WHAT I READ IN 2022

Read, read, read. Read everything – trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. – William Faulkner

I no longer read as much as I used to, and this bothers me enormously. I have always taken enormous pleasure, and found immense relief and inspiration, in the act of reading. This goes back almost as long as I can remember. As a small child, I used to pull volumes off the shelves of my parents' considerable home library and attack books so far above my reading level it was almost comical: I didn't understand many of the words or expressions, and lacked the life experience to grasp the adult nature of the stories within, but I was neverthess compelled to keep after it. Being the child of journalists, it was part of my makeup to be drawn to the written word. Being a creative person, I was just as naturally drawn to words which sparked my imagination. I will never forget, for example, the beautiful prose I encountered in a biography of Al Capone written by John Kobler. It was so colorful and vivid, and yet so sparingly written, with nary a wasted word, that I felt as if the author had driven each individual latter and punctuation mark into place with a hammer. I had a similar reaction to a biography of Adolf Hitler penned by Robert Payne. The Englishman managed to paint word-pictures so vivid that I felt as if I had been transported back to the Vienna of 1910, the Munich of 1925. I didn't quite understand how these and other writers were able to affect this sorcery, but I knew I craved that power for myself.

So I read. As the above-quoted Faulker stated, I read everything, from Joe Silva's "Captain America" novels (such things exist, and they were amazing) to the complicated science-fiction of Frank Herbert and Ursula K. LeGuinn. I read historical fiction, mysteries, horror stories. I read biographies and memoirs and history books. When I got old enough, I even read the fiction they published in "Playboy," when my gaze wasn't otherwise occupied. Part of this reading was for pleasure and part was escape. All of it contributed to my growth and development as a writer.

There is, however, one curious fact about me which I have mentioned before in this blog in a different context. I suffer from anxiety. And as an anxious person I find great comfort in repetition. I rewatch television. I rewatch film. And nary a year goes by when I don't re-read certain books, such as Howard Fast's "Spartacus," George Orwell's "Coming Up For Air," or Lawrence Sanders' "The Sixth Commandment." Because of this tendency, I realized about ten years ago that the actual amount of new reading I was doing must be fairly small. I started keeping track of just how many new books I was reading per year, and was shocked at how paltry the number was: I was averaging -- at most -- a new book every other month, say 6 - 7 a year. For a writer who professes to love reading, those are sorry statistics indeed. By 2015, I had better than doubled that figure, but even this did not leave me contented, and my figures for the next three years were as follows:

2016 - 20 books
2017 - 22 books
2018 - 26 books

This may not seem like many to some reading this. I see people on Goodreads who claim to read 100 books or more each year. I myself wouldn't do that if I could, because I would never retain any of what I was reading nor would I savor the process. It would be like eating chicken McNuggets every day. (I'm of the opinion that books should never be relegated, in the main, to mere "content," but that's just me.)

Unfortunately, the next few years showed a very different trend. Circumstance piled upon circumstance to cut down on the time and the inclinination I had to read, leading to these pathetic figures:

2019 - 17 books
2020 - 15 books
2021 - 9 books

Well, as the saying goes, what you don't change, you choose. When 2020 came around, I made a resolution to arrest and reverse this trend. And I succeeded. Not impressively, but I succeeded. It turns out that the faculty for reading is like any other muscle: if you neglect it, it atrophies, and must be built back up again through intelligently applied effort. It also turns out that if you lack a single goddamn place in your apartment which is truly comfortable to read, you don't do it. So I bought myself a comfortable chair with matching Ottoman, and got down to business.

I am still two books short of what I need to consider 2022 a reading success, but I have thirteen days left in the year, and I don't anticipate any difficulty in finishing two or even three before the ball drops. It is therefore premature for me to make the following list, but I'm going to do it anyway. The following is what I've read so far.


Passchendaele and The Somme: A Diary of 1917 by Hugh Quigley -- This is one of the most bizarre books I've ever read, and got me off on the wrong foot. Quigley's memoir of his WWI experiences is written in a vague, florid, dreamlike style which was more poetry than prose. It quite literally was like trying to write down the events of a wild, nonsensical dream. Here and there he has moments of lucidity but by and large the book was an incomprehnsible if pretty mess, rather akin to talking to a poet on acid.

The Life and Death of Lenin by Robert Payne: Payne, despite his flaws, is one of my favorite historians and while quite bloated, his bio of Lenin is highly readable and atmospheric. He depicts a man who wanted to burn down the system and didn't have the faintest idea what he wanted to replace it with.

Mine Were of Trouble by Peter Kemp: Having read Orwell's "Homage to Catalonia" many times, my perspective on the Spanish Civil War came from a hard left-wing angle. Kemp, like Orwell, was an Englishman who fought in that war, but for the Fascists rather than the government. His side of the story, and his motives, made for a fascinating read and helped balance the scale.

The Life and Death of Trotsky by Robert Payne: Payne's bio of the infamous Trotsky, Lenin's chief co-conspirator and the creator of the Red Army, is another win for him, though like "Lenin" it is somewhat bloated. Payne depicts a brilliant scholar and home-made soldier who lost a power struggle with Stalin and was effaced from history so thoroughly that Orwell fashioned the character of Goldstein in "1984" after him. An interesting and tragic tale.

Now and Then by Joseph Heller: This book bored me to almost literal tears. Heller wrote "Catch-22" so I figured a memoir about growing up Jewish in Coney Island in the 1920s - 1930s would be fun and interesting. It wasn't. Men who boast about how unsentimental they are should not write memoirs about happy childhoods. It just doesn't make any sense. Jesus, was this a bore. I had to force myself to finish it.

Johnny Carson by Henry Bushkin: I enjoyed this breezy tell-all about the last real King of Late Night TV by his former lawyer, friend and allaround fixer. Bushkin paints a fascinating if not terribly flattering picture of Carson as the hard-working product of an absolutely loveless mother: an immense talent but a psychological mess, both Jekkyl and Hyde, often simultaneously. It's also a tale of Bushkin's own seduction by fame, money and reflected glamour.

Fire and Blood by Ernst Jünger: This short book is essentially a "director's cut" of the final chapters of his seminal combat memoir, "In The Storm of Steel." It recounts the day before, and the day of the enormous 1918 attack the German Army mounted against the Allies, as witnessed by Jünger himself. It is a fascinating, fast-paced, pitiless depiction of war by a war hero who drew a very different moral from his experiences than, say, Klaus Maria Remarque ("All Quiet on the Western Front.")

War as an Inner Experience by Ernst Jünger: The notorious Jünger, sometimes referred to as "The Intellectual Godfather of Fascism," writes a fascinating little book here, one of the five he penned about his WWI experiences: it's broken up into a series of chapters devoted to one aspect of war each, (waiting, fear, battle, etc.), as the author sees it. This quick spiritual-psychological study of the German combat soldier of 1914 - 1918 is worth reading alone just for the horrible passage about fighting in a burning house full of corpses in the middle of the night, only for someone to accidentally trigger a player-piano. You can't forget imagery like that.

The Border Wolves by Damion Hunter a.k.a. Amanda Cockrell: This book probably holds the record as the Most Delayed Sequel in Literary History. "The Centurions" was a 1980s trilogy of novels about a sprawling military family in ancient Rome. The third book ended with everything unresolved, and fans like my father and me waited in vain for more.Hunter/Cockrell finally self-pubbed the fourth and final installment in 2022, after a pause of almost forty years...and it was more or less worth the wait. Although she really should have written at least one more novel to round out the saga -- it feels disjointed and incomplete at times -- I found it an enjoyable and largely satisfying end to a wrongly forgotten, very entertaining historical romance.

American Nightingale by Bob Welch: This is a very readable and informative biography of Frances Slanger, a U.S. Army nurse who was killed in action while serving in Europe in WW2. The thoughtful and compassionate Slanger, a Jewess originally born in Poland, had a special sense of mission and her death sparked an outpouring of national grief. She was truly the "Ellis Island immigrant who made good" in the face of cultural prejudices from her own family (Jewish women shouldn't be nurses) and society at large (women shouldn't be in uniform, much less serving overseas). It was also fascinating to see how combat nurses were trained and the hardships they had to endure, and did endure, uncomplainingly, much to the admiration of their patients and soldiers generally.

A Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass by Frederick Douglass: Probably no former slave contributed more to the destruction of slavery than Frederick Douglass, an escaped slave whose literacy proved his greatest weapon. Douglass lays bare the horrors of antebellum slavery, but it is his description of of the mental and spiritual anguish of being mere property, rather than the physical torment which came with it, which struck me most. Degredation, and not the whip, was what Douglass came to hate the most. Douglass's story is not a quest for freedom per se as much as a quest for dignity, the dignity of choice without which life is meaningless. (His writing, incidentally, is quite easy on the eye despite the heavy, formal, flowery style of the 19th century: contrast it with the plodding, turgid "forward" written by a famous abolitionist).

Crosses in the Wind by Joseph Shomon: This is a short, informative book about the Graves Registration service of the U.S. Army during WW2, told by the C.O. of one of its most prolific companies: his tiny outfit alone buried 21,000 American soldiers killed in action in Europe between 1944 - 1945, sometimes coming under heavy fire themselves to do it. While his historical background is quite badly written and sloppy, when Shomon writes about his own experiences the book is quite good, informative, and fast paced. He pulls a lot of punches to spare his audience, but nevertheless gives a fairly detailed picture of what life was like for men whose business was, even more than combat soldiers, quite literally death.

As I said above, I have a few more books to go this year, but I will at least complete the Goodreads Challenge for the first time since 2016, which will come to me more as a relief than a victory. Getting out of the habit of reading was a huge lapse on my part, an egregious failure of self-care, and I look forward very much to wearing out my reading chair in 2023 -- that is, if my cat doesn't destroy it first.