What writers do you rely on? Whom do you go back to again and again for soul-satisfying poetry or prose?
Such writers seem all the more important as our lives seem to find a sixth gear, despite ourselves. Such writers can help us slow down (just a little), make us think (just a little), make us reflect (just a little).
Have a look at my recent reading list, and you can see a few of my "usual suspects": Milan Kundera, Ray Bradbury, Kurt Vonnegut. And here's someone else I've been revisiting this year: William Gibson.
I read Neuromancer (1984) in school, loved it, and never followed up on it. I guess I was more focused on other key SF titles (Foundation, The Martian Chronicles, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Stranger in a Strange Land, The Dispossessed, etc.) than going terribly deep on this or that author.
But that's starting to change: I just read Bradbury's Zen in the Art of Writing (1990) in an attempt to jump-start some of my own writing; I'm in the midst of picking through Arthur C. Clarke's short-story collection, More Than One Universe (1991), which I wanted to re-read before gifting away; I'm half-way through my Library of America volume of Philip K. Dick novels. So it goes.
I went back to Gibson this year: first with the future-past, post 9/11 novel Pattern Recognition (2003), and now with the collection of short nonfiction Distrust That Particular Flavor (2012). I got Flavor home from the library yesterday, and I find myself already 1/4th of the way through it...
You get Gibson's homage to Takeshi Kitano, entitled "The Baddest Dude on Earth," originally written for Time Asia in 2002. You get Gibson bluffing a vision of "The Web" in Rolling Stone circa 1989. And you get amazing little nuggets popped off to Forbes (of all places) you really never had a chance to see otherwise.
Here, in "Dead Man Sings" (1998), he opens with a thought that reverberates Milan Kundera's Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1978):
Time moves in one direction, memory in another.
If you're a fan of William Gibson, you need to check this one out. If you're not a fan of William Gibson, you still need to check this one out.
Busy, busy, busy.
