Pseudo-resolution: read at least 30 books in 2009.

I consider myself to be a voracious reader. I don't remember the full tally from 2007 but it was around the 25 mark. Not shabby, I thought.

Coming to the end of the year, I expect I could burn through a couple more books and I wanted to see how I did in expanding my mind through reading this year.

To my dismay, I realized I haven't read even 15 books as of today for the entire year. I have been slacking, some would say. It would be easy to blame my old job or my classes but that's hardly fair. There have been many hours of sloth-like behaviour and poker-playing online that could have been used in much better fashion.

Here's the list of what I've read:

The Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac
Death in the Afternoon by Ernest Hemingway
The Winter of Our Discontent by John Steinbeck
It by Stephen King
Salem's Lot by Stephen King
Mother Night by Kurt Vonnegut
The Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut
Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer
Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson
A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller
Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
Watchmen by Alan Moore


Not a bad list. I could tentatively include The Stand by Stephen King as well as I read the second half of it this past summer. I had started it about five years ago, put it down and plum forgot about it until this summer.

Within the next day or so, The Poisonwood Bible will be complete and I'll likely move on to another to devour in the coming weeks, not sure yet what it will be.

Due to my lack of reading accomplishment -- 13 is paltry -- I am making my sole New Year's resolution. I will read at least 30 books next year. Luckily, quitting smoking does not have to be a resolution as I am two weeks into that project and have suffered no setbacks as of yet.

I am looking for suggestions of what to read in 2009. Believe me, I'll read pretty much anything. It doesn't have to be fiction, it can be politics, travel, sociology, etc. Here are a few titles I plan on reading (all for the first time...some should have been read years ago):

Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
Finnegan's Wake by James Joyce
Big Sur by Jack Kerouac
The Cold Six Thousand by James Ellroy
1984 by George Orwell
Animal Farm by George Orwell
The Cider House Rules by John Irving
The Hotel New Hampshire by John Irving
Skinny Legs and All by Tom Robbins
Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson
Cocksure by Mordecai Richler
For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway
The Jungle by Upton Sinclair

So if you have any other suggestions, please comment here or let me know in any way you can figure out.

Also, if you're looking for books to read, check out the following lists:

50 Greatest Travel Books
Books that induce a mindfuck
Time Magazine's top 100 novels

Cheers,

JCW

#180: Night of the Living Dead

Night of the Living Dead (1968)
Written and Directed by George Romero
Starring a bunch of people you've never heard of


I'm not what you'd call a horror fan. Don't get me wrong, every genre has something worth offering but there is so much crap to sift through in the world of horror it's almost not worth trying. Luckily for me, my friend Isaac went through all that trouble so I didn't have to.

Video Stop, the same place my folks rented $1.00 seven-day rentals, is where he lurked. See, along with a ton of classics, Video Stop also seemed to stock-pile every awful horror movie known to man. And he kept going back for more.

Because of our friendship, I developed a knowledge of horror somewhat against my will but in the end it was worth it. If a horror movie was good he'd watch it again, if it wasn't he would just warn me against the real terror behind it...that it was a complete waste of time. Time we wouldn't get back. The horror...

He's a horror nut. For a while he had every intention on becoming the next Romero or Sam Raimi. At the time I had my sights set on the marquee. And seeing how he could have become the next master of horror I figured I'd be his Bruce Campbell.

He made a couple horror movies in high school, and considering his budget of zero and household appliances they weren't too bad. The one he made for his Media Studies class in his senior year, Revenant was pretty damn good. It was about a group of convicts trying to break out of prison. For one reason or another one of them had this spell that brought the dead back to life and obviously the dead wreaked havoc on the inmates.

I was one of them. My death scene was excellent. I was in a bathroom during the breakout and Isaac tried to jimmy-rig a rope system to jerk me around the room. An invisible entity was supposed to be thrashing me around.

After a couple run-throughs it just wasn't working.

"How about I just do it myself?"

"Uh...okay."

The end result had me screaming as the toilets flushed and the taps turned on by themselves and then my body flailed around the bathroom until I smeared my blood on the wall*. I cracked my head off the toilet in one of the stalls and I biffed my shoulders off the wall a couple times. It's amazing no bones were broken.

The film was finished, and I had lived my own Bruce Campbell moment for Isaac. Bruce has been beaten up and has the scars to prove it working on the Evil Dead series and I did the same on a scaled down level for Revenant.

Isaac shifted gears though after that. He graduated high school that Spring and moved to Halifax. He ended up focusing more on music and a couple years after high school he was the lead singer in the band The Search for Alexander and later played with groups The Magnetic Lines and Tattered Black Dress.

After a disillusioning experience at Dalhousie University and their theatre program I was done with acting, at least as a profession. Writing was eventually my decision. But those days of horror films have not gone unforgotten.

A couple years ago, Isaac and his friend Terry wrote Play of the Living Dead. It was an homage to Night of the Living Dead and zombie movies everywhere. Isaac showed me the movie in high school and I knew he loved it dearly. He did it justice in his own take on the zombie mythos. It won Fringe hit at the Fringe Festival in Halifax and broke attendance records at the Neptune Theatre.

Even now, Isaac and I are working on a novel together that brings together his horror sensibilities and my own active imagination. And instead of trying to be the equivalent of someone else creatively we're finding our own voices in the collective experiment. Yes we're influenced by Stephen King, George Romero and Sam Raimi, but we're trying to bring something fresh to the table. Whenever that happens, the horror fans know it and appreciate it more than the average fan. Horror lovers are rabid and while they may watch a lot of crap, they are extremely hard to please.

Night of the Living Dead and the stories of Stephen King have been inspirations to us. No they aren't the only ones but without them would we have the ideas we have today? Likewise if Romero and King hadn't read the books they read or watched the movies they saw they probably wouldn't have done what they did the way they did it. We all have our influences and it's best to embrace them instead of push them away.

*Above I mention my death scene where I spray my blood on the wall. Well I worked at a Tim Horton's around this same time in high school when we were shooting Revenant. One day my supervisor went in the bathrooms to do a check/cleaning. To his surprise someone had smeared blood all over the wall in the woman's stall. Somehow that's only the second most disgusting story involving a bathroom from my days at Tim Horton's. It's also only third in the top 3 gross bathroom stories of all time. But that's for another day.