Richard Dansky

I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again – the net is awash in advice by, of and for writers. This is a good thing, insofar as getting information into the hands of folks who are interested in using it to become better at their craft is generally a good idea. There’s advice on writing, there’s advice on marketing, there’s advice on self-publishing, there’s advice on e-publishing, there’s advice on how one should comport one’s self when engaged in a metaphorical act of cross-species carnal knowledge between Rana pipiens and Pan troglodytes. There’s advice on writers and agents and editors and bookstore folk and podcasters and cover artists and blurb-givers.

But lost in this flood-stage river of writing advice tends to forget one important person in the equation: the reader. Sure, there’s lots of stuff out there about how you can get readers to buy your book (which is kind of important), and get them talking about your book, and get them reviewing your book on Amazon. But it feels like something’s missing from all that, the sense of the reader as reader, not customer, the notion that their role in this is to enjoy what the experience of reading. And that bothers me a bit.

I confess, I’m a big reader. I read fast, and I read often, and I spend a lot of time in airports, so I have lots of reading time. I also review books, more or less, for four publications, so there’s a pretty steady flow of reading material through Chez Dansky and its hotel room-shaped far flung outposts. In a given year, I’ll probably read about 120 books cover to cover, plus take bites out of another thirty. I love reading, love the experience of curling up with a good book (metaphorically curling, that is – the seats at LaGuardia really don’t allow for much in the way of alternative posture choices) and losing myself in it. I don’t read because I have to – the reviewing gigs follow the reading, not the other way around – I read because I genuinely enjoy it, and I genuinely hope that everyone who reads something of mine gets that same enjoyment.

One of the things I’ve done the past couple of years is track which books I’ve read in a given year via Goodreads. It’s not keeping score, it’s more a way for me to check myself to see what my reading habits are, and how they change, and if I need to stop reading so damn many graphic novels. (Answer: Yes. Yes, I do.) As the year wound down, I did a run through this year’s catalog, and thought about where I’d read them, and when, and how. And I realized there were stories to the reading, to go with the stories that I was reading, ways in which the things I’d read had resonated beyond the experience of just reading. I thought I’d share a few of them.

Flaming Zeppelins: The Adventures of Ned The Seal (Joe R. Lansdale) – I bought this in an airport bookstore in St. Louis, waiting for a delayed flight to take me home to start the year. I read it in the airport, and was finished before my plane left the ground. On the flight, I read an uneven biography of Forrest J. Ackerman, and fretted over the fact that I’d dinged the cover.

A Man Called Intrepid (William Stevenson) – Read mostly in a hotel room in Paris, off the Bastille. Three weeks at the head office to start the year off, punctuated by news that two relatives I loved dearly had passed away. One of them, according to family folklore, had served in Europe, and fought in the Battle of the Bulge. He was a good and generous and strong man, much loved by all who knew him. I learned of his passing while stalking back and forth in the courtyard of the Louvre one cold night, trying to uncross figurative wires and meet up with the marvelous Gio Clairval, writer and translator, and fellow friend of Bull Spec editor Samuel Montgomery-Blinn. Eventually we found one another, and had a lovely dinner over which many stories were told, and I didn’t mention that Uncle Joe had passed  because, really, that would have been kind of selfish. Eventually dinner wound down, and we said good evening, and I walked myself home to my hotel. And in the evenings the rest of that trip, I’d read myself to sleep with stories of derring-do from World War II.

Journal of a UFO Investigator (David Halperin) – Read for the sake of a review and interview of the offer, for Bull Spec Magazine. The interview was at Foster’s Market in Durham, and I was lost and late getting there. I parked in the wrong lot, sprinted in, and recorded the whole thing on my new iPad, which would have been fine if I’d had any chance to test recording things on my new iPad before breaking it in at the interview. The author, David Halperin, was wonderful and generous with his time, just as the book was wonderful and generous. Later, he wrote me to say that he thought the review nailed exactly what he was trying to do with the book, and asked if I’d be kind enough to repost it to amazon. So I did.

Ice Cream: A History (Ivan P. Day) – Read on the back deck of my house with a glass of homemade lemonade as accompaniment. That didn’t happen a lot this year; 20 or so weeks on the road. The hammock went almost entirely unused.

A Mammoth Murder (Bill Crider) – Bought off a dealer’s table at World Horror Con, pretty much because the back cover copy promised a Bigfoot angle to the mystery. I read it at home in the first couple of days following the con. The Bigfoot angle was pretty much a dud, but those who seek Bigfoot are used to failure. God forbid anyone ever actually found a sasquatch; the zoologists would move in instantly, and where would all the happy cryptozoologists be then?

The John Varley Reader (John Varley) – Read in a variety of places around Visby, Sweden. Four stories were read on the beach. Two were read as I perched precariously on the old town wall. Three more in a coffee shop, waiting for something that wasn’t coffee. You get the idea. And in the end, the book stayed there, left behind at the hotel for their tiny lending library, so someone else might get a chance to read it the way I had.

A Taste for Absinthe: 65 Recipes for Classic and Contemporary Cocktails (R. Winston Guthrie) – My wife is a statistician. She is also an absinthe fiend, having become thoroughly hooked on the not-so-blithe spirit during a trip to Prague for a writing workshop with John Kessel and Wilton Barnhardt. When this book came in for review, she decided we’d be having an absinthe party so we could review the recipes scientifically, with a matrix and, err, statistical stuff. So we invited friends over, and we bought a bunch of absinthe, and we made a lot of drinks, and, well, I’m pretty sure I remembered enough of the evening to actually write the review. Were any of the drinks any good, though? You’ll have to ask her.

Mendoza in Hollywood (Kage Baker) – Kage Baker passed away in early 2010. She and I both wrote for Green Man Review, and I was asked to write an appreciation of her for the magazine in the wake of her passing. I’d read and enjoyed her work prior to that, of course. 2011 was the year I really fell in love with it, and I dove in and devoured that which I had not already read. Sometimes, we find things too late; we don’t want to read the next thing from an author who’s gone because that brings us one step closer to reading the last one. Then again, there’s still joy to be taken in the reading of what is there, and there’s a brand new copy of Empress of Mars waiting for me in my to-read pile.

Bad Astronomy: Misconceptions and Misuses Revealed (Philip Plait) – Read in Toronto, in a hotel room that was hugely spacious but lacking in a desk. In the convenience store next door, I was nearly trampled by a Lady Of The Evening stampeding her way to the drink cooler; apparently she was jonesing for a strawberry-kiwi Snapple. Later, I saw her on the street, yelling into her cell phone, tottering on heels high enough to require elevators, and clutching the half-empty Snapple bottle like it was the stuff of life itself.

The Disappearing Spoon (Sam Kean)- Bought in T.F. Green International Airport after a lengthy, lengthy conversation with one of the booksellers there. It was the trip home from NECON, and any books we’d bought there were packed and tucked away. Our flight was delayed – pretty much every flight I had this year, with the exception of the prop job puddle jumper that got me to and from Visby at ungodly hours in the morning was delayed, canceled or otherwise banjaxed – so Melinda ran back to the bookstore to pick up some things we’d talked ourselves out of buying. In truth, the bookseller had helped with that. He’d been so engaging and knowledgeable – and so interested in the fact that there was a writers’ convention down the road he’d never heard of – that we focused more on him, than on the books. But he got us on the rebound, and I read the book in dribs and drabs, one gaggle of elements at a time, over the next week.

Unseen Academicals (Terry Pratchett) – Also read in Toronto, as much of the back half of my year was spent there. I bought it from a tiny, cluttered used bookshop on Yonge Street, where the shelves had long since given up the fight and the books were stacked ten high and three rows deep on the floor. I read it over meals and in cab rides, reading it with one eye to make sure that I got where I was going and didn’t end up lost in the hinterlands of Missasauga or some such. Maybe I read it slower that way. Maybe it was just a very dense book. In any case, I didn’t finish it until just before I left for home. Many books I read on the road, stay there. If it’s not something I’ll read again and I can find a good home for it on the road, there’s no reason to shlep it back. Far better to let it stay behind so someone else could discover it. This one, though, came home with me.

The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes: War of the Worlds (Manly Wade Wellman) – I was mocked by the lead singer of a Swedish prog-metal band for reading this visibly during his band’s set. Prog Day is a local festival, out way the heck and gone in Chapel Hill. My friend Steve Burnett introduced me to it a couple of years ago, and my modus operandi is pretty simple: pack some books, pack a chair, pack a cooler full of beverage, and go hang out. It’s what everyone else is doing, after all. It was just my luck that the lead singer of Freak Kitchen noticed me – us, really; Steve was reading, too – during his set. The book, of course, is by Chapel Hill resident Manly Wade Wellman; things come full circle when you least expect it.

To Rule The Waves (Arthur Herman) – A deliberately contrarian history of the British Navy, selected largely for its bulk and ability to be the only book I’d need on a trip over to Vienna. The reason for the trip was the inaugural STAGConf, dedicated to Storytelling and Games (see how that worked?) and held in the Museum of Natural History in Vienna. Between lectures, everyone would eat pastry, then scurry off to ogle the Venus of Willendorf. Pictures do not do her justice. She is stunning. And she put what we do – what we were all there for – in perspective. Nobody’s going to be going to museums to check out lines of dialog from Cold Fear, twenty four thousand years from now.

Girl Genius, Volume 1 (Phil and Kaja Foglio) – Part of a 6-box-of-books delivery from one of the magazines I review for. I tore them open and blasted through a good ten or so in the next two weeks. One of those weeks was spent on the road, which is when I read half of those books. The other half were all read that night. I stayed up, sitting in one of the living room chairs with my cat curled up next to me, going through one after another. After I wrapped up each book, I told myself I’d be off to bed. Then I’d pick up another book, and another, until the sun came up.

After the Apocalypse (Maureen McHugh) – This one was read traveling back and forth on the Toronto subway. The stories are mainly about everyday people finding themselves in extraordinary circumstances – we’re talking serious end-of-the-world stuff here – and acting in less-than-admirable but entirely believable ways. When you’re on a subway car surrounded by complete strangers, that sort of thing makes you think. My next subway book, for the record, was about sasquatches.

The Hollow Earth (Rudy Rucker) – Melinda brought this home from a World Fantasy Convention, years ago. I read a few pages, and put it down someplace vaguely accessible, and started reading something else. Every so often, I’d pick it up again, and read a few more pages, and then put it down again. This year, I decided to finish it. I picked it up. I sat down in a room with no other books in it. I read the rest of it without stopping for lunch, for tasty beverages, or for random acts of affection toward one of our cats (this is less optional than it sounds – none of them have been declawed, all of them have abandonment issues, and one actually managed to chase off a burglar at one point. Ignore at your peril). And when a few hours were up, I’d finished it. It was done. I’d never pick it up for a few pages and then put it back down, again. And it was OK. Not great, not a mindblowing read or an unstoppable narrative cannonball knocking me off my feet. OK. But I’m glad I finished it.

Monster Spotter’s Guide to North America (Scott Francis) – Am enjoyably disjointed mess of a book that never quite figured out what it wanted to be, but it’s full of hodags and wampus cats and sasquatches, and I’ll never say no to that. This one was a Hanukkah present from my family, much of which is down here. I’ve got an eight year old nephew, and he’s got a friend who’s suddenly decided that he’s into Bigfoot; he cornered Steve at a Christmas Eve party to ask him details of our abortive Bigfoot-hunting expedition in eastern North Carolina (Note: We didn’t find Bigfoot; we did find hippies), which thrilled him to death. Maybe one of these days I’ll sit down with him and my nephew, and we’ll go through this book, and figure out where we can find Bigfoot in suburban Raleigh. And if he asks, I’ll lend him the book, and he can read it, too. Happy new year, everyone. And happy reading.