Following on from last month’s Books Read in 1984.
And the numbers are down slightly to 124, for which I blame Jane Austen. It took me nearly four weeks to plough through the awful Pride and Prejudice; usually I’d get through a book of that length in three or four days, but it was so bloody boring that each day I would dread picking it up, as my ‘I’ve started so I’ll finish’ work ethic warred with a desire to do something more interesting, like watch wallpaper peel or rust form. The only comparable reading experience I can bring to mind was Robert Graves’ almost entirely tedious The White Goddess, and even now, nearly thirty years later, I’m so bitter that writing an ‘adult’ version of the novel, Perversion and Pornography, is still on my ‘to do’ list, even if somebody got to it before me a few years back with ‘the omitted scenes’.
Okay, rant over.
On this day in 1985 I cracked open Cosmicomics by Italo Calvino.
And on the occasion of my 31st birthday I read Fantasy Art Techniques, which in practical terms meant that I probably spent a good part of the day leering over Vallejo paintings of impossible women while pretending to myself that I was so much better than those common folk who read Playboy.
Looking over what I read the only major discovery I can see is the wonderful Tom Robbins, whose Even Cowgirls just blew me away. I sampled some of the great and the good – Nabokov, Faulkner, Rendell – but wasn’t so smitten that I’ve ventured back into those waters since.
With a couple of books I have no idea who wrote them, so any suggestions are welcome. In the case of Fifty Glorious Years I’m really coming up blank, so much so that I wonder if I forgot to write all of the title down. The most likely explanation is that it was some royal anniversary book I dipped into to humour my mother, but if so I can’t pin down any significant royal events in 1985.
Anyway, here’s the list (with author names in the main added from memory, so please feel free to point out any errors):-
The Winds of Change – Isaac Asimov
The John Franklin Bardin Omnibus – John Franklin Bardin
Magnetic Storm – Roger Dean & Martyn Dean
Nightwings – Robert Silverberg
Reincarnation – Hans Stefan Santesson
Two Sisters – Gore Vidal
Fantastic People – Allan Scott & Michael Scott Rohan
The International Book of Comics – Denis Gifford
The Infernal Device – Michael Kurland
The Mystery of the Human Double – Ralph Shirley
The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
Urshurak – The Brothers Hildebrandt & Jerry Nichols
The Lost Decade – F. Scott Fitzgerald
Doctor Sally – P. G. Wodehouse
The Songs of Summer – Robert Silverberg
Fifty Glorious Years
Matters of Fact and of Fiction – Gore Vidal
The Fantasy Book – Franz Rottensteiner
The Kama-Sutra: Erotic Figures in Indian Art – Marc de Smedt
Deadeye Dick – Kurt Vonnegut
In Favour of the Sensitive Man – Anais Nin
Setting Free the Bears – John Irving
Cosmos – Carl Sagan
Fevre Dream – George R. R. Martin
Romer’s Egypt – John Romer
The Charioteer – Mary Renault
Black Spring – Henry Miller
Danse Macabre – Stephen King
The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail – Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh & Henry Lincoln
The Barbie Murders – John Varley
The Steel Tsar – Michael Moorcock
Rogue Ship – A. E. van Vogt
Cosmicomics – Italo Calvino
The Deceivers – Alfred Bester
The Ghost Pirates – William Hope Hodgson
Unaccompanied Sonata – Orson Scott Card
The Space Machine – Christopher Priest
Three Men in a Boat – Jerome K. Jerome
Sandkings – George R. R. Martin
Birthstone – D. M. Thomas
Voyage to Arcturus – David Lindsay
The Venus Hunters – J. G. Ballard
Arthur C. Clarke’s Mysterious World – Arthur C. Clarke
Opus Pistorum – Henry Miller
Stonehenge Decoded – Gerald S. Hawkins
Enchantment – Doris & Boris Vallejo
Life in Egypt in Ancient Times – Bernard Romant
The World of the Pharoahs – H. Stierlin
Meanwhile – Max Handley
The World of the Egyptians – Jacques Champollion
A Dictionary of Devils and Demons – J. Tondriau & R. Villeneuve
Galactic Cluster – James Blish
Egyptian Sculpture – T. G. H. James & W. V. Davies
The Killing Doll – Ruth Rendell
Stiletto – Harold Robbins
The Dead Zone – Stephen King
The Godfather – Mario Puzo
The Island – Peter Benchley
A Kiss Before Dying – Ira Levin
The Dark of the Sun – Wilbur Smith
Even Cowgirls Get the Blues – Tom Robbins
The Black Marble – Joseph Wambaugh
An Innocent Millionaire – Stephen Vizinczey
Lady, Lady, I Did It – Ed McBain
The Big Footprints – Hammond Innes
The Pyrates – George MacDonald Fraser
Ghost Story – Peter Straub
Songs of Stars and Shadows – George R. R. Martin
Enemies of the System – Brian W. Aldiss
Lord of the Trees – Philip Jose Farmer
The Silent Invaders – Robert Silverberg
Other Days, Other Eyes – Bob Shaw
A Touch of Strange – Theodore Sturgeon
The Imperial Stars – E. E. ‘Doc’ Smith & Stephen Goldin
Stranglers’ Moon – E. E. ‘Doc’ Smith & Stephen Goldin
The Clockwork Traitor – E. E. ‘Doc’ Smith & Stephen Goldin
Getaway World – E. E. ‘Doc’ Smith & Stephen Goldin
The Bloodstar Conspiracy – E. E. ‘Doc’ Smith & Stephen Goldin
The Purity Plot – E. E. ‘Doc’ Smith & Stephen Goldin
Planet of Treachery – E. E. ‘Doc’ Smith & Stephen Goldin
Fireship/Mother and Child – Joan D. Vinge
Heroes and Villains – Angela Carter
Profundis – Richard Cowper
Between Time and Timbuktu – Kurt Vonnegut
Marcovaldo – Italo Calvino
The Sorcerer – Eric Ericson
The Sword and the Stallion – Michael Moorcock
Trader to the Stars – Poul Anderson
Duluth – Gore Vidal
Penny Black – Susan Moody
The Hand-Reared Boy – Brian W. Aldiss
A Soldier Erect- Brian W. Aldiss
A Rude Awakening – Brian W. Aldiss
Six of One – Rita Mae Brown
The End of the Road – John Barth
Palm Sunday – Kurt Vonnegut
Silence Among the Weapons – John Arden
Different Seasons – Stephen King
The Leopard Hunts in Darkness – Wilbur Smith
A Crown of Feathers and Other Stories – Isaac Bashevis Singer
The Last Cattle Drive – Robert Day
Puffball – Fay Weldon
Mr Sammler’s Planet – Saul Bellow
The Floating Opera – John Irving
In Patagonia – Bruce Chatwin
Sneaky People – Thomas Berger
The End of a Mission – Heinrich Boll
The Magic Toyshop – Angela Carter
In Search of Forever – Rodney Matthews
Mysteries – Colin Wilson
Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
Tarotmania – Jan Woudhuysen
The Dark Angel: Aspects of Victorian Sexuality – Fraser Harrison
The Sound and The Fury – William Faulkner
Fantasy Art Techniques – Boris Vallejo
Partners in Wonder – Harlan Ellison & Diverse Hands
King Arthur’s Avalon – Geoffrey Ashe
Past Present Future
Art Treasures in Germany – Stephan Waetzoldt
Magic: Primitive and Modern – Ernest de Martino
Matthew, Mark, Luke & John
Good News in John – Douglas Webster
The Work & Words of Jesus – A. M. Hunter
Trumpetville 
Actually, I have just noticed another major discovery for me, the achingly good Peter Straub with his monumental “Ghost Story”.
You’re still reading quite a lot of sf at this point – does that begin to tail off soon? With me, I got to a point in my early twenties where I’d read all the sf I could lay my hands on. Weird now, when every book ever published is three quid and a click away, to remember a time when that was actually possible! I started reading more classics, cult fiction, comics and tie-ins just because there weren’t any more Jack Vance or Michael Moorcock books in our secondhand bookshops, and I had to read something.
Years yet to go before the SF element in my literary diet becomes negligible. Even in the early part of the 21st century I was reading and reviewing SF for TTA. There is a definite falling off though. If you exclude art and non-fiction books this year it’s just over 25% of my reading, compared to over 50% a few years back.
In part the SF consumption was down to the fact that I still had ambitions to write SF and wanted to be well read in my chosen genre. I gradually weaned myself of that notion, with 1993 and the publication of “Winston and the Demon” in Grotesque magazine the best I can do by way of a cut off point come moment of epiphany. Until then I’d written nothing but SF, at least seriously.
Pingback: Books Read in 1986 | Trumpetville