20 Book Covers pt 1
August has been a wild time and I’ve been slack on my short story recs so I’ll probably double up and do an August-September post a month or so from now. In the meantime please accept this post i had in the chamber with some non-short story recs…wait technically there’s a lot of short story collections on this list, in fact they’re mostly short story collections so here you go…
So how it started was, someone I follow on Bluesky (don’t recall who) shared one of those prompt posts that I usually avoid but this time I took the bait.
“The challenge is to choose 20 books that greatly influenced you. One book per day, for 20 days. No explanations, no reviews. Just covers. #booksky”
That sounded easy enough, as challenges go. But anyone who follows me has probably already twigged to the fact that as far as social media goes, I pretty much suck. Technically, I failed the challenge. Life got in the way, I missed a day or two, some of the posts were even misnumbered, etc. Terrible!
Still, I thought I’d group them all together and share them, and maybe give a couple of explanations for some, not all, of the choices.
Ficciones, Jorge Luis Borges
I have a clear memory of being in high school Spanish class and there being a passage in our textbook which gave a resume, a commentary, on Borges’s story “The Aleph” (not included in Ficciones but bear with me) and me sitting there like ‘whoa, that sounds dope’, which I guess primed me to pick up one of the older English translations of Ficciones at the local library a year or so later. Also, this bit in the prelude to the first half of that collection (El jardín de senderos que bifurcan) absolutely blew my mind at the time: "The composition of vast books is a laborious and impoverishing extravagance. To go on for five hundred pages developing an idea whose perfect oral exposition is possible in a few minutes! A better course of procedure is to pretend that these books already exist, and then to offer a resume, a commentary . . . More reasonable, more inept, more indolent, I have preferred to write notes upon imaginary books.”
The Visiting Privilege, Joy Williams
Discovering Joy Williams felt about as momentous as finding some mythical clay tablet that made me rethink my entire understanding of human history, but then it turns out a bunch of people had already carried out that same archaeological dig and been like hell yeah, that clay tablet fucking rocks
Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung, Lester Bangs
As a teen I had an extremely normal level of interest in the Count Five, MC5, the Stooges, thanks to this classic of rock criticism at my local library. (I was tempted to also include Chuck Eddy’s Stairway to Hell in this list, but this will stand in for both in terms of opening the door onto a whole world of 60s and 70s freakouts.) Also, the titular piece—an exhaustive retrospective of a garage-rock one-hit wonder’s subsequent (and entirely fictitious) catalog—is the sort of story I’ve been tempted to write a million times. Man, what I wouldn’t give to actually hear the Carburetor Dung album.
My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist, Mark Leyner
To this day, the only reading/book-signing event I have ever attended was Mark Leyner (mid-90s, Regulator Bookshop, Durham). My mom had heard me read/snort-laugh my way through several of his books and was gracious enough to drive me there. He read from The Tetherballs of Bougainville, and afterwards I bought a copy of Tooth Imprints on a Corn Dog. When it was my turn in the book-signing line, I very nervously made a quip about how this was my least favorite book of his, and he of course signed it “To my least favorite reader”. I’ve not read his more recent trio of books, but I’ve seen conflicting retrospectives opinions re their merits (specifically pieces by Mitch Therieu in n+1 and by Peter Berard in The Melendy Review, but one thing is for certain: of everyone involved in that famous interview with him and DFW and Franzen and Charlie Rose, Leyner is by far the least gross
Historias de cronopios y de famas, Julio Cortázar
The very first time I ever went to my now-wife’s apartment, I saw that she had this book and two others by Cortazar (Prosa de observatorio and Rayuela) on her bookshelf, and that was a damn good omen in terms of the future of our relationship. Ended up spending a lot of time with this book at various beaches that summer
A Wizard of Earthsea, Ursula K. LeGuin
Generally speaking I am not a huge fan of wizard fiction but I’ll make exceptions for CAS (see below) and UKLG. I will slap anyone who tries to badmouth this book. A shockingly pure and beautiful thing.
Sixty Stories, Donald Barthelme
This big silver tome spent a whole big chunk of my late teens checked out from the local library. Did much of it go over my head? Of course, but then one of the main problems with most books today might be that it would be cooler they weren’t so concerned about not going over people’s heads.
Dialogues in Paradise, Can Xue
One of the more recent discoveries for me on this list. Reading Can Xue for the first time was bewildering and utterly freeing. A reminder that you can do anything, anything you want, with words and stories.
Hyperborea, Clark Ashton Smith
Okay, technically, I have never owned a copy of this collection but Hyperborea remains my favorite CAS setting and I have read and re-read all these stories and they will always be close to my heart. “The Door to Saturn”! “The Coming of the White Worm”! “The Seven Geases”! Fucking Tsathoggua all over the place! Shout out an old read-along podcast called The Double Shadow that rekindled my interest in CAS years ago. Fond memories.
10. The Palm-wine Drinkard and My LIfe in the Bush of Ghosts, Amos Tutuola
A roommate, former bandmate, friend and all around copacetic human being had this book around the house many, many years ago. Apart from how hilarious and delightful and affecting it was, more than anything it was a first glimpse onto a huge new world of literature beyond the canons I was accustomed to (those imposed on one, and those one imposes on one´s self).
Maybe i’ll post 11-20 in the future, maybe I won’t! Stay tuned to find out!