2020 lives strangely in my memory, a feeling like a year with a broken spine, the early hopes of the year staring down in horror at the dead and dangling months below March. In the interest of honesty, I’m writing this italicized bit at the top in 2022—nearly a year after I wrote what follows—and I’m shocked by how my memory of these books shifts after the moment the lockdowns started. I remember all of the books I read before the Pandemic hit: Kitty Genovese, one of the best true crime books I’ve read since In Cold Blood. The Talisman, Stephen King and Peter Straub doing their wickedest Mark Twain impression by way of The Lord of the Rings. The Filth, Grant Morrison at his brain-bending finest, a beautiful exploration of the power of creativity, and the dangers. A Widow’s Story, one of the most honest memoirs of grief after loss I’ve ever read. Ever.
(Joyce Carol Oates is absolutely incredible. If you’ve never read anything of hers, try one of her novels. See how she finesses the knife between your ribs and nicks open your heart. A Widow’s Story is great, but I recommend Blonde (a fictionalized biography of Marilyn Monroe) or The Garden of Earthly Delights if you’re new to her work.)
Snow Crash is one of the wildest cyberpunk sci-fi novels I’ve ever read. It’s long. It’s prescient. It’s cool, and stylish, and violent, and all too plausible, on a long enough timeline. Neal Stephenson immediately became one of my favorite writers on reading Snow Crash. You’ll see another of his, Zodiac, later in this list. The same day I finished that book, I ordered a copy and sent it to my dad.
Neal Stephenson rules.
I finished out the live part of 2020 with a long slew of crime novels and detective fiction—it was around this time that the idea for the dystopian sci-fi crime-noir horror novel I’m working on currently started to bubble in the back of my mind, and so I inundated myself with three masters, to get the beats, patter, and patois of the genre back in my head. It’s not even just these books: I wholeheartedly recommend you go seek out and ravenously consume everything you can get your hands on by Elmore Leonard, Richard Stark (who is secretly Donald E. Westlake, who is near-peerless, and whose words echo from the fingertips of all who came after him), and James Ellroy.
The Maltese Falcon needs no explanation. It’s legendary. It’s better than they tell you it is. Dashiell Hammett didn’t write many novels during his lifetime; it’s easy to read them all. You should do that.
V for Vendetta.
V for Vendetta.
I repeated it to catch at your attention, to jar you from the flow of reading. Listen to me: if you read nothing else on this list—if you read nothing else, period—read V for Vendetta. Don’t watch the movie and think you’re getting the same thing. You aren’t.
Not even fucking close.
I like the movie fine. I’ve seen it a couple of times, and it’s definitely fine. I’m not coming at the flick—it’s better than the fans of the comic made it out to be when it first came out—but comparing the movie to the comic is like saying a set of Hulk Gloves on a ten-year-old is equivalent to Mike Tyson in his prime, with murder in his heart and a head full of methamphetamine.
(They might not walk so far as I, but I suspect even the Wachowskis would allow that the comic is leagues beyond their adaptation: their love of the source material is obvious in the film, and many of the deleterious elements of the flick feel like studio pressure to “make it more like The Matrix.”)
One more time. I’m not fucking around, here: V for Vendetta, written by Alan Moore, illlustrated by David Lloyd, is one of the best books ever written. Not comic books, not “dystopian fiction,” not “one of the best by a British blah blah blah.”
No qualifications. No caveats.
V for Vendetta is a masterpiece. It’s the sort of book that will rewire your head. I read it for the first time when I was 13 years old. I’ve read it probably twenty or thirty times since then. I’ve given away three copies. I’ll probably give away half a dozen more.
That said. It’s a weird book to read right before March 2020. Believe me. You’ll see.
But I’ll turn all that over to past Max. He’s got this whole other thing going on. After all, he’s a year away, and a different man than I am, as the guy who writes to tell you all about his books next year will be unrecognizably me, and someone else entirely. It’s something I’m learning about being alive. A slow lesson, but instructive, and liberating.
Here’s what I wrote last year about what I read the year before, and never published before now.
—m.
Kitty Genovese (Kevin Cook)
Smoke and Mirrors (Neil Gaiman)
The Talisman (Stephen King)
The Hunger, and Other Stories (Charles Beaumont)
The Filth (Grant Morrison)
Big Sur (Jack Kerouac)
A Widow’s Story (Joyce Carol Oates)
Snow Crash (Neal Stephenson)
The Yage Letters (William S. Burroughs)
Get in the Van (Henry Rollins)
V for Vendetta (Alan Moore)
Mr. Majestyk (Elmore Leonard)
The Rare Coin Score (Richard Stark)
The Big Nowhere (James Ellroy)
The Green Eagle Score (Richard Stark)
The Black Ice Score (Richard Stark)
The Maltese Falcon (Dashiell Hammett)
According to my list, The Maltese Falcon was the last book I read (listened to, as it happens) before the COVID-19 Pandemic came and crashed down over the world. I was talking with a friend a couple weeks ago, about how nobody talks about the early weeks and months of the Pandemic anymore. Now that more and more people are being vaccinated, and more businesses, cities, and states are reopening, there seems to be a general tendency among us to chuckle and shrug.
What a crazy year we had, hey? Wild times, wild times. Say, want to go grab a beer?
I worked straight through the pandemic. Essential Worker. Someone’s gotta haul the shit off the trucks. What I remember, mostly, is unloading pallets of computers, cases of paper, and back-to-school supplies with a bandana tied around my mouth and nose while maskless truck drivers stood a few feet away from me in unventilated semi trailers, telling me about the best places to go Squatch-Spotting, about how finally there was someone with some sense at the wheel in Washington, about the time they took a couple shots at a UFO that buzzed their rig while they were pissing in the dust forty miles west of Vegas. I remember a cell phone video one of my friends sent from New York City, of bodies being buried in mass graves. I remember barren grocery stores with shelves denuded of toilet paper, canned goods, dry goods, and anything with even a spritz of bleach in the bottle or “Kills” or “Viruses” on the label, masked shoppers skirting the walls like refugees moving through a war zone, maskless shoppers crowding in on them (and me) shouting about Sheep and Truth and Lies and Freedom.
I remember the fear. The fear was bad, through 2020. The rage and uncertainty, the sense of unraveling, of doom, of thinness. No one talks about that, anymore, that sense that what we’d all thought of as the Bedrock of Civilization was actually no more than translucent gossamer, a silk scarf hung over the mouth of the cave to obscure the howling dark outside.
Remembering the dark, I wonder.
(We now return you to the Reading List you’re reading:)
The Black Dahlia (James Ellroy)
On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft (Stephen King)
The Sour Lemon Score (Richard Stark)
Brokeback Mountain (Annie Proulx)
Deadly Edge (Richard Stark)
Lost Girls (Alan Moore, Melinda Gebbie)
A Midsummer Night’s Dream (William Shakespeare)
Saint Thomas Aquinas (G.K. Chesterton)
Henry VI Part I (William Shakespeare)
Hellblazer Vol. 1: Original Sins (Jamie Delano)
The Comedy of Errors (William Shakespeare)
The Tempest (William Shakespeare)
Henry VI Part II (William Shakespeare)
The Ocean at the End of the Lane (Neil Gaiman)
Sailing to Byzantium (Robert Silverberg)
The Prestige (Christopher Priest)
Perchance to Dream: Selected Stories (Charles Beaumont)
Hellblazer Vol. 2: The Devil You Know (Jamie Delano)
Zodiac (Neal Stephenson)
Web of the City (Harlan Ellison)
The Moving Finger (Agatha Christie)
Better Than Sex (Hunter S. Thompson)
.diane arbus. (Diane & Doon Arbus)
Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail, ‘72 (Hunter S. Thompson)
The Dangerous Alphabet (Neil Gaiman)
The Tragical Comedy or Comical Tragedy of Mr. Punch (Neil Gaiman, Dave McKean)
The Punisher Max Vol. 1: In the Beginning (Garth Ennis)
The Punisher Max Vol. 2: Kitchen Irish (Garth Ennis)
The Punisher Max Vol. 3: Mother Russia (Garth Ennis)
The Punisher Max Vol. 4: Up is Down, Black is White (Garth Ennis)
The Punisher Max Vol. 5: The Slavers (Garth Ennis)
Forty-eight books. Most of them audiobooks, listened to in the long pre-dawn hours moving freight at the job I was working back when the world first got knocked off its pin (I requested the early shift, four a.m. to noon, to limit my exposure to the public; they’re also quiet hours, pleasantly conducive to keeping your head down and listening to stories). I listened in the car on my way to and from work (or, on Sundays, to Meijer for sushi breakfast, which became a strange sort of ritual for me through April, May, and June of 2020, before I left the pallet jacks behind and started working at Left Foot Charley), and while I did the dishes, and vacuumed the house, and walked the dogs, and while I did nothing at all.
Forty-eight. My goal, back when I started keeping track of my reading, several years ago, was to get my pace up to 70 books a year. My reading lists have been shrinking these past couple. I’m going to have to haul ass this year to get my literary shit in shape, especially since I decided to start The Stand in March. I’m barely on page 600…
—m.