TOME AFTER TOME

One more bit of 2018 business: As in years previous, Your Humble Narrator kept a list of the books I read this past year. So, for whoever might, for whatever earthly reason, be remotely interested, here it is:

Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House by Michael Wolff

How Town by Michael Nava

Scoundrel Time by Lillian Hellman

Chike and the River by Chinua Achebe

The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu

The Happy Man by Eric C. Higgs

Two by John D. MacDonald

Dead Ringer by Arthur Lyons

Tales of French Love and Passion by Guy de Maupassant

Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood by Trevor Noah

Mr. Bass’s Planetoid by Eleanor Cameron

The Stainless Steel Rat Wants You! by Harry Harrison

The Man Who Spoke Snakish by Andrus Kivirahk

The President is Missing by Bill Clinton and James Patterson

Sargasso of Space by Andre Norton

Dirty Work by Gabriel Weston

So Move the Body by Carter Brown

The Master by Carter Brown

The Corpse Walker: Real-Life Stories, China from the Bottom Up by Liao Yiwu

The Great Los Angeles Fire by Edward Stewart

Planet of Judgment by Joe Haldeman

Get Carter (aka Jack’s Return Home) by Ted Lewis

Elevation by Stephen King

The Informer by Liam O’Flaherty

End of Watch by Stephen King

Mistrustful as I am of contemporary literature, I was startled to notice that the three books I found most mind-blowing this year, The Three-Body Problem, The Man Who Spoke Snakish and The Corpse Walker, were all of 21st-Century vintage. I was also fascinated by Stephen King's Elevation. It's one of his odder tales, a strangely conceptual variation on The Incredible Shrinking Man; it's dedicated to the memory of Richard Matheson and the hero's name is Scott Carey. King calls it a novel, and for most authors it would be, though at 146 pages it seems like flash fiction by King standards.

I greatly enjoyed, though I'm not sure it comes together exactly the way King wants it to, and it has an almost Capra-esque sentimentality to it. But it has great heart, and there are passages that are thrilling, in particular a long chapter about a footrace; an effortless, economical tour de force.

As usual, this list does not include individual articles, reviews, essays, interviews, comic books, blogs, poems, fortune cookies, Facebook posts, warning labels, bathroom walls, etc. etc. that I read last year. Or very short books; I was, for instance, given Whose Boat is This Boat? (by [Our Current President], "by Accident")...

 
...as a gift, read it, enjoyed it, and greatly appreciated that proceeds from its sale benefit hurricane victims. But I didn't list it, in no small part because I didn't wish to further disseminate the "author's" name.