So, I got into the reading game kind of late. Like REALLY late.
How late?
The last book I read cover to cover was the Marilyn Manson autobiography, The Long Hard Road Out of Hell, which I'd read at age seventeen.
After that I didn't pick up another book until I was twenty-one. That whole span of time in-between I spent doing other stuff--drinking, messing around with girls, making 'music', and so on. Reading wasn't a priority for me for a long time, and I just didn't want to.
The thought of reading books did nothing for me, didn't get my nerves churning, didn't get my heart thumping. I was then, and am now, a movie buff.
You want to talk to me about film, I could go on for hours. We'll talk directors, scenes, quotes, actors, filmography, and it'll be endless. I didn't have that with books.
By the time I was twenty-one, I'd read maybe eight books my whole life. Several of them were Fear Street books that I picked up at the local thrift store.
Those were my favorite . . . R.L. Stine at his darkest, writing well detailed grisly teen horror. I remember one of the books, Fear Park: the First Scream (or something like that), was absolutely brutal to my fourteen-year-old eyes. Kids took up hatchets and hacked each other to bits, guts spilling out, heads being caved in. It was absolute chaos.
If I read it now, I'm sure I'd have a different take on it, find it even maybe a bit cheesy, but reading it as a kid, the experience was totally different!
I also read Stephen King's Dolores Claiborne, at about the same age. That one was a little harder to read, because it was obviously geared more towards adults than kids, even teenagers.
In that span of time I tried to read several different Stephen King books, but found myself being unable to finish any of them. I read fifty pages of IT and put it down. Same with The Stand, Christine, The Tommyknockers, and likely a handful of other King works.
I think what it was is that those works were too advanced for me, and as much as I hate to admit it, I'm a terribly slow reader!
It takes me a long time to get through a book, whereas it takes some people a couple of hours or even a weekend to get through a six hundred page novel. Typically, I read an average length novel (three hundred pages or so), in about a week.
When I was a kid, trying to get through these books, it was an arduous endeavor. I think that ultimately quelled the desire within me to read, and I just moved on, like the world in the Dark Tower series.
From ages seventeen to twenty, I lived without reading any books at all, just living my life, doing the dumb shit I'd adapted into my daily routine. Then, I went to Montana to visit some friends, and they books littered about. One of them was the book version of Fight Club, Chuck Palahniuk's baby, and the book that would catapult the man to mainstream audiences with David Fincher's phenomenal film adaptation.
My friend asked if I wanted to read it, and I politely, or maybe not so politely, turned him down. It was completely cool, I just told him I wasn't interested, and he looked like he wanted to fight me on the point, but ultimately let it go.
The year after that, I returned to Montana, this time for an extended stay--some personal problems not worth mentioning here. This time, I was finally convinced, not by my friends, but by myself, to read some goddamn books!
This dude had a plethora of them lying around, and with nothing else to do in a house with no T.V. and no internet, I became hooked on books.
The first of the lot that I had read was Robert Rankin's Hollow Chocolate Bunnies of the Apocalypse. This was a madhouse story, and one that I stuck to with some sick passion, refusing to put it down at any point in time, until I'd finally finished it.
At this point, I'd exalted, "I FUCKING LOVE THIS STORY!"
I immediately demanded more novels and they were provided. I don't remember the exact order in which I read the other stuff I delved into while in Montana, but this is the list:
Koushun Takami - Battle Royale
Chuck Palahniuk - Survivor
Chuck Palahniuk - Invisible Monsters
Chuck Palahniuk - Haunted
Chuck Palahniuk - Pygmy
Dante Alighieri - The Inferno (didn't finish! :'[ )
From there, I ended up becoming a full-fledged reader, and as you can see by all the Chuck Palahniuk books, I became a pretty big fan. His works inspired some of my earlier writing, as is evidenced in: Addleton College of the Arts and Loaded.
My inspirations have since broadened, as I've read and learned from a great many other authors and have experienced life more thoroughly since being twenty-one. It's been close to eight years since I read those initial books that jump started everything, renewing my interest in something I thought I'd forever abandoned.
Instead of going through all the different books I've read since then, I'll provide you with the years through this set of hyperlinks: 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017.
There are still a handful of stories I want to read this year, so the 2017 list is not yet finished. Still, it gives you enough of a glimpse into what I've been reading, and I do plan on reading all those books. Like I said before, though, I'm a slow fucking reader! So, it's going to take a while to get through all the Dark Tower books, but I do plan to.
I've come a long way from reading a thousand or more page book in three months. The last one I read, The Dark Tower 4: Wizard and Glass, I got through in three weeks, and that's while working a full-time job. So, I have become a much faster reader over the years and that thought, right now, fills me with a jovial spirit. It would be even harder to get into reading now, at twenty-eight-years-old, so I'm glad it happened in my early twenties.
And that brings me to the point of this whole thing, the reason I even bothered to make this long post!
I'm not yet at the place I want to be as a reader, even after eight years of reading. I haven't delved into nearly enough new unexplored worlds by authors I may not know yet. These very authors could become some of my favorites.
Once I get comfortable with going back and reading stuff I read in 2013 or 2014 and not feel like I'm wasting time that I could be dedicating to stuff I haven't read, it'll happen. I hope that makes sense, because that a brutal run-on sentence.
So, let's really get to the point of this post . . . The books I want to eventually reread.
Stephen King - It
Why?
Because I absolutely love this book! This is one of those that I couldn't get through when I was a kid. Like I'd stated before, I made it maybe fifty pages into it, and just couldn't make myself continue. Picked it up again when I was twenty-three and although it took me three months to read, I fell in love with it (both creature and book). I hadn't read anything quite like this book and it changed everything for me, world building, characters, interactions, and even to this day, this is my biggest inspiration as a writer.
Roberto Bolaño - The Savage Detectives
Why?
This about a group of pretentious teenagers living in Mexico in the sixties and seventies, who call themselves 'visceral realists', and they worship French poets from the 17th century or thereabouts. It's told in a Truman Capote - In Cold Blood sort of fashion, with each character recalling an event and giving almost photographic detail about it. It spans decades and follows these people all across the world, including Africa and Deutschland. Sure, it starts off with a bunch of kids, but they grow up and experience some of the wildest journeys and it's all so beautiful to read about. For me, this is my Catcher in the Rye. This book changed my life. This book made me want to travel the world, which I may yet do one day . . . Starting with Japan! Nihon ga suki desu yo! Nihon-jin kanojo ga hitsuyou desu yo!
Philip K. Dick - Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
Why?
This is an incredible book by one of the greatest writers to ever walk the earth. I've said it before in this blog, and I'll say it again, I'm a movie buff before anything else. As such, I saw Blade Runner well before I ever read the book or even knew it was based on a book. I eventually did read it and loved it. The film isn't a copy paste of the book and changes several things that made the book stand out. Those changes in turn make the film stand out. The film I've watched countless times, but the book I've only read once. I'd like to rectify that.
Michel Faber - Under the Skin
Why?
This again goes back to my being a film nut, but I heard about the film before I knew that it was based on a book. I'd watched the film's trailer countless times and had to pick up the book when I realized one existed. Read it in no time at all and fell completely in love with Isserly and her red Toyota Corolla of death. This is one of the most interesting and compelling characters I've ever met, and spoiler alert, she isn't human! The whole final arc of this book had me so enamored with detailed descriptions of where she called home and how she would let death come for her. It is absolutely poetic.
Chuck Palahniuk - Haunted
Why?
This is, hands down, one of the most fucked up and disturbing books I've ever read. Chuck goes well out of his way to make you feel extremely uncomfortable while reading any one of his books. This takes the cake, though. I've read like eight of this man's works, and I can say without a doubt, that this is the most arduous to get through. I think 'Guts' is the first story of a collection of them strewn throughout this work. If you can get through that first short story, you'll do fine with the rest of this work. 'The Mirror Box' is my favorite of those presented here, and easily one of the creepiest short stories I've ever read.
So, this is going to end up being way longer than I intended if I keep doing summaries, so here is a simple list of all the other books I'd like to reread:
Joe Hill - Horns
Ernest Cline - Ready Player One
Chuck Palahniuk - Invisible Monsters
Koushun Takami - Battle Royale
Kurt Vonnegut - Slaughterhouse-Five
J.D. Salinger - Catcher in the Rye
Chuck Palahniuk - Rant: the Story of Buster Casey
William Faulkner - The Sound and the Fury
Dennis Lehane - Shutter Island
Richard Price - Clockers
If you sat there and read this whole thing, thank you so much! If you do want to see summaries for all of these, let me know! I'll do a different post for the rest of the books, giving some small detail about them. I didn't want to do a review of the books, so I instead talked about how each made me feel and why I want to dive back in.
Take care of yourselves, and thanks again for reading!
--Oscar Lopez Jr.
