Mark Will's Blog

Unfortunately, I was unable to devote as much time to reading in 2023 as I have in previous years. I don’t want to make excuses, but I did change residences twice last year and was also preoccupied with the publication of a book, the production of two albums, and the recording, editing, and release of numerous podcast episodes. Still, it’s something of a tradition for me to document annually my reading and research, so for what it’s worth here are the highlights of 2023:

Rhinoceros (Eugene Ionesco)
The Leader (Eugene Ionesco)
The Future Is in Eggs or It Takes All Sorts to Make a World (Eugene Ionesco)
A Hunter-Gatherer’s Guide to the 21st Century (Heather Heying and Bret Weinstein)
The Butterfly’s Burden (Mahmoud Darwish)
One Nation Under Blackmail, Volume One (Whitney Webb)
The Interpretation of Dreams (Sigmund Freud)
The Assassination of Julius Caesar (Michael Parenti)
1971: Never a Dull Moment (David Hepworth)
Of Africa (Wole Soyinka)
My Heart Laid Bare (Charles Baudelaire)
JFK and the Unspeakable (James W. Douglass)
Eroticism (Georges Bataille)
The Passenger (Cormac McCarthy)
Ten Myths About Israel (Ilan Pappe)
The Tao of Physics (Fritjof Capra)

Good Lord, it appears that I failed to post last year's reading report here on Goodreads (though I did post it on my Substack)! Since this year's report will be due soon, let me correct the error now and thus continue a tradition dating back to 2017. The highlights were as follows:

The Dark Side of Camelot (Seymour Hersh)
The White Hotel (D.M. Thomas)
Sophie's World (Jostein Gaarder)
The Demon (Hubert Selby Jr.)
Beautiful Losers (Leonard Cohen)
Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (V.I. Lenin)
Requiem for a Dream (Hubert Selby Jr.)
Kabbalah: The Tree of Life Oracle (Cherry Gilchrist)
Grendel (John Gardner)
American Psycho (Bret Easton Ellis)
The CIA as Organized Crime: How Illegal Operations Corrupt America and the World (Douglas Valentine)
Stone Age Economics (Marshall Sahlins)
To Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch (Immanuel Kant)
Extinction (Thomas Bernhard)
The Trouble with Being Born (E.M. Cioran)
A Short History of Decay (E.M. Cioran)
When We Cease to Understand the World (Benjamin Labatut)
Hurricane Season (Fernanda Melchor)
Words (Jean-Paul Sartre)
Nadja (Andre Breton)
Demon Box (Ken Kesey)
The Blind Owl (Sadegh Hedayat)
The Dharma Bums (Jack Kerouac)
Hashish, Wine, Opium (Charles Baudelaire and Theophile Gautier)
Mad Love (Andre Breton)
Tik-Tok (John Sladek)
Timequake (Kurt Vonnegut)
The Mystique of Dreams: A Search for Utopia Through Senoi Dream Theory (G. William Domhoff)
Novels in Three Lines (Felix Feneon)
Artificial Paradises (Charles Baudelaire)
The Bald Soprano (Eugene Ionesco)
The Lesson (Eugene Ionesco)
Dream Story (Arthur Schnitzler)
Jack, or The Submission (Eugene Ionesco)
The Chairs (Eugene Ionesco)

Highlights of my reading in Year 2 of Coronavirus:

High-Rise (J.G. Ballard)
Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization (Nicholson Baker)
Ur-Fascism (Umberto Eco)
The White Album (Joan Didion)
The World as Will and Representation: Volume I (Arthur Schopenhauer, trans. E.F.J. Payne)
Hadji Murat (Leo Tolstoy, trans. Richard Pevear & Larissa Volokhonsky)
The God of Small Things (Arundhati Roy)
Last Exit to Brooklyn (Hubert Selby Jr.)
A Walk on the Wild Side (Nelson Algren)
The Talented Mr. Ripley (Patricia Highsmith)
The Body: A Guide for Occupants (Bill Bryson)
Sapiens: A Brief History Humankind (Yuval Noah Harari)
The Inheritors (William Golding)
Marxism & Darwinism (Anton Pannekoek)
The State and Revolution: The Marxist Teaching on the State and the Tasks of the Proletariat in the Revolution (V.I. Lenin)
New Atlantis (Francis Bacon)
The City of the Sun (Tomasso Campanella)
Erewhon (Samuel Butler)
The Road Less Traveled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values, and Spiritual Growth (M. Scott Peck)
The Left Hand of Darkness (Ursual K. Le Guin)
Newsletter Ninja: How to Become An Author Mailing List Expert (Tammi Labrecque)
Following: A Marketing Guide to Author Platform (David Gaughan)
Gravity’s Rainbow (Thomas Pynchon)
Why We Sleep: The New Science of Sleep and Dreams ( Matthew Walker)
Revolutionary Road (Richard Yates)
Herland (Charlotte Perkins Gilman)
Slaughterhouse-Five (Kurt Vonnegut)
My Brilliant Friend (Elena Ferrante, trans. Ann Goldstein)
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (Max Weber, trans. Stephen Kalberg)
Player Piano (Kurt Vonnegut)
The Kite Runner (Khaled Hosseini)
The Denial of Death (Ernest Becker)
Travels with Herodotus (Ryszard Kapuscinski, trans. Klara Glowczewska)
Shah of Shahs (Ryszard Kapuscinski, trans. William R. Brand and Katarzyna Mroczkowski-Brand)
Imperium (Ryszard Kapuscinski, trans. Klara Glowczewska)
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (Lewis Carroll)
Through the Looking-Glass (Lewis Carroll)
V. (Thomas Pynchon)
The Courage to Be Disliked (Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga)
The Book of Life (J. Krishnamurti)

What were the best books you read in 2021? What are your reading goals for 2022?

In 2020, I went bonobos, learned how to dream, traveled with Mary Wollstonecraft, glimpsed the future of our planet, became a total Dickhead, kissed the Spider Woman, discovered secret histories, experimented with the tarot, imagined a paleo lifestyle, and revisited Kierkegaard, Faulkner, Chaucer, and Shakespeare. Here are the highlights of my reading in the Year of Coronavirus:

The Bonobo Way: The Evolution of Peace Through Pleasure (Susan Block)
The Essential Kierkegaard (ed. Edward V. Hong and Edna H. Hong)
The Art of Dreaming (Carlos Castaneda)
Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (Mary Wollstonecraft)
The Mansion (William Faulkner)
The Canterbury Tales (Geoffrey Chaucer, ed. A. Kent Hieatt and Constance B. Hieatt)
The Uninhabitable Earth (David Wallace-Wells)
Energy: A Beginner’s Guide (Vaclav Smil)
The Man in the High Castle (Philip K. Dick)
The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (Philip K. Dick)
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (Philip K. Dick)
Ubik (Philip K. Dick)
The Tempest (William Shakespeare, ed. Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen)
Black Prophetic Fire (Cornel West in dialogue with and ed. Christa Buschendorf)
Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong (James W. Loewen)
Kiss of the Spider Woman (Manuel Puig, trans. Thomas Colchie)
The Golden Khan (A.H. Wang)
October: The Story of the Russian Revolution (China Miéville)
The Tarot: History, Symbolism, and Divination (Robert M. Place)
Sex at Dawn: How We Mate, Why We Stray, and What It Means for Modern Relationships (Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá)
How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them (Jason Stanley)
Prejudential: Black America and the Presidents (Margaret Kimberley)
American Tabloid (James Ellroy)
The Fire Next Time (James Baldwin)
Civilized to Death: The Price of Progress (Christopher Ryan)
CHAOS: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties (Tome O’Neill with Dan Piepenbring)
Reporter: A Memoir (Seymour M. Hersh)
Ishmael (Daniel Quinn)

It was a lean year, as I've been more focused on writing and publishing, but here are the highlights:

The Iron Heel – Jack London
Kingsblood Royal – Sinclair Lewis
The Machine Stops – E.M. Forster
Wolfgang: A Werewolf Erotic Horror Novel – Mawr Gorshin
Água Viva – Clarice Lispector
Cain – José Saramago
Concrete – Thomas Bernhard
Nightwood – Djuna Barnes
Great Jones Street – Don DeLillo
Cup of Gold – John Steinbeck
The Temptation of Saint Anthony – Gustave Flaubert
Bend Sinister – Vladimir Nabokov
Pale Fire – Vladimir Nabokov
The Ginger Man – J.P. Donleavy
The Who: Maximum R & B – Richard Barnes
Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower – William Blum
Acid Dreams: The Complete Social History of LSD – Martin A. Lee and Bruce Shlain
The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories – H.P. Lovecraft
In Favor of the Sensitive Man and Other Essays – Anaïs Nin
Delta of Venus – Anaïs Nin
Mishima: A Biography – John Nathan
The Life and Death of Yukio Mishima – Henry Scott Stokes
Unknown Pleasures: Inside Joy Division – Peter Hook
The Nobel Prize in Literature – Sture Allén and Kjell Espmark
Black Elk Speaks – John G. Neihardt
Beneath the Underdog – Charles Mingus
The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner – Daniel Ellsberg
Night Thoughts – Edward Young
Traveling Through North Korea: Adventures in the Hermit Kingdom – Stephen Harris
Looking Backward – Edward Bellamy

“To read well, that is, to read true books in a true spirit, is a noble exercise, and one that will tax the reader more than any exercise which the customs of the day esteem. It requires a training such as the athletes underwent, the steady intention almost of the whole life to this object. Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written.” – Henry David Thoreau

Another year has come and gone. Here are the highlights of my reading and research in 2018:

The General in His Labyrinth – Gabriel García Márquez
Is That Kafka? 99 Finds – Reiner Stach
Miles: The Autobiography – Miles Davis
The Wall – Jean-Paul Sartre
Three Character Classic
The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge – Carlos Castaneda
Falling Man – Don DeLillo
Point Omega – Don DeLillo
Zero K – Don DeLillo
Norse Mythology – Neil Gaiman
Under the Neurotic Hood – Connor Bixby
The Flowers of Evil: A Selection – Charles Baudelaire
A Season in Hell – Arthur Rimbaud
Illuminations – Arthur Rimbaud
The Imperial Alchemist – A.H. Wang
Maldoror – Lautréamont
Poems – Lautréamont
Conspiracy Theory in America – Lance DeHaven-Smith
Shakespeare and Company – Sylvia Beach
The Plot Against America – Philip Roth
The Golden Age – Gore Vidal
The Town – William Faulkner
The Book of Imaginary Beings – Jorge Luis Borges
The Confidence-Man – Herman Melville
Birds in Cages at the Bike Repair Shop – David Wood
The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Shadow Government – David Talbot
Hundred Family Surnames
One Thousand Character Classic
The Three Kingdoms: Volume 1: The Sacred Oath - Luo Guanzhong
Great Learning
The Doctrine of the Mean
The Analects
The Double – José Saramago
This Modern Love – Ray Hecht
The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis – José Saramago
An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States – Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
Miss Lonelyhearts – Nathanael West
A Cool Million – Nathanael West
The Day of the Locust – Nathanael West
The Dream Life of Balso Snell – Nathanael West

When asked how one could become a better writer, William Faulkner said: "Read, read, read. Read everything - trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it. Then write." Reading has always been an essential part of my own writing process. Here are some of the highlights from the reading I did this past year:

The Sebastopol Sketches - Leo Tolstoy
The Deep Self - John C. Lilly
Notes from a Dead House - Fyodor Dostoevsky
It Can't Happen Here - Sinclair Lewis
Chadwick Yates and the Cannibal Shrine - Bradley Verdell
Cities of the Red Night - William S. Burroughs
The Place of Dead Roads - William S. Burroughs
The Western Lands - William S. Burroughs
Children of the Mire - Octavio Paz
The Drowned World - J. G. Ballard
The Burning World - J. G. Ballard
The Crystal World - J. G. Ballard
Diary of a Bad Year - J. M. Coetzee
The American Deep State - Peter Dale Scott
Autobiography - Morrissey
The Four Agreements: A Toltec Wisdom Book - Don Miguel Ruiz
Life & Times of Michael K - J. M. Coetzee
My Education: A Book of Dreams - William S. Burroughs
The Doors of Perception - Aldous Huxley
Heaven and Hell - Aldous Huxley
The Last of Mr. Norris - Christopher Isherwood
Goodbye to Berlin - Christopher Isherwood
War Primer - Bertolt Brecht
On the Natural History of Destruction - W. G. Sebald
Spring Snow - Yukio Mishima
Runaway Horses - Yukio Mishima
The Temple of Dawn - Yukio Mishima
The Decay of the Angel - Yukio Mishima
X-Ray: The Unauthorized Autobiography - Ray Davies
South China Morning Blues - Ray Hecht
Femmestuary - Alexandra Gilliam
The Last Words of Dutch Schultz - William S. Burroughs
The Wild Boys: A Book of the Dead - William S. Burroughs
Johnny Got His Gun - Dalton Trumbo
The Moon Is Down - John Steinbeck
In Dubious Battle - John Steinbeck
The Old Gringo - Carlos Fuentes
The Autumn of the Patriarch - Gabriel García Márquez
Hiroshima - John Hersey
No One Writes to the Colonel - Gabriel García Márquez

What were the best books you read in 2017?