Steve is another reader who introduced himself to me after I put out a plea for novel suggestions for my ‘50 Novel’ challenge. Steve’s reading efforts are tireless and his knowledge of books enviable. His recommendations, together with the revelation that Knut Hamsun’s Hunger was a favourite of his (as it is for me), instantly endeared me to him; Steve seemed to have read many of the novels I wanted to, which made him an invaluable contact, one whose established reading tastes matched my evolving one.

Steve in genuinely a nice guy, showing a real warmth towards others, and especially ‘newbie’ ‘serious novel’ readers like me. Steve is a passionate writer too and runs a popular writer’s group (no spoilers, he’ll tell you all about that himself) which has proven to be a ‘well of knowledge’ for me in that discipline too.

I have an admiration for articulate people and they really don’t come much more articulated than Steve. This should become apparent in the following interview so rather than suffer me harping on, I’ll pass you on to the man himself so you can judge for yourself. Here’s Steve:

I wasn’t one of those kids who enjoyed reading.  I wish I had been, I guess.  But I’ve got great memories of digging around creeks, playing baseball, and figuring out which things burn easily and which require gasoline.  It wasn’t until I was in high school and was forced to put down the matches and read The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger, that I got the sneaking suspicion that someone had forgotten to invite me to the party.  Why wasn’t I told about these books?

Years later I read that, after Salinger had become a recluse (my kind of guy), he was practicing a form of yoga and drinking his own urine (not my kind of guy).  I moved on to non-urine drinking writers.

When I was in my early twenties, I read many of the beat writers.  Charles Bukowski often gets lumped in with the beats.  I remember trying to call Bukowski once when I was in my early twenties after reading him and drinking too much cheap beer.  The Charles Bukowski in San Pedro, California, who answered the telephone said he was not Charles Bukowski the writer, but he wished that he were.  “He sure gets a lot of phone calls.”

By reading Bukowski I learned about writers John Fante, Knut Hamsun, and James Purdy.  Fante’s book, Wait until Spring, Bandini, is a fine read.  Fante went blind later in life and continued writing by dictating his stories to his wife.  I think that is how the story goes, or went.  It’s that kind of drive to tell the story that comes through in great writing.  It’s as though if the book were not written, the world would come to a painful end.  Read Steinbeck’s letters written during the time he was working on The Grapes of Wrath. Working Days: The Journals of The Grapes of Wrath ISBN-13: 978-0140144574.  Amazing drive, beyond compulsion.  The poor guy was filled with doubt about the novel’s worth and his worth as a writer, but he pushed on.

Twenty years after reading Bukowski’s Ham on Rye, I finally ordered a replacement copy.  (Don’t lend Bukowski books.  They are never returned.)  Though the book doesn’t move me the way it did when I was in my early 20s, it still has a special place on the shelf.  John Martin’s Black Sparrow Press did a lot to put underground writing in a nice package and get it some much deserved attention.  To hell with the big publishing houses.

For the last ten years I’ve worked with my wife at our desktop publishing company in Richmond, Virginia, USA.   While I don’t enjoy sitting at a desk, I do enjoy the work. I enjoy working with words, learning and forgetting the nuances of the English language, and working with my wife.  Mornings or evenings I write fiction, attempting to wrestle that slippery devil onto the page.  I set a daily word count of 2,000 words, seven days a week.  This seems to be working, although there is a lot of chaff.  To get the 2,000 words out, I use my Dana by Alphasmart, or my Neo by the same.  This gets dumped to Scrivener for Mac.  Great program.  I also collect and use manual typewriters, fountain pens, and a few mechanical pencils.  For better or worse, I’m a collector.

I started a Yahoo writing group called The Way We Write, but I admit to not having much time to keep it active.
I also run a group for swapping typewriters: TypeSwap.

If either group sounds interesting to anyone, please sign up.

1. Favourite Genre? I don’t know if this exists as a genre: Substream, Character-driven Fiction with oddball protagonists, written with a sense of humor.  Humor is missing in so much contemporary fiction.  Humor is such a complex psychological process.  It distinguishes humans from other animals.  Even elephants seem to grieve, but I’ve never seen any indication that they tell jokes or even laugh.

Lately I’ve been reading the Science Fiction of Robert J. Sawyer and several Westerns by Tim Champlin.  Good writers.

I try to keep an open mind regarding genre, but to this day I have not read a romance book.  I’m open to suggestions.

I know this isn’t genre, but I don’t care for stories written in the present tense.  For me, it is an initial cheat to quickly get the reader into the story, but my brain grapples with the logic of a story told in present tense.  We are reading, or listening, to an account of an event, which by nature makes the telling of that event past tense.

2. Favourite Book? How about a short list, instead?

• Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
• MAUS by Art Spiegelman
• Masters of Atlantis by Charles Portis (This can be a little slow at times and littered with the author’s self-indulgent passages, but there are parts of the book that should be read only after emptying your bladder–it’s that good.)
• East of Eden by John Steinbeck (Slow by today’s standards–or lack thereof, but wonderful in depth and resonance.)
• A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
• Jack Matthews (any collection of short stories)
• Hunger by Knut Hamsun
• Ham on Rye by Charles Bukowski
• Wait until Spring, Bandini by John Fante

Up There:

• The Shipping News by E. Annie Proulx
• Naked by David Sedaris
• Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt
• The Naked and Dead by Norman Mailer (The buildup to the beach landing really puts the reader in the narrator’s shoes or boots.)
• Nathaniel West: How to Make a Cool Million; The Dream Life of Basal Snell.  Strange and interesting books.  How to Make a Cool Million is the flip of a Horatio Alger story.
• The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini (the first three quarters of the book, at least)

Short Story Writers who are consistently good:

• Flannery O’Conner
• E.B. White
• James Thurber
• John O’Hara
• Dorothy Parker
• Tennessee Williams
• Eudora Welty
• John Cheever
• Jack Matthews: Bitter Knowledge; Dirty Tricks; Dubious Persuasions (”Elma” is standout story in this collection.)
• Raymond Carver: Where I’m Calling From (The power of his minimalist style is in the unspoken.)
• Franz Kafka: The Complete Stories (”A Report to an Academy” is a great story.)

POETRY

• William Carlos William
• Lawrence Ferlinghetti
• e.e. cummings

Contemporary Writers :

• Nicole Krauss
• Hester Kaplan
• Khaled Hosseini

3. Why do you love reading so much? The reader must create along with the writer.

I read to be entertained, to be emotionally engaged, and to learn.

Fiction is about trouble, problems–physical and metaphysical, and the way people attempt to solve them.

Good writing deals with what it is to be human, the human condition.  Is there a reason we are here?  Is there a purpose for our existence, or is meaning itself nothing more than a sloppy human concept that can lead to absurd questions with impossible answers.  Good fiction deals with bits and pieces of what it is to be living in this uncertainty and how characters deal with situations, large and small, that we all have faced or will face.

4. Favourite reading place? My favorite reading place is the well-cushioned chair in my living room with a footstool and a good dictionary nearby.  I keep pencil and paper close to take notes.  I don’t last long reading in bed.  Although, once upon a time I thought it would be a nifty idea to teach myself to read Braille so I could read in the dark while my wife slept.  I brought home an instructional booklet from the library, but all the dots were filthy.  I use a book light.

5. How BIG is your reading addiction? Well, that’s a bit personal, isn’t it?
We have four bookcases at home, several at work, a few wall shelves at home, a stack in flux next to the bed, and an 11″ x 17″ wooden box I keep library books in.  I try to limit my library loans to what will fit in that box.  There are also several cardboard boxes filled with paperbacks in the attic.
My wife does a good job of displaying books on any flat surface of the house.  To the untrained eye they might look like decoration, but it’s really just an organized mess.  When decor meets clutter.  We are definitely in the clutter camp.

6. How do you normally add books to your collection?

• Library sales.  My local public library has a rolling cart near the front door.  One dollar for hardbacks, fifty cents for paperbacks.  Most of these are patron donations and in fine shape.  Some are ex library.
• Amazon.com - Some of the user reviews are excellent.  They can also lead to suggestions for other reading.
• Bookcloseouts.com - You can find some pretty good deals on remainders here.
• eBay, campusi, ABE.com.

More and more, I borrow books from my local library.  Kurt Vonnegut had a name for people who buy used books or borrow books: twerps.  In that case, I’m a twerp, but I’m not exclusively a twerp.  I do buy new books, too.

Libraries should have a royalty system in place for authors.  If a patron borrows a book, the author receives a micro royalty.  I’m sure there are too many problems inherent with such a system, but if the taxman were involved, he’d figure out how to do it.  Sales tax?  Royalty tax for writers!

7. How do you decide what to read (i.e. family/friends, group recommendations, reviews, awards etc.)? All of the ‘above’.  If I find an author I like, I usually try to read a few interviews and see who they mention as their favorite writers.

Sometimes jacket blurbs can lead to other writers, but this can be misleading.  I think some blurbs are written at gunpoint.

8. Ebooks - love or hate? For me, reading is time away from the glowing screen and the distractions of technology.  I’ve read eBooks using my Palm TX, but haven’t tried a Sony Reader or Kindle.  I’d like to give one a go.  The screen technology on the Sony and Kindle sounds promising, but I’ve never seen one.

One liberating aspect of eBooks, from an author’s standpoint, is the potential to sell directly to readers.  From a reader’s perspective, this offers the convenience of books on demand.  However, it also eliminates the publishing house filter.  The market will continue to be flooded with rough first drafts presented as finished work.  I think many readers will still buy from publishers–just online–rather than trying to sift through self-publishing muddle of half-baked books.

EBooks have great potential to function beyond ink-on-paper books: adjustable typestyles, search functions, links, word lists, electronic bookmarks, annotations, etc., but those features can also be a distraction when reading fiction.  I enjoy a well-designed printed book, one where careful attention has been paid to typestyle, paper, and layout.  I’d miss that.  However, I have several printed books that I haven’t read because the type is too small and the paper contains a lot of high-acid pulp that has browned over time.

As long as the medium doesn’t dictate the content, I’ve got nothing against eBooks.

9. Has reading inspired you to do any serious writing yourself? Reading is what made me start writing.  I think The Catcher in the Rye was the first piece of fiction I read that felt human to me.  A fart was mentioned someplace in the book.  You mean this is considered good fiction?  Great!  People fart.  They don’t just ponder the mysteries of the universe in starched collars, they fart through their cotton briefs.  I’m in.

10. What single piece of advice (or tip) would you give to fellow readers? Good writing has cadence, tone, and timbre.  Listen for it. Slow down and hear the words.  If the words aren’t enjoyable, if they lack music, seek out writing that has the music.

I don’t understood the desire to speed read, unless you are reading poor writing.  And why in the world are you wasting your time reading junk?  Some popular fiction is more concerned with moving the story or an idea than how the story is told and the development of the characters.  Those books are faster reads; not every sentence is honed.  I’m not saying that one is better than the other, just different.  Okay, that’s a cop-out.  They are clunkers.

Last, and this tip can be taken however anyone wants to take it, do.  Read the books you’ve been meaning to read, write the books you been meaning to write.  Whatever you do, DO it–unless you have homicidal tendencies, then DON’T.

I read an obituary several years ago.  The obituary stated that the guy enjoyed watching television.  Gulp.  Don’t be that guy.

Steve - Rest easy! After reading this interview I’m sure you’ve given everyone the inspiration to hit the TV ‘off’ buttons and reach for their bookshelf. Thank you so much for taking all of the time and energy to bring us all such a comprehensive snapshot of your reading life. Now, I’ll let you get back to writing about flactulence :o) Thanks again!!