Tag: Strolling Down Amnesia Lane

A Reader’s Snapshot

Strolling Down Amnesia Lane

A Reader’s Snapshot

by H. C. Newton

In 1996 my plan was still to write (at least) part-time. It wasn’t long before I got over that as more and more I realized that I didn’t possess the requisite talent, drive, or discipline to actually pull that off. What I did have was a love for the written word that goes back far before then. Maybe I wasn’t much of a writer, but I was a reader.

1996 was the last year that I lived in the dorms—for some reason, when we returned to school for our last semester the next year, my wife and I decided that it’d be better to live together, so this was it for the dorms. Every year when I moved into/out of the dorms, I would pack up 100-150 books that I just had to have within reach—the rest could take up space in my old room at my parents’ house. I would get weird looks from just about everyone about the number of books I’d bring to school that had nothing to do with any of the classes I was taking. But even then—before then, actually—just having some of these trusted friends near and accessible was important.

Still, leisure reading wasn’t high on my priority list—I probably did more than I should’ve (I can point to a couple of less-than-stellar grades to back me up). There was a lot of Literary Theory, British poetry (largely from the 17th-19th century), some Behavior Modification psychology—that kind of thing.

There was a class in American Studies that a few of my engineering pals talked me into taking with them—they needed an upper-division Liberal Arts class to prove they realized there was more to life than numbers and asked me to tag along. Outside of the textbook for that class we had to read Black Elk Speaks by John G. Neihardt (which I couldn’t get into at all then or a couple of times since) and The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America’s Man-Made Landscape by James Howard Kunstler (I found this fascinating).

There’s only one new/new-to-me novel that I’m sure I read in 1996—a little thing called Primary Colors by Anonymous (later revealed to be Joe Klein). And I had to work hard to find a copy, and got one of the last ones in town on the week it was released. It was selling out across the nation and internet bookstores were not a thing. If you wanted a copy, you had to go somewhere and put your hands on it. I visited all three bookstores in town one morning and I’m pretty sure there was only one other copy on the shelf (or maybe I picked that one up). I remember a professor a couple of days later expressing jealousy that I’d got it.

I remember reading a lot of humor around that time—I definitely read All the Trouble in the World by P.J. O’Rourke and two Dave Barry books—Dave Barry’s Complete Guide to Guys and Dave Barry in Cyberspace, there was some re-reading of Paul Reiser, Lewis Grizzard, SeinLanguage, and that kind of thing. (this is one of the things that I dabbled in writing)

In 1996, I was reading Cyberpunk and post-Cyberpunk kind of SF. Rudy Rucker’s Hacker and the Ants; Crashcourse by Wilhelmina Baird, Synners by Pat Cadigan, Idoru by William Gibson. I tried Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson, too (small confession: I’ve tried that multiple times, I’ve only been able to finish his The Diamond Age). Jonathan Letham’s Gun, with Occasional Music and Jeff Noon’s Vurt fit in there somewhere.

Believe it or not, when it comes to Mystery/Detective fiction, I didn’t read a whole lot. This was the last year I did my “read every Spenser novel in print over a three-day weekend” project. In fact, 1996 was the first (and only) year since I started reading Spenser that I didn’t buy and/or read the new novel (however, in 1997, I got to read three new-to-me-Parkers—1996’s Chance and 1997’s Small Vices—along with the first Jesse Stone novel, Night Passage). I’m sure I re-read a handful of Nero Wolfe and Gideon Oliver novels—and maybe even a Perry Mason or Brady Coyne book or two. But I just wasn’t reading new mystery/detective novels at that time. I didn’t have time for experimentation/discovery—just for re-reading.

I know I didn’t read any fantasy novels that year—at the time, I can only think of one or two stand-alone Fantasy novels that I’d found (and they both eventually became series). So the only Fantasy I’d really come across were part of a trilogy, or as part of a longer thing—like The Wheel of Time was shaping up to be. I would only read completed series back then, and I didn’t like carving out that much time to read them—I always felt exhausted afterward. And given school and personal life, I wouldn’t have let myself take the time, had I any ideas for them.

I was in the middle of a really deep dive on the theological front—Michael S. Horton’s In the Face of God was on the lighter end, along with G. I. Williamson’s on study guides for the Westminster Confession and Shorter Catechism, and R. C. Sproul’s The Intimate Marriage. On the other end of the spectrum, I was working through The Bondage and Liberation of the Will by John Calvin as well as his Institutes of the Christian Religion—the Beveridge translation in a blue paperback that could be used as a melee weapon (my wife got me the classier looking hardcover edition of the Battles translation as a gift that year). I also discovered Richard Muller’s Dictionary of Latin and Greek Theological Terms that year, one of those evergreen finds.

I really shot myself in the foot with this idea, I realized much too late. I have a much stronger idea about the books I read in 1995 and 1997, for example. Or probably just about any other year since 1986. So did I gain any insight thanks to this stroll down Amnesia Lane? I’m not really sure. It was kind of fun trying to figure out what I’d been reading (why didn’t I track things then?) I can grab a hint or two about how my tastes developed from this point—but honestly, I’m not sure what I’ve gained from this exercise. Maybe after it percolates a bit longer, I’ll see it. If you’ve read this far, hopefully it was a little interesting—and helped you remember a thing or two about your own reading 25 years ago.

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There’s a Reason I Write by Ian Patrick Robinson

Strolling Down Amnesia Lane

There’s a Reason I Write

by Ian Patrick Robinson

Fight ClubIn 1996 I was reading the hardback edition of Fight Club. This is the only book that’s really resonated with me. The power of the language and the themes it explored have stood the test of time. If you’ve seen the film then it would be easy to think the book’s all about toxic masculinity – it’s far from that.

The following is my own opinion based on reading the book many times. It’s not to be considered in any way a critique worthy of note. So, without trying to give any spoilers, here’s my take on the book that resonated with me in 96.

The narrator’s going through what could be described as existential angst. He’s in a job he hates and can see no way out of until he meets Tyler Durden, a soap salesman who introduces him to his take on life. In 1996, I was six years in a police career that would last twenty-seven. I was young, but not what I would consider to be impressionable. I was working in the Criminal Investigation Department where the regular fallout of many a punch up would await me in the cells each morning. Each one with a tale of innocence to tell. Innocent until proven guilty, that is.

It was a time where CCTV wasn’t prominent, mobile phones weren’t a thing, and pagers were only beginning to come in. It was a time of face-to-face engagement, or you picked up a landline and had a conversation. Witness statements were taken on paper and interviews were just beginning to be taped—yes, taped. Fight Club was all about conversation—conversations between the narrator and those he would seek in self-help groups he didn’t belong to. Conversations with all walks of life who’d come together to fight, to bond, to express their desire for freedom, freedom from expectations of conformity to the “norm” and freedom to be themselves.

Every individual I came in contact with had a choice of how they would react at the time prior to committing the offence. They just didn’t take the option of least resistance. There are many quotes in Fight Club that the author, Chuck Palahniuk, nailed. Google them to see the best, or better still read the book.

In 2015 I was diagnosed with an incurable muscle-wasting condition. A condition with no name that fell under the umbrella of Muscular Dystrophies.

My policing career was over after 27 yrs. Yes, I could have stayed on doing a desk job, but that wasn’t why I joined.  Now I write books. Books of crime fiction and I’m working on others that aren’t. Rubicon, Stoned Love, Fools Gold, and How the Wired Weep are my attempt at urban noir. Latent Damage, Cover Blown, and Shots Fired a stab at police procedural.

There’s a reason I write and that’s due to Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club:

“It’s only after we’ve lost everything that we’re free to do anything.”

What will you do?

It’s only after we’ve lost everything that we’re free to do anything.


Sam Batford Trilogy

How the Wired Weep

Nash & Moretti series

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Back to the Past by Jeff Quest

Strolling Down Amnesia Lane

Back to the Past

by Jeff Quest

I would love to say I was the 19-20-year-old who read Proust and Pynchon with regularity and could quote from the oeuvre of Whitman and Wordsworth; but I wasn’t then, and still am not now.

Instead, where I found myself in the year 1996 was that for the first time I was within walking distance to three bookstores, had access to a university library with tons of books/scripts, and more time to dedicate to reading than I can even imagine currently. That time of my life was when my reading options began to expand beyond the low-hanging fruit.

I was very much into the branded sci-fi/fantasy of the time so the Star Wars X-Wing novels and various Star Trek books loomed large in my reading. For all of my fantasy reading of the time, I managed to skip the book released that year that would come to dominate the fantasy world over the past ten years—A Game of Thrones.

My mystery/thriller/espionage fandom hadn’t fully formed yet. I would pick up the likely suspects you’d find in the drug store spinner rack, Cussler, Clancy, Ludlum, but I hadn’t yet tried some of the more challenging authors that now top my favorites list like Eric Ambler, John le Carré, or Len Deighton. I’d read Sherlock Holmes and other mysteries, but I’m happy that my mystery reading has broadened to include fun series authors like Rex Stout, SJ Rozan, and Will Thomas plus a recent class has introduced me to several authors whose work has been translated into English.

I did find one enduring read that I can trace back to that particular year – P.G. Wodehouse. His Mr. Mulliner omnibus introduced me to an unknown world of vicars, broadway producers, movie stars and writers who proceed to get into more zany situations than you can shake a stick at. He’s a writer that I love to return to, especially any time when life gets stressful and I need to shift to a different world where the stakes are low.

1996 also found my reading including a lot of plays and I discovered one of my favorite playwrights – David Ives. Although it’s almost always preferable to watch theater rather than read it, in Ives’ case the reading is just as pleasurable. His beguiling short play The Universal Language, about a con man that “teaches” his students how to speak his “universal language” made up of nonsense words, is one of my favorites. Back in ‘96 I was dying to perform in one of his short plays and I pledged to will a production of his work into existence, something I eventually succeeded in doing five years later. That show was also how I started dating my wife, so the seeds of my life now were truly planted back in 1996.

 

 


Jeff Quest is a reader with less time to read than he’d prefer. He writes about spy fiction at SpyWrite.com and podcasts on Nero Wolfe at LikeTheWolfe.com, Mick Herron at BarbicanStation.com and spies at Spybrary.com.

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1996: The Year a Book Turned Things Around by K.R.R. Lockhaven

Strolling Down Amnesia Lane

1996: The Year a Book Turned Things Around

by K.R.R. Lockhaven

In 1996 I was a junior in high school with an ever-growing urge to drop out.

The shitty thing was, I had always been good at school up to that point. Earlier in my academic career, I had been given a chance to join this gifted program, but I had spurned it because all I wanted to do was drink, talk to girls, and steal everything that wasn’t nailed down. The change had been sudden.

I could try to blame this change on hanging with the “wrong crowd,” which was definitely a part of it, but the blame was mostly on me. I had very little self-confidence back then, and even less purpose in life. Looking back, I can see that a big part of it was the fact that I had given up on a very important part of my life to that point.

I had given up on fantasy books, both reading them and writing them.

Throughout middle school and into high school I had been an avid reader of the Dragonlance series, and I had started writing a fantasy series of my own. My books were so close to the Dragonlance books in content they probably could have been considered plagiarism, but I absolutely loved writing them. I would lovingly draw each character and make detailed maps of my made-up worlds. I wish I still had them, but nearly all of it has been lost over the years.

I was extremely nerdy, but I didn’t have any nerdy friends. So once I became aware that my interests weren’t cool, I began to hide them from people. What once brought me joy slowly became something shameful. Eventually, I abandoned the whole idea of writing and began to fill that void with all the wrong things.

Anyway, back to 1996, the year I picked up the book The Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut. At this point I was no longer an avid reader, but I still had reading assignments from time to time in school. I wish I remembered the circumstances, as it ended up being such a pivotal moment in my life, but I don’t. What I do remember is how that book completely floored me. It brought back all that love of stories I used to have, and although it took a while to fully realize it, it sparked the idea that would soon give my life the purpose I had been missing.

I don’t want to spoil the book at all, but I think it’s safe for me to say a few things about it. For example, its explanation for the purpose of all human life is one of the darkest and funniest things I’ve ever read. It’s hard to explain how that changed my way of thinking, though. I guess the idea that there was no ultimate purpose in life, or that such things could be joked about,  was very freeing. My teenaged mind hadn’t really contemplated such things before, but Vonnegut’s wisdom and satire had brought so many new ideas to the forefront. One of those ideas came from the following line: “I can think of no more stirring symbol of man’s humanity to man than a fire engine.” This one line in a book I just happened to pick up in 1996 led me to where I am today, sitting in a fire station, writing a blog post about reading and writing. The goal of becoming a firefighter, although vague at first, helped to keep me on track through some tumultuous times.

I’m currently working as a firefighter while pursuing my middle school dream of being a fantasy author. My writing is nothing like Dragonlance, or Vonnegut, but I can definitely see their influences in everything I write.

 


K.R.R. LockhavenMy book, The Conjuring of Zoth-Avarex: The Self-Proclaimed Greatest Dragon in the Multiverse can be found here here and the follow-up, a Choose Your Own Adventure-style novella, can be found here here.

You can find me on Twitter—@Kyles137 or at my website krrlockhaven.com.

 

 

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Authorial Aspirations? Not So Much by Robert Germaux

Strolling Down Amnesia Lane

Authorial Aspirations? Not So Much

by Robert Germaux

Okay, first, authorial? Really cool word, one I’d never come across until H.C.’s email giving me the outline for this guest post. You learn something new every day, right? And speaking of this guest post, travel with me back to 1996, when I was a tender lad of 50. Wait, no need to reach for the old abacus. I’ll save you the trouble. I’m old.

Getting back to the title of this piece, no, I had no authorial aspirations at that time. I was still three years away from taking advantage of an early retirement offer from the Pittsburgh Public Schools System, so the bulk of my “writing” that year consisted of the comments I wrote on the approximately 1500 student compositions I graded for my 9th and 11th grade English classes. Some of my students were very good writers, so the comments I wrote on their papers came pretty easily. On the other hand, many of my kids struggled with the process of transferring thoughts to paper, so after gently pointing out a few of their more egregious errors in spelling, grammar, syntax, etc., I also tried to add a positive note or two, which at times involved a certain degree of creativity on my part.

What was I reading in 1996? Well, that’s an entirely different situation. No matter how busy I was with my “schoolwork,” I always found time for recreational reading. I particularly enjoyed the detective series by Robert B. Parker, Michael Connelly, Sue Grafton (I think 1996 was M is for Malice) and Robert Crais, but I also loved reading P.G. Wodehouse’s Bertie and Jeeves stories, which my father had introduced me to when I was just sixteen or seventeen. Beyond books, I read magazines: Sports Illustrated, Time, People, Life, Ladies Home Journal (the only periodical my dentist had in his waiting room), TV Guide, etc. Basically, if you wrote it, I’d read it. And, of course, I always glanced through Pittsburgh’s two daily newspapers. (Sadly, today, the ‘Burgh, like so many other cities in this country, is a one-paper town.)

So, no writing back in ’96, other than the aforementioned composition comments. But shortly after I retired, my wife urged me to give writing a try. As usual, Cynthia’s suggestion was a good one, because now, here I am twelve books later, and although I didn’t realize it at the time, all that reading and grading of papers written by teenagers in 1996, along with the time I spent putting eyes on books, magazines, newspapers, heck, even billboards on drives across Pennsylvania to visit my wife’s family, all of that definitely played a part in preparing me for my post-teaching career as a writer. Of course, it wasn’t just 1996. It was also all the years before and since. It’s an ongoing process for all of us who write. It’s who we are. It’s how we’re hard-wired.

Twenty-five years from now, in 2046, when H.C. and his wife are celebrating their 50th wedding anniversary (I recommend a cruise of the Mediterranean) and I’m turning 100, I’m sure I’ll still be reading and writing, maybe even submitting the occasional Senior’s Perspective guest post to The Irresponsible Reader.


Robert GermauxRobert Germaux and his wife, Cynthia, live outside of Pittsburgh. After three decades as a high school English teacher and now more than twenty years into retirement, Bob is beginning to have serious doubts about his lifelong dream of pitching for the Pirates. While waiting for that call from the team’s GM, Bob has written five books about Pittsburgh private detective Jeremy Barnes, two books about Pittsburgh police detective Daniel Hayes (who hunts serial killers in the Steel City), and two stand-alone books: The Backup Husband (a romance with a twist) and Love Stories (a semibiographical novel based on the six weeks Cynthia spent in Europe when she was seventeen). In addition, with tongue planted firmly in cheek, Bob has written what he likes to call his Grammar Sex Trilogy, three collections of humorous essays.

You can find links to all of Bob’s books (and download free samples) at his Amazon Author Page.

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Strolling Down Amnesia Lane—An Introduction to This Week’s Series

Strolling Down Amnesia Lane
I have never had a week’s worth of posts scheduled before today. I’m excited for the series for that alone. I did that because I’m out of town for the week with my wife and as a gift to her, I’m not going to work on the blog. I”ll look in on things from time to time, I’m sure, but I won’t be doing anything until Saturday (and I’m only halfway sure I’ll bother with a Saturday Miscellany). It’s our 25th Anniversary this week, and I’m not thinkng about work or this blog.

So I put out a call to readers of this space to chip into a different kind of Guest Post series. The pitch was:

Think back to 1996. What were you reading? What were you writing—did you have authorial aspirations at that point? If you weren’t a reader/writer at that point, can you point to why? What were you doing at time that prepared you to become the reader/writer you are today? Basically, you and the written word in 1996—do with it what you will (heck, if you’re in the mood to write an alternate history about what could’ve been, go for that).

Obviously, 1996 was picked as the theme, because that’s the year I’m thinking a lot about this week. I didn’t expect it to be as pivotal for every contributor as it was for me, but one of my assumptions is that for pretty much any year, we can find some things going on that are part of the foundation for where we are now. And I thought it’d be fun to explore that a bit.

So that’s what we’re going to do this week. Yes, so we have writers at various stages of their careers, bloggers and a podcaster–but our common thread is the written word. And the influence of what we’ve read has shaped us into what we are now (usually without us realizing it at the time).

We’ll start things off later this morning with Robert Germaux, indie crime writer. Tuesday we’ll hear from K.R.R. Lockhaven, firefighter/fantasy author. On Wednesday blogger and podcaster Jeff Quest is up to bat. On Thursday, Ian Patrick Robinson—one of the best Crime Fiction writers around—will wrap up the guest contributions. And then on Friday, I’ll hopefully not bring down the average quality of the series too much.

I really want to thank everyone who expressed interest in this series—and for the couple of people who weren’t able to come up with something, I still thank you for the time (and don’t blame you—I almost didn’t contribute anything myself). But for those four who persevered? I cannot thank you enough—this was not an easy task. Each contribution made me smile and I can.

To everyone else who’s read this far, I hope you enjoy our looks back to twenty-five years ago as we stroll down Amnesia Lane…

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