Between rounds of playing Civilization and
emphatically not reading very much, my mind drifted to
thoughts about which authors have I read the most books by. It was easy to
figure out who they were, but, man, was I surprised when I added up just how
many books of there's I'd read (and in many cases reread) over the last forty
plus year. Between Stephen King, Terry Pratchett, and Glen Cook, I've read 100
books. Of all of them, the first I read was The Shining, way back
in 1978 or 1979. Most of the rest I read as they came out or nearabouts.
Stephen King
Fiction
- Carrie (1974) - good with even better movie made from it
- 'Salem's Lot (1975) - my favorite vampire book
- The Shining (1977) - his best, with nary a wasted word
- The Stand (1978) - two times I tried but couldn't finish. bloated and surprisingly dull in parts. The beginning, though, man, oh, man.
- The Dead Zone (1979) - very good - how do you make Lee Harvey Oswald the hero? also, challenge me if you like, but Cronenberg's movie is the best King adaptation
- Firestarter (1980) - disposable
- Pet Sematary (1983) - way overrated
- The Talisman (1984) w/Peter Straub - good enough
- IT (1986) - good parts mixed with very bad parts and waaaay too long
- The Tommyknockers (1987) - he can't remember writing this which I think is for the best
- The Dark Half (1989) - very good
- Insomnia (1994) - goodish but long and a little pat with its human villain
- The Regulators (1996) - not good
- Bag of Bones (1998) - solid if, again, pat in its villains
- Dreamcatcher (2001) - nuts and not really good, but big, stoopid fun
- From a Buick 8 (2002) - very good
- The Colorado Kid (2005) - infuriating fun about an unanswerable mystery
- Cell (2006) - goodish, but feels like a over-long short story
- Lisey's Story (2006) - I found it more interesting than good, but decent enough. some very good non-fantastic parts of loss
- Duma Key (2008) - eh, but only because I still expect more
- The Outsider (2018) - very good
- Night Shift (1978) - perfect
- Skeleton Crew (1985) - close to perfect
- Four Past Midnight (1990) - okay
- Nightmares & Dreamscapes (1993) - some good stuff
- Hearts in Atlantis (1998) - as a longtime hearts player, I love this
- Everything's Eventual (2001) - okay
- Full Dark, No Stars (2010) - not bad at all
Nonfiction
- Danse Macabre (1981) - important look at horror as a genre
- On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft (2000) - helpful
King is the writer who almost
single-handedly turned horror into a marketable genre. It wasn't by accident:
his early works mix pulp roots with literary aspirations and eyes wide-open on
the bestseller lists. He wasn't the first person to do this, but he was the
most industrious and simply better than most of his rivals.
His first five novels (as much as I don't
like The Stand, its importance to his career and the genre are
undeniable. Most people I know who've read it totally dug it.) and first two story
collections are forces that any examination of modern horror has to address. If
you read horror and have somehow missed them it's best to rectify that.
There's a definite drop off in quality in
the eighties due to addiction troubles (supposedly he has no memory of
writing The Tommyknockers, though that just might be wishful
thinking). As good as I think some of his later books are, they lack the
immediacy and novelty of those first six books. Those early ones, though, man,
oh, man are they fun.
PS: I just recently read his last
novel, The Outsider, and it cooks. More than any of his other books
that I can think of, it feels very much a part of the horror paperback original
scene of the seventies and eighties - done really, really well. In these days
of glittery vampires and torture porn gore, it's a really standout.
Still, it's not as much of a punch to the
gut as his early books. I attribute that to the effect of decades, and decades
of horror written by divers hands. When King kicked things off over forty years
ago, if not the first explorer, he was definitely the most important
conquistador in the lands of horror. The trails he opened and styles he
conquered have long since been traveled and done to death. It's incredibly hard
for new horror book to strike with the same potency of King's earliest books,
even his own.
Terry Pratchett
- The Colour of Magic (1983) - The fun begins...
- The Light Fantastic (1986) - and gets intensified
- Mort (1987) - Enter Death, resplendent in sable
- Equal Rites (1987) - Enter Three Witches
- Sourcery (1988) - Surprisingly eh
- Wyrd Sisters (1988) - The Witches get better
- Pyramids (1989) - Okay standalone
- Guards! Guards! (1989) - Enter Sgt. Vimes
- Eric (1990) - Another surprisingly eh entry
- Moving Pictures (1990) - And yet another eh
- Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch (1990) w/Neil Gaiman - Not my cup of tea, though I'll watch the movie. I've watched the movie and it's as good as the material allows for.
- Witches Abroad (1991) - Terrific
- Reaper Man (1991) - Very (VERY) good
- Lords and Ladies (1992) - Better yet
- Small Gods (1992) - Heartbreaking and beautiful
- Men at Arms (1993) - Great
- Interesting Times (1994) - Okay
- Soul Music (1994) - My least favorite, and yet it's still a good book
- Maskerade (1995) - Grand opera buffa
- Feet of Clay (1996) - Brilliant
- Hogfather (1996) - Very, very good
- Jingo (1997) - Good
- Carpe Jugulum (1998) - My second favorite vampire novel
- The Last Continent (1998) - Rincewind in Discworld's Outback
- The Fifth Elephant (1999) - Great
- The Truth (2000) - Enter William de Worde
- The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents (2001) - Terrific. Ostensibly a young adult book that reads exactly the same as his adult ones.
- The Last Hero (2001) - Cohen the Barbarian's greatest ride
- Thief of Time (2001) - Hilarious retconning of the whole series
- Night Watch (2002) - The best City Guard book (which is say a lot)
- The Wee Free Men (2003) - Enter Tiffany Aching and the Nac Mac Feegles
- Monstrous Regiment (2003) - Very good
- A Hat Full of Sky (2004) - Tiffany gets better
- Going Postal (2004) - Enter Moist von Lipwig
- Thud! (2005) - Okay
- Wintersmith (2006) - Very good
- Making Money (2007) - Moister yet
- Unseen Academicals (2009) - I liked this but many didn't
- I Shall Wear Midnight (2010) - Tiffany and company go to Ankh-Morpork
- Snuff (2011) - The real end. An awful central concept and, I suspect, Pratchett's illness make this a bad book. As such, I thoroughly disliked Snuff and I have never been interested in reading Full Steam, the final book. I also suspect his daughter is the actual author of FS.
At one point (before JK Rowling's advent),
Terry Pratchett was publishing between two and four books a year, and ten
percent of all books sold in England
The Discworld books
started as parodies of heroic fantasy but quickly developed into something far
more ambitious. Unlike most fantasy settings, Pratchett's isn't stagnant, and
many of the books follow the Discworld's social and technological evolution.
The books aren't just comical. In them he explored some pretty heady ideas,
though rarely with heavy hands and never without being extremely funny.
My favorite sub-series are the Guard
books. They are love songs to Discworld's great city, Ankh-Morpork, which in
turn is a stand-in for all the great cities of the West. They are as much about
the dedication and sacrifice it takes to a city running as the sheer joy of
living in one.
- A Shadow of All Night Falling (1979) - Enter Mocker and Bragi
- October's Baby (1980) - Things get crazier...
- All Darkness Met (1980) - and crazier yet
- The Fire in His Hands (1984) - Readable
- The Black Company (1984) - Enter the Company. A groundbreaker
- Shadows Linger (1984) - The best Black Company book
- With Mercy Toward None (1985) - Again, readable
- The White Rose (1985) - Good conclusion to first Black Co. trilogy
- Reap the East Wind (1987) - Disappointing
- Sweet Silver Blues (1987) - Great
- Bitter Gold Hearts (1988) - Greater
- An Ill Fate Marshalling (1988) - Very disappointing
- Cold Copper Tears (1988) - Very good
- Old Tin Sorrows (1989) - Best in the series and one of Cook's best
- Shadow Games (1989) - Okay
- The Tower of Fear (1989) - Very good standalone
- The Silver Spike (1989) - Good and bleak - sums up a lot of Cook - people suck
- Dreams of Steel (1990) - Alright
- Dread Brass Shadows (1990) - Good. At some point, around here, actually, these start to run together. They're still good, but less distinct from one another than the earlier installments
- Red Iron Nights (1991) - Good
- Deadly Quicksilver Lies (1994) - Good
- Petty Pewter Gods (1995) - Good
- Bleak Seasons (1996) - Alright
- She Is the Darkness (1997) - Alright
- Water Sleeps (1999) - Good
- Faded Steel Heat (1999) - Good
- Soldiers Live (2000) - A good, appropriately, sad farewell
- Angry Lead Skies (2002) - Good
- Whispering Nickel Idols (2005) - Good
- An Empire Unacquainted with Defeat (2008) - Stories; some great, several less so
Looking back at Glen Cook's work, there's no denying he's a very
good storyteller. Drawing on hard boiled writing as much as heroic
fantasy, Cook is the writer who brought fantasy down into the dirt for the masses.
I like it a lot (obviously). The results are often derided as flat, and against
the more deliberately literary style of King and Pratchett's elaborate style,
it can look very pale, but when it works, it's good and tough. The first three
Black Company books (The Black Company, Shadows Linger, The
White Rose) remain as smash-in-the-face brutal today as when they appeared.
They also remain the best distillation of his strengths; If you don't like
these, you probably won't like the rest of his catalogue, but if you do, you're
in luck.
The problem with his work is that a lot of
it's part of three long-running series. As with any serial work, it tends to be
stretched out, often further than warranted, and its impact diminishes.
Rereading the entire Black Company series this past summer did
nothing to disabuse me of that.
Before you tell me most of Pratchett's
books belong to a series, let me remind you that within that there are several
discrete shorter sequences (guards, witches, Rincewind, etc.). Each only ended
up running about five or six books written over fairly long periods of
time.
There are eleven Black Company books,
nine Dread Empire, and fourteen Garrett. None of the
latter, for example, are markedly bad, but at some point, seven or eight in, a
certain degree of blending takes over and it gets pretty hard to keep them all
straight. It's not a bad thing - these make no claim to be anything other than
- but it does make keep them separate in one's mind a bit of a chore at some
point.
I don't love a lot of the fantasy spawned
in the wake of the Black Company. I mean the grim military series that litter
the field. The modernisms that Cook popularized aren't so original anymore and
just seem lazy and forced. The grim stuff, well, I've written a lot over the
years about my boredom with it as its own genre, and, again, it reads lazy and
forced. Many of the newer writers may be technically better, capable of finer
prose, but I've found few who can match him for visceral storytelling.
*****************************************
As I continue to get older - that's code to closer to being dead -
I feel a little sad that I've read so many fantasy books and so little
literature, or even just some other genres. I'm not denigrating King,
Pratchett, and Cook, but it all looks so limited from June, 2019. There are so
many books, so much other writing, so many authors, that I should be spending
time with. I know there's no prize for doing this, but to miss out on so much
seems like winning some sort of anti-prize. I mean, I'm pretty sure I'll never
read all of Trollope's Chronicles of Barsetshire and
I'll probably never get to Proust. It's a real mortality-confronter to
understand that there are certain books I will just never read. If I want to
accomplish anything - readingwise - I need to pick and choose.
I've been struggling reading these days.
It's happened before in my life, usually, like this time, after long periods of
reading like mad. For the past five years, I've pushed myself to keep a regular
column at Black Gate going and it feels like I've blown some
sort of reading muscle. Instead of the fifteen or twenty books I'd have read by
now in recent years I've reached a grand total of seven. I think things are
getting back on track, but it's been an outright chore to read.
Right now I'm trying to read that ur-text
of swashbuckling stories, The Three Musketeers by Alexandre
Dumas. After it, I might get back to Fathers and Sons and
maybe I'll finally pick up Lord Jim or something else dense by
Conrad, maybe Nostromo. Oh, and I guess I'll finish Master
and Commander. I really like it so far, but I put it down and got
distracted and somehow didn't pick it back up straight away.
I'm going away to the shore for week soon.
Since I loathe the beach, I'll hang back in the rental house and read like
crazy - ideally. In addition to the books above, I'd love to get to Memo
From Turner, Tim Willocks' latest. Also, one or two more nautical books and
a Golden Age mystery. Of course, based on my history, little of this will come
to pass, I won't read half of what I want to, and I'll just play more games.
