1. Rum Punch by Elmore Leonard
I read this to see how Tarantino’s film was different than the book, and I was surprised by how true to everything he really was. The key differences I think are the fact that Tarantino changed main character to a black woman instead of a blonde white woman, and he was a bit more liberal with using Beaumont in the film.
Overall, I enjoyed the book and I’m looking forward to reading more Leonard because at times it felt like I was just reading a transcript of the movie. Although there are enough differences to make the book its own thing, the movie is iconic and I’ve seen it a million times at this point and it’s hard to not favour that over Rum Punch. Leonard is great writer though: looking forward to reading more of his work.
2. How Everything Can Collapse: A Manual for Our Times by Pablo Servigne and Raphaël Stevens
As times get darker and darker, I have been reading a lot more about collapse and where we seem to be headed as a civilization. Some people are calling our time period the sixth mass extinction, one that a lot of humans won’t survive. I think when you look at what is going on in the world with the wealth disparity, overpopulation, and the climate emergency, it’s almost impossible to not see how we’re headed for collapse.
This book does a great job at summarizing the matter, and it’s not very difficult to understand at all despite being about very heavy subject matter. To sum the entire book up, the biggest takeaway is that we live in a complex society with many vulnerable factors, and we have essentially set ourselves up with a perfect recipe for disaster.
3. Street Players by Kinohi Nishikawa
I am a big fan of both Iceberg Slim and Donald Goines, so I picked this up to read about the role they played in Holloway House, the publishing company that first published them. The fascinating thing I found about this book was just how exploitative the founders of the company were, and how the black pulp fiction market was set up to make the owners of the company rich while doing much less for its writers.
The author delves into the history and you can tell has done his research. Something that really stood out to me: at one point he compares a scene in a documentary about Iceberg Slim to his research, and he finds that the documentary had fabricated a piece of information about how Iceberg Slim originally found the publishers (through a classified ad looking for black writers). The fact that they would lie about this is telling enough, but the author continues to go into great detail about how the company was built throughout.
4. Ha Ha Ha Delightful: Selected Epigrams by William Guppy
This is a much less heavy book. It’s basically just a collection of funny tweets intended for bathroom reading, but I found a lot of it quite humorous. Dumb, but funny overall. Worth buying. It’s the kind of book you don’t read in one sitting and don’t really want to end because of how many funny lines are in it.
I have discussed the importance of supporting independent writers in the past before, and this book seems to be no different: like all of my books, it was self-published, and you won’t find it in any public library system or any book store other than Amazon. I have a special place in my heart for self-published writers, and will pretty much always buy anything by them if I see “Independently Published” in the Amazon info.
5. Dandy in the Underworld by Sebastian Horseley
During a Christmas break from school one year, I was watching TV late one night (this is back in the days when people still did that). At one point of channel flipping, a charming man named Sebastian Horseley appeared on the screen doing some kind of interview. But it wasn’t just any old boring sit-down Q&A: he seemed to be doing some kind of performance. He was larger than life, and I liked him immediately.
I bought his book as soon as I could, and having it felt like I had a dark secret or something. It’s been over a decade, and I still kinda feel that way: Horseley died of an overdose in 2010, and at this point he’s kind of a cult figure who I don’t think too many people know about. When I first read this it had a big effect on me: it’s one of those “I am 14 and this is so deep” types of books. Nevertheless, it’s hilarious, very vulgar, but never boring to read at all.
Now that I’m an adult and re-reading, I can obviously see a lot wrong with Horseley: he was rich, misogynistic, a drug addict, a narcissist, etc, etc, etc. But at the same time: that’s the point, and it makes for a hell of a great book. Especially in our current culture of people being cancelled left and right for marginal offences and tweets, I loved revisiting this now more than ever. Horseley was a genuine personality, and reading this now felt like it was from an entirely different era; when people allowed their writers and artists to be deeply flawed people. Reading it in this decade, you get the sense that if a person like this were around now and had a book finished, it would never be published by a major company like HarperCollins. Times have changed so much this book actually feels like it’s closer to the 70s rather than 2008. I laughed to myself many times throughout this at the image of a politically correct zoomer accidentally discovering and reading it today: there is no way they’d be able to get through this without a million “trigger warnings.”
Horseley considered himself a dandy, and this book is primarily about his journey getting to that point. He details his rough childhood to two rich, but absent parents, his lifelong struggles with drugs, inability to fit in with society, and his failures becoming a recognized artist. After failing every possible thing he sets out to do, Horseley realizes he has to make his life his art, and that’s where the dandyism comes into play. As a failed artist myself, that aspect of it really moved me on the second read. There are some things in life you only truly get when you become an adult and you live them.
The other big takeaway I got from this is that Horseley was once good friends with Wes Anderson collaborator Hugo Guinness. He writes sordid details about their friendship together, and it dawned on me: Horseley may very well have been the inspiration for M. Gustave, Ralph Fiennes’ character in Grand Budapest Hotel. Anderson and Guinness have commented that he was based on a “mutual friend” of theirs, but revisiting this now, I could hear the character’s voice throughout the entire book. Of course, they would have had to clean up Horseley’s persona quite a bit to not get an NC-17 rating, but the dandyism is still very much intact in the final film.
I’m happy I reread it after so many years, but it did make me a bit mournful for the past. It’s sad to know a guy like Sebastian Horseley isn’t around anymore. I felt the same when Chad Holt died in 2019, another great and unique personality that only comes around once in a lifetime. As time progresses it feels like we’re losing more original thinkers and everyone’s becoming increasingly homogenized. Thankfully we still have documents like this great book!
