Summer Reading
This piece should have gone out 24 hours ago. The reason it didn’t is because I was breathlessly racing to finish the new collection of Stephen King stories, You Like It Darker. King is one of my favorite fiction writers, and I especially like his shorter fiction. I usually read everything he writes as soon as it comes out, but for some reason, I haven’t yet read his last two novels, Fairy Tale and Holly. I’ll get to them eventually. Meanwhile, I started reading his latest, and wow! I loved it. Two stories in particular stood out: the lead story, “Two Talented Bastids” and long one called “Danny Coughlin’s Bad Dream.”
Not since reading I read Stephen King’s “A Death” in the New Yorker in 2015 have I read such a great piece of short fiction as “Two Talented Bastids.” I loved everything about this story. As far “Danny Coughlin’s Bad Dream,” I was on tenterhooks from the very first page of this long piece1 and the suspense built from there without letup. I felt completely wiped out by the end of the story. What a ride!
Also among the stories in the collection was one called “Rattlesnakes,” which fans of King’s novel Cujo2 will enjoy.
I’d been looking forward to this collection ever since it was announced, and that anticipation reminded me of one of the other joys of reading: there is always something new up ahead.
We are in the time of years where all kinds of new books are coming out. Part of the reason I raced through King’s latest was because it was so good, and part of the reason was because I had to squeeze in a read3 for the bookclub to which I belong before our next meeting. That meeting is on Tuesday, and I have long weekend to finish the book. I need to get it done, not just for the meeting, but because on Tuesday, the newest Walt Longmire book by Craig Johnson comes out, First Frost. Johnson’s Longmire books are among my absolute favorites for fiction. They are just so much fun. This is an unusual time for a new Longmire book. They normally arrive in October, and the previous book came out only seven months ago.
Among other books that I am looking forward to that have come out recently, or will be coming out in the near future, there are the following:
Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space by Adam Higginbotham.
John Quincy Adams by Randall Woods (come out June 25)
The Secret Lives of Numbers: A Hidden History of Math’s Unsung Trailblazers by Kate Kitagawa (comes out July 9)
Why Machines Learn: The Elegant Math Behind Modern AI by Anil Ananthaswamy (comes out July 16)
You Never Know by Tom Selleck (comes out July 16)
In addition to these books, there have been books sitting around my office that I’ve been looking forward to reading:
Our Moon: How Earth’s Celestial Companion Transformed the Planet, Guided Evolution, and Made Us Who We Are by Rebecca Boyle
What an Owl Knows: The New Science of the World’s Most Enigmatic Birds by Jennifer Ackerman
Encounters with the Archdruid by John McPhee
Cider House Rules by John Irving
This is a good start for summer reading, but it isn’t necessarily what I will end up reading, thanks in large part to the butterfly effect of reading, and the fact that there is always new stuff coming out that catches my attention, and pulls me in unexpected directions.
Long even than “The Body” upon which the movie Stand By Me was based.
For whatever reason, I always skipped Cujo when reading King’s novels, but finally got around to reading it just about a year ago. There are only a handful of other King or Bachman books that I not yet read.
In the Woods by Tana French, which, incidentally, makes a direct reference to Stephen King early in the first chapter.
Everett was one of my creative writing professors when I was at the University of California, Riverside, in the early 1990s.