Hardly 20 minutes have passed since I finished my 1200th book in my silly book-tracking project, which I began in earnest ‘way back in 2015. As per usual, I do not count comics and graphic novels (nor books about comics, for that matter) towards this total figure, though I am tracking the aggregate numbers as well.
This 1200th book was the classic—and rightfully so—Slaughterhouse-Five, by Kurt Vonnegut. (My old movie tie-in addition has the novel as being by “Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.“, but I suppose that he eventually (the illustration there is of the 80th printing, the which I just finished reading) decided he’d matured enough to drop the “Jr.”, or maybe his pop left this mortal coil and he decided there wasn’t any question anymore of him being confused with his father (not that that seems all too likely).) I say it’s “rightfully” considered a classic because: Wow. I mean, seriously. Wow. It’s awesome. Now it may be the case that there are certain authors that we read at a certain time of life, and I’ve always considered Vonnegut as someone you read in your late teens or early 20s—and I still stick by that. (I also think that’s true of, say, Tom Robbins.) But re-reading Mr. Vonnegut now that I’m in my post-quinquagenarian years has brought home to me just how good a writer he really is. Sure, maybe he has annoying tics (lots of ’em), like in this novel “So it goes” and “And so on”. But maybe it’s also the case that for some authors like Vonnegut and Brautigan, they needed so to tell us things that simply could not be told, and yet they found a way to do just that. Sure, Slaughterhouse-Five is an anti-war novel; could it have been otherwise written in 1969? But it also speaks to and for the powerless, for those destined (one could say doomed) to always be the “listless playthings of enormous forces” who simply do as they’re told, or try to do so, or try to succeed, or strive, but … well, then, life just happens, keeps on happening. Some may not like the Sci-Fi elements of the tale (indeed, almost all of his awards were various Science Fiction prizes), but it may just be that SF presented the only effective way to tell his stories. As Chandler said of the mystery novel, “it is just possible that the tensions in a novel of murder are the simplest and yet most complete pattern of the tensions on which we live in this generation.” Maybe the same applies here to the Science Fiction genre, to the succeeding generation of which Vonnegut was part, to those who fought for democracy in WWII and then sought to ‘Impeach Earl Warren’. Anyway, listen to me gas on. Better still, read the book; it’s still great.
In this last set of a hundred books———
Whoops
Okay, so it turns out that the book I thought was #1200 was actually #1201, and that I crossed the finish line of the last hundred with a truly terrible bad not-good-at-all book, which I’ll tell you about in a minute. But what happened, was that away back at book #1129, I used that same numeration twice, so that what I’d entered as Book #1130 was really #1131, Book #1131 was supposed to be #1132, and so forth and so on, all the way up to where we are now. Which means that I have to ask myself if I truly want to go back and change all the datapoints for seventy something books. Why am I even raising the question? Of course I’m gonna change them all; and just as of course, I don’ wanna. *Sigh*
What this means is that the veritable 1200th book read was the staggeringly bad Sword Of Power, by James Robert Hawkins, which is even worse than that cover over there implies. This is, in fact, a 1987 hardback reprint of a paperback originally published by Fawcett in 1980 as The Living One. It’s not that the writing is terrible (it is) or that the plot is among the worst science fiction has to offer (it is that, too), but that the whole misbegotten narrative is in the service of some weird-ass religion, like when PKD grabbed from the Bahai faith to make a major plot point of Eye In The Sky—only he knew what he was doing, wasn’t a true believer, and though he could never be called the best prose stylist, he would never have written garbage like this: “Her body was steadfast but flexible, much like the dancer she wished to be as a child; but now her only dance was one of death for the beasts that had slaughtered her people and shattered her dreams.” I won’t tell you which religion the author Hawkins draws from and likely follows, but if you really need to know, you can use your favorite search engine (if any of them are even working anymore) to learn about the odd word in the supposed series title of this new edition: “The Swordsmen of the SUGMAD Saga”. This is book one. It’s hard to say if there was ever a book two. There’s a couple of other books mentioned in the forepages of this turkey, but the only evidence is for this book, in the two versions. (One wise choice the author made when he (likely self-) published this new edition, is to use his longer name. The first printing was under the “Jim Hawkins” rubric, and I sure his writing career didn’t benefit from being associated with a fictional kid in a pirate adventure. (Though, come to think of it….)) The cover also speaks of Mr. Hawkins as being the “author of the Galaxy Award-winning novel, SHIFT”, though I can find no evidence of such a novel, nor do I think the Chinese SF award was presented to him, though there could be such an award I’m just ignorant of. (It would be tacky to speculate that … No, nevermind. It would be tacky.) Anyway, it is a sad, bad, pathetic, poor book, and I am sad that it was #1200. Had I known, I would have read something else at that time.
In this last set of a hundred books I’m still reading a lot of mysteries, though the percentage dropped another fifth, down to 29% (under a quarter if we count the comics I read). Only science fiction represented as much as 10% of this last tranche, however evil the result. (See paragraph above.) I actually plowed through 18 comics—including the delightful Poetry Comics—, though, as I said, I don’t count those towards each century of ‘books read’.
I maintained a truly ludicrous speed over this last hundred books, which surprised me a bit. I knew that I’d gone into the month of May determined to read a book a day, at least, but I guess the ‘at least’ doubled up a few days to allow me to reach this hundred book milestone in only 102 days. My absolute pace was dramatically higher as well, being 206 pages per day (as opposed to 131 pg/day in the last hundred), going up to 218 pg/day if we include the comic books.
1 Book per 1.03 Days
Eventually I’ll try to give you the entire book listing, which I assure you has several (well, one or two, at least) books better than the turkey that ended up being #1200.
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