Trip City Overdrive—The Bestest Books of 2022 (which is the clickbait title since it really should be titled “The Best Books That Ivan Read in 2022, Which May or May Not Actually Include Books Published in 2022”)

Two great cosmic explorers and
authors; one of them is
William S. Burroughs

BEST BOOKS [that I read] of 2022:

All these books are trippy (in some vague way—at least to me)
Jouuuuuurneys of Self-Discovery! [Echo effects included]

The essay portion is below the break; up top, this is just a delicious listicle! (Which sounds kinda gross, actually…)

BESTEST Book of 2022!!!—
— The Man With Kaleidoscope Eyes by Tim Lucas (based on the original screenplay by Tim Lucas & Charles Largent with Michael Almereyda & James Robison) (2022) 

The Rest of the Best (listed by year published)
—Against Nature (À Rebours) by J.-K. Huysmans (1884)
—Memories, Dreams, Reflections by C.G. Jung, edited by Aniela Jaffe (1961)
—Billion-Dollar Brain by Len Deighton (1966)
—Downward to the Earth by Robert Silverberg (1969)
—The New Journalism by Tom Wolfe, with anthology edited by Tom Wolfe and E.W. Johnson (1973)
—True Hallucinations: Being an Account of the Author’s Extraordinary Adventures in the Devil’s Paradise by Terence McKenna (1993)
—Huế 1968: A Turning Point of the American War in Vietnam by Mark Bowden (2017)
—Rated SavX: The Savage Pencil Skratchbook by Savage Pencil (Edwin Pouncey) (2020)
—The Strange Death of Alex Raymond by Dave Sim & Carson Grubaugh (2021)
—Fantastic Four: Full Circle by Alex Ross, based on characters created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby (2022)

Honorable Mention:
—The Yage Letters: Redux by William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg; edited by Oliver Harris (1963; 1975; 2006)

BEST REREAD:
—*) Kamandi: The Last Boy on Earth! by Jack Kirby (1972-1976; #1-#40)

More details below! Read on, MacDuff!

Our Motto: I like to work hard and cause trouble

In Marathi, that’s:
मला कठोर परिश्रम करणे आणि त्रास देणे आवडते

In 2022, I read 48 books (and when saying “books,” I include novellas, novelettes, graphic novels, complete runs of a comic book—sometimes 40 issues!—or novella-length journalism pieces). Personally, I’m surprised to have read so much in 2022. In previous years, I meant to read like a crazy person, reading only to carve notches in my gun belt, but what was the point? So I could have a long list? Blah. I hardly remember the books when I did that. 

But as 2021 was oozing into 2022, I made the decision that I had to read at least one book a month. I was in the mood to cut down on extraneous, useless reading-for-putting-a-title-on-a-list reading, but as a nerd who keeps lists, I had to set parameters. One book a month seemed decent, and if anything, made me feel somewhat normal. At one point, I really thought that I’d actually end 2022 having only read 12 books, and that I might have to struggle to reach that number.

Savage Pencil
in action

As it happens, I’ll often have two or three reading projects going on at one time, with one eventually busting out of the pack and proceeding to command my attention completely. So I would read one, while nibbling through other books piecemeal—which is how I finally finished Harlan Ellison’s 1967 New Wave collection Dangerous Visions, Jung’s autobiography (see below), Silverberg’s Gilgamesh the King (which was awful in the long run), and, among others, Savage Pencil’s Rated SavX—which, as an art book, I spent my time going over each image, absorbing them slowly, savoring the madness. 

Somehow, I wound up clocking in on average about three books per month anyway, sometimes a lot more. What can I say? I like reading. 

That said, upon reflection, a major theme in my reading was:
Journeys of Self-Discovery and the Ways We Try to Express That Journey

BEST BOOKS OF 2022:
BESTEST—
— The Man With Kaleidoscope Eyes by Tim Lucas (based on the original screenplay by Tim Lucas & Charles Largent with Michael Almereyda & James Robison) (2022) 

An incredible document, created in the “you are there” style of New Journalism (see below). Read my full review of The Man With Kaleidoscope Eyes HERE.

Is this a Journey of Self-Discovery? AB-SO-TOOT-Lee! Main character Roger Corman takes LSD specifically to change himself, fer cryin’ out loud! To be creative is to accept—and encourage—change, especially in yourself. 

A wild, sweet ride that treats all its characters with kindness and love, while willing to expose their (essentially mild) flaws. The Best Book of 2022!

The sleazy 1960s-ish paperback
cover I designed for
Against Nature

The Rest (Not Really In Any Order)

—Against Nature (À Rebours) by J.-K. Huysmans (1884)

Perhaps one of the first examples of “sick humor” in the (near) mainstream.
Decadent, agoraphobic French nobleman splits Paris for his country home where he can expand his consciousness and experience newly created sensual delights, like “symphonies” made with liqueurs, or falsifying natural environments through specially constructed windows. But since he’s quite decadent (hardly DeSade-like, or extremely cruel—more like convoluted and tres wigged out), everything ends up being kind of boring for our Nobleman—from his bejeweled tortoise (which made me sad) to funding a street-punk’s visits to the best Parisian brothel (not to do anything as mundane as watching people fuck; no, the Nobleman wants to see if the youth will turn to a life of crime to keep financing the brothel’s sweet tarts when Nobleman stops paying). 

I originally learned about Against Nature (À Rebours) in the early-1980s (via Gene Sculatti’s excellent The Catalog of Cool), and tried to read it then. It took me about forty years to finally get it. I guess that’s how decadence works. 

I’m starting to think that, as I’m getting older and slower (not sure if I’m wiser), authors like Huysmans, Burroughs (WS not ER), and Bukowski should not be read by inexperienced men. I think you need some life under your belt before trying to tackling these works. Like any bad influences….

Carl Gustav Jung

—Memories, Dreams, Reflections by C.G. Jung, edited by Aniela Jaffe (1961) 

The autobiography of Carl Gustav Jung, the Second Father of Modern Psychiatry. Moody, tough stuff to struggle through—but SO worth it if you’re in any way interested in Jung’s theories. Personally, I’m fascinated by his concepts of the Collective Unconsciousness, and the process of individuation. Being familiar with Dreamy Carl J. is absolutely necessary if you’re going to read this—I’ve previously read Jung’s Man and His Symbols—and because this is Jung’s autobiography, not a textbook, he’s not wasting time on ground you should’ve already covered. 

BTW, the book’s worth it for Jung’s slams against Freud alone, dropping in gossip on how Big Sigmund was so easily rattled that when Jung presented some of his more controversial theories to the old man, Freud fainted. The way it is written in quite catty, but hilarious. And fuck that loser Freud, anyway. 

Another of my personal
paperback cover redesigns
(like most covers of the 1960s,
the art only suggests the
topics covered)

—Downward to the Earth by Robert Silverberg (1969)

Silverberg starts off with a weird spin on Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (that is a smidgen obvious and heavy-handed: one character is even named Kurtz), and becomes a mediation on spirituality and symbiosis. On a planet where the primary species are quasi-Zen green elephants and bipedal rodent-simians, a repentant human administrator returns to the planet after the humans have “granted” it independence. Initially, he wants to atone for his sins, but soon realizes he’s still being selfish; cognizant of that, he begins a consciousness-expanding plunge into the essence of everything. A novel that needs to be experienced, and that’s why it’s one of this year’s best. Downward to the Earth is hardly an easy read, but it doesn’t do that through cheap linguist tricks but by pushing your moral and spiritual buttons. 

While Silverberg is a Grandmaster of SF, I’ve only recently discovered him, and have been playing a massive game of “catch-up” with his work, sometimes to both of our detriments—this year, I read seven Silverberg books, and started and couldn’t finish another: I think I may have burned out on the guy, but I did discover some worthwhile literature, like Downward to the Earth. 

I think this redesign of mine
really captures the sleazy
vibe a lot of British
pulp paperbacks achieved
back in the early-1970s!

—Billion-Dollar Brain by Len Deighton (1966)

Read this because I’m a big fan of the Michael Caine/Ken Russell film from 1968 (I’m kind of alone in my appreciation of the flick), but the source book is way, WAY different from its eventual cinematic adaptation, and the two share little aside from the superficial. It’s not so much about a falsified “invasion” of Latvia, but more on how greed, lust, and desperation fill the void that spycraft can create in a man. It’s uncertain if our unnamed protagonist is immune (his cynicism and desire for hedonistic pleasures give him enough of a shell, though), but our “hero” certainly recognizes it in others, especially in former friends, sadly. A page-turner which surprised me with how smart and engaging it became—and dark. 

I dig this convergence of noir and existentialism—for me, the best spy books are bleak, cynical, and nasty (see Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy), and Billion-Dollar Brain is my selection of Pulp Read of the Year, something that transcends its limitations (and those of the genre). It’s on this list because it surprised me. 

—Huế 1968: A Turning Point of the American War in Vietnam by Mark Bowden (2017)

The most depressing book I’ve read in a long time. An impressively, exhaustively researched minute-by-minute history of the battle of Huế, the setting for Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket (1987) and that film’s source novel, The Short-Timers by Gustav Hasford (originally published in 1979). Hasford had served in Huế, and was pals there (and after) with Dale Dye. Dye has become one of the top military advisors for Hollywood (among his many cameos in films, you can see him as a general in Starship Troopers, and in Oliver Stone’s Platoon, as the only officer with some common sense). Dye was also at Huế (as a Marine combat correspondent—yes, like Joker in Full Metal Jacket), and provides some wild details to the whole FUBAR nature of that combat.
Author Bowden surpasses the research conducted for Black Hawk Down or Killing Pablo, but there’s a sense of utter hopelessness about this whole thing: I mean, who won the war, after all?

A worthwhile read, but WOW, what a downer!

Some hippie art I swiped
to make the redesign for
this paperback

—The New Journalism by Tom Wolfe, with anthology edited by Tom Wolfe and E.W. Johnson (1973)

A collection of non-fiction written as if it was fiction, from a time when journalism was reinventing itself to be beyond propaganda. This is a time capsule of the era (mainly the mid- to late-1960s), and a time capsule of a type of reportage that we may never see again—at least in the mainstream.

Wolfe’s “New Journalism” (the kissing cousin to Truman Capote’s “Nonfiction Novel”) is a “fly on the wall” story written in a “you are there” style, where the reader is privy to the private thoughts of “real” people. Wolfe demands that the writer pay special attention to social details, like status, while getting so much background on the topic and so thoroughly interviewing/researching the subjects that the events and scenarios covered can be recreated in an exciting “novelistic” form, rather than your standard snoozeville reportage. This is a style of writing that I love when done right, and this collection is an example of the best of it. 

My tribute to a goofy 1970s
Australian edition of this book
that never existed 

—True Hallucinations: Being an Account of the Author’s Extraordinary Adventures in the Devil’s Paradise by Terence McKenna (1993)

Genius hippies trek into the foreboding and forbidden Amazon jungle searching for consciousness expanding plants that may also break down the walls of reality and allow the contact of hyperspace. Just your normal spring break, eh? 

The majority of this book is told in a spritely and spirited manner, full of joy at life and the mysteries therein. It accepts the trials and tribulations of a jungle expedition with grace, and tries to keep its cool. The only time the book slogs is in its scientific descriptions, which I’ll admit may be more due to my ignorance than any of McKenna’s authorial shortcomings. Even if McKenna & Co. had not been hunting for a new type of high, this would’ve been an intriguing trip, with smart people exploring strange places. 

I’m only a recent convert to the teachings of St. McKenna, and I’m specifically interested in what he refers to as the “Machine Elves.” I believe that these hyperdimensional beings are definitely associated with the UFO phenomenon, as well as the legends of the leprechauns and other “little people.” It was through my research into this that I discovered McKenna and his works. 

Then, there were the Art Books. All radically different in style, tone, and intention, and all of them perfect to grrrrooooooooooove over when really fuckin’ high. Planning to take shrooms? I dare you to bring along these books. 

—Rated SavX: The Savage Pencil Skratchbook by Savage Pencil (Edwin Pouncey) (2020)

Been a fan of Savage Pencil (real name Edwin Pouncey) since I first saw some of his evil doodles and scratches in an issue of Forced Exposure back in the 1980s… His garbage-can/punk rock-esthetic with its swervings into psychedelia was a great influence on me, and boy-howdy! When I found out we both grooved on gnarly/cheesy BIKER MOVIE MUSIC, I knew I had a spiritual brother (whom I wouldn’t like if I met them in person, I bet). 

Rated SavX is a “best of” collection of Savage Pencil’s decades of blasphemy, and I intend to be taking that book down every once and a while and checking it out forever. 

—The Strange Death of Alex Raymond by Dave Sim & Carson Grubaugh (2021)

Witness a graphic novel that drove both its creators insane. Honestly. It helps if you’re at least partially hip to the graphic artists of the 1940s, like the book’s initial topic Alex Raymond (the creator of the Flash Gordon newspaper comic strip, among many others), as well as to post-WWII American culture, in general. 

And hypertexts. Great GOD almighty, does this comic book PLUNGE into a Ouroborosian realm!!! Uncle Sam’s subtextual secret sorcerers start their supersonic siren calls softly then escalate them to psychic screams akin to tsunami. 

To compare The Strange Death of Alex Raymond to works by James Joyce or Thomas Pynchon would not be off the mark

And beautiful; the artwork is insanely detailed. (I had no idea that The Strange Death of Alex Raymond even existed until it was pointed out to me by good buddy Kelp Bed. Thanks, dude, heal up soon!)

—Fantastic Four: Full Circle by Alex Ross, based on characters created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby (2022)

Beautiful, absolutely beautiful. It’s a magnificent blacklight tribute to King Kirby’s most fertile days as a creator (although not his weirdest days, IMHO). 

But you don’t buy this to read; the story’s nothing to write home about anyway (although far superior to the garbage-can prose that Stan Lee shoveled onto the page; his idiotic and hackneyed yammerings utterly ruined many a page of Steranko’s run on Nick Fury, Agent of SHIELD—grrrrrr! [Although I am a fan of Stan in general]). 

No, you don’t buy Fantastic Four: Full Circle to read.
You buy Fantastic Four: Full Circle to grooooooove. 

It may be on my shelf now, but this book is something that will be pulled down again and again in the future… so that I might groooooooove some more. Beautiful…

Honorable Mention: 

—The Yage Letters: Redux by William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg; edited by Oliver Harris (1963; 1975; 2006)

Burroughs does the heavy lifting here, and if you have read McKenna before this (or listened extensively to McK’s longer lectures), you are only required to read the Burroughs sections of this slim tome. I do get the feeling, though, that Uncle Bill is channeling the voice of Gordon MacCreagh, whose excellent and utterly sarcastic 1926 travel/natural history book, White Waters and Black, is something I get the feeling that WSB would have read. (MacCreagh had been the guide of an ill-fated exploration of the Bolivian Andes and the Colombian Amazon; it was an absolute fustercluck, and his book is hilarious.)

Of course, if you’re not a fan of Burroughs’ cantankerous, hypocrite-stabbing style (that’s more akin to sleazy dime-store pulps than “Quality Lit”), you may not enjoy The Yage Letters. (But a newbie to Burroughs might be intrigued….)

In a way, Yage Letters is the (French-)kissing cousin of A Rebours, with both books treating us to misanthropic, degenerate gentlemen of high intelligence and refined tastes splitting the whole bourgeois scene to seek new realities. To me, both books are hopeful, if grouchy.

BEST REREAD: 

—*) Kamandi: The Last Boy on Earth! by Jack Kirby (1972-1976; #1-#40)

A Planet of the Apes rip-off that takes the leap into hyperspace, as they say.

Every sci-fi trope or high-weirdness in the culture that was prevalent in the early-1970s (pre-Star Wars) ends up in Kamandi. Yes, talking apes—but also tigers, lions, dogs, and so on. Dumber animals have grown huge and mutated (like grasshoppers you can ride like a racehorse). (Curiously, horses are not shown to have evolved into tool-using, bipedal English speakers with opposable thumbs, though.) Humans are speechless dumbasses, feral and awful. (Naaah. I’m not making the obvious joke.)

Soon “tributes” to Westworld’s robot playland; Andromeda Strain’s space germ and weird secret lab; interests in telepathy, UFOs, and Ancient Astronauts; and more were showing up in Kamandi. It was an absurd mélange served up with Kirby’s usual hyperactive style. The King’s writing style was as creaky as Stan Lee’s, but its advantage was that it NEVER tried to be hip or clever. Kirby always strives for a “serious” and “mythic” tone, and in a way, you can’t blame The King: This is serious! Kamandi is, after all, “The Last Boy on Earth!” (and don’t you EVER forget the exclamation point (!)). [The last (thinking human) boy on Earth had been born in an underground bunker: “Command ‘D’”—get it?]

I had read the Kamandi comics when they were coming out, in the early 1970s—I still have the first 40 issues. I wouldn’t sell them. I may have them cremated with me. When taken piecemeal, issue by issue over years, the whole thing makes a certain sense, and some runs (especially “UFO/Pyra”) have masterful plotting that keeps upping the ante with crazy ideas and scenarios, in an almost cinematic way. But when taken as a whole, like it was a massive graphic novel of the New Wave of Sci-Fi…? HOLY SHIT, this book is KEE-RAY-ZEE. Love it. 

(And now I’m old enough, and secure in my masculinity, to admit that I had a boy-crush on Kamandi when I was a kid. C’mon, look at him: He’s capable, smart—and hot. Who wouldn’t want to be his best friend?)
This was the Journey of Self-Discovery that one takes via Nostalgia…

AND NOW....

The whole list of 2022’s readings—48 in 52!~Skidoo!: 

The list below is presented in the order with which items were read.
Starts strange…stays strange… What the hell do normal people read, anyway? Do they even read, if they’re “normal”? And what does a “normal reader” read?  

BTW, (*) means “I’ve read it before.”

—Against Nature (À Rebours) by J.-K. Huysmans (1884)

—*) The Painted Word by Tom Wolfe (1975)

—Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan (2012)

—*) The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean by John Milius (1973)

—Barbarella by Jean-Claude Forest (1962, 1964)

—Widespread Panic by James Ellroy (2021)

—On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons From the Twentieth Century by Timothy Snyder (2017)

—*) The Hephaestus Plague by Thomas Page (1973)

—Huế 1968: A Turning Point of the American War in Vietnam by Mark Bowden (2017)

—*) Kamandi: The Last Boy on Earth! by Jack Kirby (1972-1976; #1-#40)

—The Good Thief by Hannah Tinti (2008)

—The Relic Master by Christopher Buckley (2015)

—The Strange Death of Alex Raymond by Dave Sim & Carson Grubaugh (2021)

—New Gods by Jack Kirby (1970-1973; 1984-1986; collected 2018)

—*) King Rat by James Clavell (1962)

—Escape From Yokai Land by Charles Stross (2021; novella)

—*) The Woman Chaser by Charles Willeford (1960) 

—*) The Crystal World by J.G. Ballard (1966)

—Collision Course by Robert Silverberg (1958; 1961)

—The Lesson by Cadwell Turnbull (2019) 

—The New Journalism by Tom Wolfe, with anthology edited by Tom Wolfe and E.W. Johnson (1973)

—True Hallucinations: Being an Account of the Author’s Extraordinary Adventures in the Devil’s Paradise by Terence McKenna (1993)

—Rated SavX: The Savage Pencil Skratchbook by Savage Pencil (Edwin Pouncey) (2020)

—*) “Mother Earth Mother Board” by Neal Stephenson (1996; novella-length article)

— “If All Men Were Brothers, Would You Let One Marry Your Sister?” by Theodore Sturgeon (1967; novelette)

— “Jerry and Marge Go Large” by Jason Fagone (2018; novella-length article)

— The Kaiju Preservation Society by John Scalzi (2022)

— The Man With Kaleidoscope Eyes by Tim Lucas (based on the original screenplay by Tim Lucas & Charles Largent with Michael Almereyda & James Robison) (2022) 

— The Second Shooter by Nick Mamatas (2021)

— “Riders of the Purple Wage” by Philip José Farmer (1967; novella)

—The Patchwork Girl of Oz by L. Frank Baum (1913)

—Gilgamesh the King by Robert Silverberg (1984)

—Autonomous by Annalee Newitz (2017)

—Dangerous Visions: Thirty-Three Original Stories, edited by Harlan Ellison (1967)

—The Bird King by G. Willow Wilson (2019)

—Thorns by Robert Silverberg (1967)

—Tower of Glass by Robert Silverberg (1970)

—Up the Line by Robert Silverberg (1969)

—Nightwings by Robert Silverberg (1968)

—*) Hellboy: Strange Places by Mike Mignola (2006)

—Downward to the Earth by Robert Silverberg (1969)

—*) A Night in the Lonesome October by Roger Zelazny (1993)

—The Black Ice Score by Richard Stark (Donald E. Westlake) (1968)

—Billion-Dollar Brain by Len Deighton (1966)

—The Yage Letters: Redux by William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg; edited by Oliver Harris (1963; 1975; 2006)

—Memories, Dreams, Reflections by C.G. Jung, edited by Aniela Jaffe (1961)

—Fantastic Four: Full Circle by Alex Ross, based on characters created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby (2022)

—Blood, Sweat, & Chrome: The Wild and True Story of “Mad Max: Fury Road” by Kyle Buchanan (2022)

The End… Until Next Year