand what was going on there. This was not a time when you could get online and find shit like this unless you put in a lot of time, a lot of effort, and even then, godspeed.
I was in way over my head. I was maybe ready for sexual craziness in a book on the level of Look Who Developed Breasts Over The Summer. Just KNOWING that some breasts somewhere were growing was plenty.
But. I had to finish the pages for the semester. So My position was to finish the book, write a book report on it, count the pages.
My memory tells me that the book ended with some kind of wind-powered iceboat chase. But that seems crazy.
So I wrote up a PG version of the book report. Because the thing that absolutely sucks about eighth grade is that you figure you’ll be in trouble for accidentally reading about something that’s a little more sexy than what you’re ready for.
The teacher didn’t have a great grade for me. He said the report lacked detail, which was fair, but the details it lacked were the ones that would have caused blushing on a level that would have robbed all my organs of blood and caused a faint at the least.
Guess I should have gone with Bitch Factor.
~
Survivor by Chuck Palahniuk
This is the book I have to credit for getting me back into books.
The way the people talked, they were people I wanted to listen to. They sounded like people I knew instead of people English teachers wanted me to buddy up with. The guys in this book, they didn’t have to describe everything, everything on the table at a dinner or every piece of furniture in a room.
That’s a huge pet peeve of mine. I feel like classics do this a lot. The character steps into a room, then we get a description of every stick of furniture in the joint. I hate that. It kills the action. It’s as though the characters are standing there while this stuff is described, standing there spaced out, then once the description is over we can move on.
Something weird about me, I think that books feel like that movie Stranger Than Fiction sometimes. So if we’re getting these lines about furniture and stuff, it doesn’t take long before I start thinking, Okay, is this guy just standing in a room, panning? What the hell is going on?
This book is more of a minimal style, and very “On-the-Body” which emphasizes how things feel, lots of physical action. Not explosions. But if a character is having a conversation, he has the conversation while he’s doing something with his hands. It’s got a very physical feel to it.
This is a book that I underlined and looked up words in. It’s the book I had Chuck Palahniuk sign when I went to see him. I told him that I was working at a call center when I read it, and he inscribed “1…2…3…don’t call me” on the inside.
The only tattoo I have is a line from this book.
I’ve written a lot over the years about why this author influences me. In brief, when I was young I thought it was the plotting and the fact that these books talked about stuff I thought was cool. Now, as an older guy, I think what I recognize is that these books gave me permission on a lot of levels. They gave me permission to think about these transgressive things, for sure. But more than that, through the characters I got permission to be a man while still being sensitive. I got permission to feel like a fuckup.
My dad, he always used to say this thing to us. He always used to say, It’s okay to cry. Not when we were crying already, not when something sad happened. It was just sort of a chorus for him, one good piece of advice he hit on and kept hammering.
Him saying that didn’t really teach me much about it. I never saw him cry. These characters, though. They did cry. And they were desperate and did desperate things. They were ready to admit that they were weak.
I needed that. I still do.
For the record, it is okay to cry.
My Friend Leonard by James Frey
When you tell people about liking a James Frey book, they look at you like you just said that Hitler was a great painter. Maybe he was, but who cares and fuck you.
Well, to that I say an eloquent, “No, fuck YOU.”
James Frey got fucked hard. And the thing to take away from what happened with his books is that marketing is the worst field on the planet. It’s fucked. It’s all about making money, and there’s nothing more empty than altering art to make money. Plus, marketers know dick. Look at all the classics or great books and look into how many of them were turned down by marketers. Look into Confederacy of Dunces.
When James Frey was crucified on Oprah, a whole shitload of his books came flooding into the library’s used book sale. People couldn’t get rid of them fast enough. Because they felt tricked. And they were. Sort of.
In the workshop from earlier this year, Tom Spanbauer said something that will stay with me forever. “Fiction is the lie that tells the truth truer.”
It’s a really simple way of saying something complicated. Here’s how I think about it.
If you’re writing fiction, you can write it however you want. You can take a story from your real life, remove people, add people, add an extra level on your house. Give yourself a dog.
What you can’t do, what never works, is lying about the emotion.
So when you’re trying to tell the fictional version of the true story of your father leaving your family, it’s okay to add something or delete something. Maybe your friend came over later, after your parents told you. Maybe in the story, he plays Nintendo in the basement while your parents tell you upstairs. Then you have to go back to your friend. He’s made a little progress on world 1-2 of Mario Bros, and for you everything has changed.
Having your friend already there, it changes the events. But it does so in a way that helps you be truer to the feelings.
If you write true to the feelings, it’s okay to lie.
I really think that James Frey set out to write honest. I think he felt all the things in his book. Was selling it as truth a violation of trust? Definitely. But look at it this way. You could sell your book for millions, become a writer, get out of a life of addiction and crime and become a respected artist. You have every belief that your talent warrants this chance. You just need a kickstart. Someone tells you that the kickstart is there. That your book just has to be shelved a dozen feet away from where it is now. Your entire life can change just so long as it’s based on a lie.
Don’t answer that hypothetical. You can’t. Nobody ever made you that offer.
My Friend Leonard was a book I enjoyed. I cried a bit. What can I say, I’m partial to books about father figures.
I guess it will always be interesting to me. It’s kind of rare that we get a book-based scandal these days.
~
World War Z by Max Brooks
This is a great book to read. There’s a heartbreaking story behind how it was created. I have my own story about it.
I’ve seen David Sedaris two times. Once in Portland, then a second time in Denver.
In Portland he gave a great reading, like always. I love what he does. His writing and his live performances. He’ll say something about how he basically gets paid to read his diary out loud. Which is a pretty humble way to put it. Not to mention that whatever he’s doing, he’s keeping the tradition of oral storytelling alive in a way that not many others can.
The first time I saw him, he talked about World War Z. How Max Brooks thought of everything, how there’s even one part where some guys closed up in a submarine hear zombies knocking on the outside.
Seeing David Sedaris is fun. Hearing him talk about how much he enjoyed a zombie book is extra extra fun.
Before the next part, let me tell another quick story.
At some point I went to a Billy Collin, the kind that open for 30 days, sell a shitload of spider items, then vanish before the Jack-O-Lanterns rot. And when I was looking around, I thought, “Hey, I should get something here for Billy Collins to sign. He must sign books all the time. I bet that’s boring.”
It might never be boring to sign your own books. I really don’t know.
So I looked around and settled on a genie lamp. It won out over a giant rubber rat. Those mangy Halloween rats with the bloody teeth don’t have many areas smooth enough for a poet laureate to sign.
After the reading, Mr. Collins signed my genie lamp. He told me how one time he signed a baseball for someone. I asked if he played baseball or something, and he laughed and said no. He said he was terrible at baseball. I told him I was terrible at baseball too. Then we parted ways.
So high off this success, the second time I saw David Sedaris I decided to bring a World War Z for him to inscribe. Which he did not want to do.
I remember he was polite about it. He signed a yellow post-it attached to the book and wrote a little something, but he didn’t want to sign the book for me.
It wasn’t a big deal that he didn’t sign the book. Looking back, inscribing a book is something you do for a friend. And though I feel like I know him after reading so much of his personal stuff, he sure as hell didn’t know me.
The whole thing was so embarrassing, though. Here I was, trying to start this conversation with a guy at a table. It’s always weird. It turns out okay most of the time, but man, it’s fucking weird.
I guess I crossed some kind of line that I didn’t really know about. And when I showed him the book and told him about seeing him in Portland, he said that he’d talked about a different Max Brooks book, the Zombie Survival Guide.
What could I say? I mean, I knew he talked about World War Z. The knocking on the submarine!
It was a terrible scene. I wanted to get away so bad. I felt like I’d offended someone that I thought was really great. Who I still think is really great.
After a while I threw the signed post it away. I was lending World War Z to someone else, and I didn’t want to explain why there was a weird, hesitant post it inside from David Sedaris.
Now every time I see that book, this is what I think about. Standing at that table, forcing David Sedaris to explain that he’s not really comfortable signing someone else’s work.
Now, don’t let me sour anyone on David Sedaris, if you were even headed that way. Um, also don’t let this sour you on me.
One more story?
After graduating high school my friend and I took a trip to Chicago ComiCon. You know, to sow oats and shit.
I was excited to meet a bunch of people. One of them was Brian Azzarello.
I’ve told this story a million times, so I’ll keep it quick.
Because we traveled, I didn’t bring my comics. And because I’m not really a collector, I mostly wanted to meet Brian Azzarello and get his autograph. So I asked him to sign a page in my notebook. He said, “That’s it?”, sighed, and signed it. He did not relish this opportunity, to say the least.
Now, I’ve grown some. But most of me is still an awkward fanboy who meets an author, is 100% intimidated, and if you have to count on something, count on me making an ass of myself. When Brian Azzarello is kind of dismissive and weird, I don’t really know what to do. When Billy Collins is nice and open, it takes the experience to an 11. When David Sedaris is somewhere in the middle (again, I take responsibility here)…well, I enjoy the holy fuck out of his books, but after meeting him I still wish I hadn’t met him. Because I still beat myself up about it all the time. In a weird combination of ego (that he would even remember the occasion) and my self-loathing, it’s put up the tiniest wall towards enjoying his books.
So on the one hand, I can acknowledge that it’s a weird request, I didn’t probably make it clear that I already owned a full set of David Sedaris books, not to mention always forcing them on my book club at work. I’m a huge, huge fan, and I think my mistake was trying to connect with someone on a level that was not mutual. The night was supposed to be about David Sedaris, and I tried to make it about David Sedaris & Pete for a moment. I had no right to ask, and I should have been prepared for him to say No. David Sedaris is still a great writer, and I love his work, and I would go see him again. I think “Rooster at the Hitchin’ Post” is one of the best comic essays ever written.
As special as David Sedaris might be to me, I am not special to David Sedaris. Even if we both really dig the same zombie book.
Just like asking someone out on a date, they have every right to turn down the request.
Just like asking someone out on a date, I have every right to accept the No and still be just the tiniest bit heartbroken about it.
World War Z is a great book. But that book will always stick with me as something attached to one of the most embarrassing, humiliating moments of my life.
If you’re out there, Brian Azzarello, I just want you to know that you were kind of an ass to a kid. It’s been 12 years. I still avoid your work.
If you’re out there Billy Collins, that genie lamp is on my bookshelf right now. People ask me about it all the time. I tell them how awesome you are.
If you’re out there David Sedaris, I’m 100% on your side when it comes to our encounter. But there’s the tiniest hole that opens up in me whenever I see World War Z and whenever your new books come out. Because I have to read both. They’re so good. And I wish that it wasn’t that way. The hole part, not the books being good part.
Oh, and if hell freezes over and I become famous somehow, I expect anyone else out there to hold me to the promise that I will sign anything. I’ll sign ball sacks. Unwashed ball sacks.
~
The Meadow by James Galvin
I try not to be a book snob. I really do. But when people tell me they didn’t enjoy this book, I pretty much assume that they are either heartless or gutless.
The story is about a part of the country that doesn’t really exist anymore. Galvin wrote it to freeze this little piece of the world as it was. And while he is successful in that way, what he can’t do, what you watch happen in the book, is that as much as he might try to freeze that piece of land, the people who live there aren’t frozen. They drink. They hurt each other. They die.
By the end, you figure out how the land isn’t the same anymore. The people who lived there aren’t around anymore. It’s never the same.
There’s a guy in this book who was one of the last old holdouts. A few years ago a charity auctioned off a bunch of the guy’s stuff. I went with a friend, and we bid on some stuff. I’ve never bid on anything before. I didn’t even know how it worked. There was a wheelbarrow there, the wheelbarrow from the book. The character, this guy, he built his own goddamn wheelbarrow rather than buying one. That’s the kind of person he was.
I won the auction for this. I have no idea what it is. The tag even says “Mystery Tool.” If you’ve got ideas, let me know.
And now that I’m remembering it, this was ANOTHER weird author signing story.
James Galvin was there, and my friend and I brought books for him to sign. Hers was beat to shit. She’s that way with books. Blue ink from a capless pen. Coffee stains. Her books end up looking like they spent time at sea. Not like they were packed in someone’s bag. Like they were piloting the huge wooden sttering wheel of an old-time sailboat in a huge storm.
I had a copy that I’d read a couple times, and it wasn’t looking too great either. But a while back I’d given that copy away to someone, and it wasn’t ever coming back.
When we asked Mr. Galvin to sign, he signed my book. Then he took my friend’s book and said, “This is what I like. One that’s actually been read.”
I can’t win. For whatever reason, I’m about 5/9 in terms of good interactions with authors. Which is rough because if I’m at a reading, I’m a fan. A FAN, fan. I gave away my signed book just because I wanted someone to read it that badly.
Either way, it’s a great book. And it has the best opening line of any book:
The real world goes like this…
~
Ablutions by Patrick DeWitt
The author’s gotten a little credit for the Sisters Brothers, but this book is the one that sticks with me. It’s written in second person (“You do this, you do that…”) but it never feels like a stunt. It’s sad and gorgeous.
It’s that kind of book where you keep reading, and everything the narrator does makes you say, “Oh fuck….oh fuck….oh fuck!” It just gets worse.
The book does a really great job of capturing something that’s hard to capture, a limited portion of a life.
Sometimes what makes movies ring false for me is the way they’re always about the most interesting 5 or 6 days of a person’s life. You know, how the guy and the girl overcame their differences (her being a career woman at a New York magazine, him a good ol’ boy who is secretly a famous painter somehow) to fall in love and be happy forever. I’m not asking for a boring movie about how they select underarm deodorants. I just…
Maybe I can explain it like this. In these bad movies, I can’t really wrap my head around these characters as existing before and after the camera rolls. It really feels, in a bad way, like every moment of these lives was lived in unseen preparation for this couple of days, to make this romance work.
Ablutions really covers the downhill part of the character’s life. But the character feels so real. So genuine. There’s so much voice in the writing that you buy this character as a real person who was around and had some tough years before the book started.
God Jr. by Dennis Cooper
Dennis Cooper can be a tough sell. His books can be graphic, and graphic about the kind of stuff we’re not really comfortable with being graphic. Gay sex, torture. Brutal murders.
If you’re curious about jumping in to Dennis Cooper, try the title story from the collection Ugly Man. It’s a story that’s hard to read, but it pays off. In just a few pages the narrator turns from a despicable person who is ruining lives to a guy who is…well, still that, but also you can understand what he’s doing. It’s not an easy story to read. And if you’re the type of person who has to like a character to enjoy a book, then forget it.
God Jr. came across at a very strange and coincidental time for me.
You know how sometimes you’ll read a book that’s so good it leaves you in a tough position because you don’t know what to read next? That used to happen to me all the time. Except not with books. With video games.
I’d play something I loved. Then I’d be chasing that Dragon (Warrior) through waves of new games. Knockoffs would come out, and they were worth a try because even a shadow of a great game seems like a good idea.
Super Mario 64 was and is an all-time favorite game. There might be better games out there, but it was the first time I’d played a game with so much exploration and action mixed together. It felt like a whole, real world.
I played it through way after it came out. And then I played the imitators. Donkey Kong 64, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. And one weird one, Banjo-Kazooie.
Banjo-Kazooie was a complete knockoff of Super Mario 64. Except that you played as a bear who wore a backpack, and inside the backpack was a bird who would do shit. So you could jump off a cliff and the bird would pop out and help you glide down. Shit like that.
Here’s where it gets weird.
Not a long time after spending an entire summer playing Banjo-Kazooie and listening to Ozzy Osbourne’s Greatest Hits (I’d HAD sex at this point, but I certainly didn’t expect to repeat that success any time soon) I picked up God. Jr.
The title story is about a father who loses his son. In his grief he picks up a video game his son had been playing, and he plays through himself as a way to connect to his son. He can tell a little bit about his son based on the choices he made in the game, all that good stuff. It’s a really great story, told very well.
What’s crazy, the video game in this book is UNDENIABLY Banjo-Kazooie.
Now, I get why someone wouldn’t pick Super Mario 64. It’s obvious. And kind of boring. Plus, we all know it, and there has to be a much bigger chance of getting the mustache sued right off your overall-ed ass.
I also get why you wouldn’t make up a video game that is meant to be Super Mario 64. I hate when they do that, make up a fake something to stand in for something real. “Hey, did you update your profile on FacePage?” Ugh.
The coincidence was so strange. And even stranger the more I thought about it. What percent of people who read this book had also played Banjo-Kazooie? It has to be, well, whatever percentage I represent.
I always thought that if I ever met Dennis Cooper, I would have to ask him about Banjo-Kazooie. So stay tuned for another installement of Pete’s Ill-Advised Author Interaction Theater.
Us by Michael Kimball
If there’s an author that I ape more than anyone, it’s Michael Kimball.
He does best what great authors do. You read his book, and in the story you really feel like it’s told the way someone would say it. You can read his books out loud, and you hear the character in the words. The way the characters talk it simple, easy to understand, and very imperfect.
The beauty is that you know, if you look it over you know, that he does a ton of work to make the people in his books sound that good.
Us is my favorite, the story of an older couple experiencing the terror and sadness of one of them dying.
I’ll just leave you with a block of the text. The repetition. The voice. Read it out loud. You’ll see what I mean:
I didn’t want to lose my wife. I wanted to see my wife lying down in a hospital bed. I wanted to see my wife breathing again. I wanted to see her get up out of bed again. I wanted to see her get up out of our bed again. I wanted my wife to come back home and live there with me again.
In The City of Shy Hunters by Tom Spanbauer
Tom Spanbauer has a new book coming out, and when I said that everyone should buy it, someone asked me why.
It’s a hard thing, recommending books. Because there are matters of taste. I might see something enjoyable about I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell, but I would never recommend it to my mom. Not because I’m embarrassed, but because I know for a fact that whatever redemptive qualities it might have would not redeem the book for her. There’s a line to be crossed, and after that line is crossed there’s no coming back.
I used to run a book club. The ladies in the book club never liked my picks because, as they put it, “there’s enough bad stuff in the world. I want to read about happy stuff.”
Recommending books is all about recognizing that different tastes aren’t wrong. Reading all happy books is wrong for ME. But not wrong as a concept.
Although Shy Hunters is not going to be up everyone’s alley when it comes to plot and content, it’s something that I think you should read. Yeah, you. It’s the writing. It’s gorgeous. And there’s not a wasted page, not a wasted sentence. What’s really amazing, even though there’s an economy of words at play, it never feels like there’s anything held back. It’s all there.
Writing as a hobby kills books in some ways. It’s hard to read a book without looking at how it works. Or why. Or what went wrong. It’s made me so picky. There are so many books I’ve put down after reading a page. Even less. Just from the way it sounds, it doesn’t work. The worst thing about it is missing out on good stories. There are plenty of good stories out there that aren’t told all that great. Or maybe I should say that there are great stories out there that aren’t told in ways that appeal to me. It just…it becomes difficult to read without working. A great scene loses punch because you can’t help but wonder at how it works. And pick it apart. And then things don’t mash together anymore. Imagine if instead of tasting mashed potatoes, your palate tasted potato, butter, salt, and milk separately.
This isn’t me saying I have some kind of amazing abilities. It’s just hard to unring that bell, even if you ring it like the amateur I am.
Shy Hunters is an incredible book in that the writing and the story can’t be separated. It doesn’t move back and forth between dazzling you with the way the story develops and blowing you away with language. It’s doing both, same time, all the way through.
I’ve loaned it to so many people.
One friend called me at 11:30 PM to leave me a message letting me know she’d finished it and that it was beautiful.
Another friend said she’d never read anything like it. She felt proud after reading it, like she’d done something. Not like she’d let something happen while she was in the room. Like she’d done something.
If you’re interested in the plot, look around. There are plenty of summaries. Book summaries, the difference between a book summary and a book like this is the difference between a painting and that little card that hangs next to it in a museum. You’re much better off spending the time picking the book up, holding it in your hands, and flipping to a random page. A line will pop, believe me. You’ll see something that won’t let you look away.
After so many rough author interactions, I was lucky enough to have one with Tom Spanbauer just this last year, a 3-day writing workshop.
I was nervous. This was even before cataloging my history of author problems. Thank fuck because there was no way I would have gone.
My first thought was, Oh fuck. What if he doesn’t like my piece?
My second, way worse thought, was, Oh fuck. What if he’s mean and then I can’t read his books anymore?
The workshop was in his basement. He opened his home to students. We all sat around the table and waited, and when he came down the stairs it got pretty quiet.
He told us how he started writing. And why he writes the way he does. I don’t want to tell that story here. It’s not really my story to tell. But hey, buy me a drink and I will. Maybe two drinks. It’s a pretty sad story.
It was one of the best experiences of my life. It worked out. THANK FUCK THANK FUCK THANK FUCK THANK FUCK.
That book already meant the world to me. It’s blue and black cover. I can picture the dark speckled insides of the covers. My desert island book every time.
And goddamn it, after three days of opportunity to make things horrible, In the City of Shy Hunters is still my desert island book.