Recommended Reading
Welcome to “Recommended Reading,” where talented pros discuss their favorite books and literary influences. Luminaries who have written “Recommended Reading” columns include Peter David, Boris Vallejo, David Mack, Andrew Vachss, Keith Giffen, Warren Ellis, Marc Silvestri, Tom Sniegoski, Brian Pulido, and the Demon himself, Gene Simmons.
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Dave Rawson revs up his eclectic guitar
By Dave Rawson – A mind once stretched can never return to its former size. Powerful stuff, comics. At best and worst, they provide us with images that feed our experience, reinforce our sense of self, and allow our subconscious to subtly choose what we will become. My first stories were from the Old Testament: Samson the mighty warrior, blinded and humbled, yet able to destroy the enemies of his people with a burst of self-sacrifice. David, the teenager who slew the giant Philistine, Goliath. These were lessons to struggle against the odds, because who knows what can happen, really, when you put your heart into it? From there it…
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Shi’s Billy Tucci’s Crusade for knowledge
By Billy Tucci – North Babylon, Long Island, was a great place to grow up. I spent the summers of my boyhood playing with my friends, making movies with my brothers, and romping through playgrounds and backyard barbecues. A few years later I was bombing down Deer Park Avenue with my 1966 Mustang Fastback piled with maniacs looking for girls and mischief. I played hockey in the winter, baseball in the summer, and basketball any time of the year. The only thing missing was fantasy and adventure in the worlds of the imagination. That I found in books. Sidney Lanier’s The Boy’s King Arthur, with incredible illustrations by N.C. Wyeth,…
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Gene breathes fire into some old tomes
By Gene Simmons – Stranger in a Strange Land. Robert Heinlein certainly had a big impact on me. I must have read this when I was in my early teens. Being a foreigner myself, I knew just how it felt being from a different place and never quite fitting in. The fact that a serious film of this book has never been done (despite The Man Who Fell to Earth, which was very psychedelic and missed the point) is something I never understood. Forrest Gump isn’t too far away from Stranger in a Strange Land. Read it. • The Great American Bathroom Book series. This is really a sort of…
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Steve Englehart, witness for the defense
By Steve Englehart – My choice would have to be Erle Stanley Gardner’s Perry Mason books—or at least the first 80 of them. (Gardner wrote 84, but he was slowing down at the end.) They don’t aspire to be great literature, but they do aspire to be—and succeed at being—highly entertaining. If I tell you there’s at least one murder, and often more, in each book, the parents among you may wonder if comics really do rot brains, but murders to Gardner were just off-screen pegs on which to hang Mason’s feats of deduction: There’s no overt violence. I devoured these books as a kid, surely starting at around age…
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Boris loves his ’50s comic books
By Boris Vallejo – I grew up in Lima, Peru, in the Roaring ’50s. At that time, in that country, the idea of television was almost science fiction. What did people do when they came back from work, you ask? What the heck did kids do when they returned home from school, you ponder? Well, people read. Kids read. I read. Books were my friends. All kinds of books. The classics, adventure, mystery, children’s books. And then there were comic books. I clearly remember my first contact with comic books. I had been in bed for a couple of days with the flu. My father came back from work with…
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Peter David describes books that sent his life in new directions
By Peter David – COMBO #1 – It’s difficult for me to single out a book or books that have had a major impact on my life. Certainly the bodies of work of various authors have; but is it possible to select one particular book and say, “This was it. This really shook things up, and sent my life in a particular direction?” Three come to mind, I suppose. None of them is particularly the best written books, nor will they make anyone’s top 100 (or even 1000) list of great literature. But one can’t argue with The Way Things Are, I guess. ‘Star Trek III’ by James Blish No,…
