By Dan Brereton \u2013 Science-fiction writer Alan Dean Foster once wrote that he blamed comic books for what had become of him. He\u2019s a prolific and masterful sci-\ufb01 writer whose novels and short stories captivated and entertained me as a teen. His testimonial to the powerful in\ufb02uence of comics in his life gave me solace when classmates and adults alike ridiculed my own childhood obsession with comic books. I read as many comics as I could get my hands on, though I confess I paid more attention to the artists than the writers back then. And although I was ga-ga for comics from age 8 on, I still read more books than comics.<\/p>\n
I read all of L. Frank Baum\u2019s Oz<\/em> books, plus a few peripheral fairy-tale books he wrote as well.<\/p>\n When I was in my teens, I read J.R.R. Tolkien\u2019s Lord of the Rings<\/em> and fell in love with sword and sorcery. My garage still houses many of the paperbacks I enjoyed back then: Robert E. How\u00adard\u2019s Conan books; Edgar Rice Burroughs\u2019 Tar\u00adzan, Pel\u00adlu\u00adci\u00addar, and Mars books (and about any paperback with a Frazetta cover); Fritz Lieber\u2019s Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser books; and in my late teens and 20s, the inexhaustible master, Harlan Ellison.<\/p>\n The Brothers Hildebrandt created a Lord of the Rings<\/em>-like epic called Urshurak<\/em>, which they told almost completely in pictorial form and had a writer transcribe it into a pretty nifty tale of elves, amazons, goblins, and dwarves.<\/p>\n Roald Dahl incorporated a twisted, nasty sense of wit and irony with a gentleness and sensitivity I\u2019ve never encountered in another writer. He would\u2019ve written some great comics if he\u2019d ever gone that way. (He wrote the screenplay for my favorite Bond \ufb01lm, You Only Live Twice<\/em>.)<\/p>\n A novel that took up much of my reading time in high school was The Once and Future King<\/em>, by T.H. White. This book, about the legend and life of King Arthur and the med\u00adieval satellites that surround Arthurian legend, was a seminal in\ufb02uence on me.<\/p>\n To this day I am still inspired and awed by the great writer and storyteller Ray Bradbury. I urge anyone who\u2019s never read him to pick up The Martian Chronicles<\/em>, Dande\u00adlion Wine<\/em>, or pretty much anything he\u2019s written. The man can write a horror story to chill you and in the next story show you something fantastic and pure.<\/p>\n These days, and in the last nine years, I\u2019ve been reading a lot of crime \ufb01ction. I like the pared-down, simple, and almost spartan texture of crime \ufb01ction. Crime \ufb01ction is perfect for a lover of dialogue laced with violence. I read some of the genre\u2019s masters, such as Dashiell Hammett (The Maltese Falcon<\/em>, Red Har\u00advest<\/em>) and Charles Willeford (Miami Blues<\/em>).<\/p>\n In a contemporary vein, I enjoy the works of Carl Hiaasen (Stor\u00admy Weather<\/em>, Tourist Sea\u00adson<\/em>); he\u2019s funny and writes a great yarn. Other great crime writers are Jon A. Jack\u00adson, Law\u00adrence Block, and Walter Mosely.<\/p>\n I also recently \ufb01nished Naked Came the Manatee<\/em>, a \u201cjam\u201d novel with each chapter written by a different author. Authors include such names as Hiaasen and Elmore Leonard (another great crime writer), along with 11 others, all from Florida. It\u2019s mystery\/crime \ufb01ction and a great read; I\u2019d love to see something like this done in comics.<\/p>\n Last, but certainly not least, one of my favorite writers in sus\u00adpense\/ crime drama: Stephen Hunter. I recommend Point Of Impact<\/em>, Black Light<\/em>, and Dirty White Boys<\/em>. Howard Chaykin turned me on to Hunter\u2019s great stuff, and Howard never steers me wrong.<\/p>\n Howard turned me on to James Ellroy (The Black Dahlia<\/em>, American Tabloid<\/em>) years ago, and I\u2019ve since read everything Ellroy\u2019s written, including his latest, an autobiographical odyssey called My Dark Places<\/em>, about his search for the man who murdered his mother when he was only 10. Ellroy tears away at not only the evidence and facts surrounding his mother\u2019s murder, but at his own soul in the process.<\/p>\n Last night I \ufb01nished a highly acclaimed and award-winning book called Snow Falling on Cedars<\/em>, by David Guterson. It\u2019s set on an island in Washington state in the \u201950s and concerns the murder of a \ufb01sherman and the trial of a Japanese-American local accused of the crime. It\u2019s a great read, and it also touches just slightly on another favorite subject of mine in \ufb01lm and reference reading: medieval feudal Japan. If you\u2019ve never read the Lone Wolf and Cub<\/em> comics reprinted from Japan, hunt them down. Frank Miller owes much to creators Goseke Gojima and Kazuo Koike. So do I, and so do a lot of Japanese manga readers.<\/p>\n I\u2019m sure I\u2019ve left out so many deserving novels and authors. I didn\u2019t tell you how much I loved Moby-Dick<\/em> or Ivanhoe<\/em> or Dracula<\/em>; F. Scott Fitzgerald, J.D. Salinger (every high schooler should read Catcher in the Rye<\/em>), or Flannery O\u2019Connor; Watership Down<\/em>; David Good and Raymond Chandler; Alan Dean Foster\u2019s Phlinx stories, about a psychic kid and his lethal best friend, a \ufb02ying snake named Pip; Edgar Allan Poe, H.P. Love\u00adcraft, H.G. Wells\u2014the list is long and hallowed. By Dan Brereton \u2013 Science-fiction writer Alan Dean Foster once wrote that he blamed comic books for what had become of him. He\u2019s a prolific and masterful sci-\ufb01 writer whose novels and short stories captivated and entertained me as a teen. His testimonial to the powerful in\ufb02uence of comics in his life gave me solace when classmates and adults alike ridiculed my own childhood obsession with comic books. I read as many comics as I could get my hands on, though I confess I paid more attention to the artists than the writers back then. And although I was ga-ga for comics from age 8 on, I still read more books than comics. I read all of L. Frank Baum\u2019s Oz books, plus a few peripheral fairy-tale books he wrote as well. When I was in my teens, I read J.R.R. Tolkien\u2019s Lord of the Rings and fell in love with sword and sorcery. My garage still houses many of the paperbacks I enjoyed back then: Robert E. How\u00adard\u2019s Conan books; Edgar Rice Burroughs\u2019 Tar\u00adzan, Pel\u00adlu\u00adci\u00addar, and Mars books (and about any paperback with a Frazetta cover); Fritz Lieber\u2019s Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser books; and in my late teens and 20s, the inexhaustible master, Harlan Ellison. The Brothers Hildebrandt created a Lord of the Rings-like epic called Urshurak, which they told almost completely in pictorial form and had a writer transcribe it into a pretty nifty tale of elves, amazons, goblins, and dwarves. Roald Dahl incorporated a twisted, nasty sense of wit and irony with a gentleness and sensitivity I\u2019ve never encountered in another writer. He would\u2019ve written some great comics if he\u2019d ever gone that way. (He wrote the screenplay for my favorite Bond \ufb01lm, You Only Live Twice.) A novel that took up much of my reading time in high school was The Once and Future King, by T.H. White. This book, about the legend and life of King Arthur and the med\u00adieval satellites that surround Arthurian legend, was a seminal in\ufb02uence on me. To this day I am still inspired and awed by the great writer and storyteller Ray Bradbury. I urge anyone who\u2019s never read him to pick up The Martian Chronicles, Dande\u00adlion Wine, or pretty much anything he\u2019s written. The man can write a horror story to chill you and in the next story show you something fantastic and pure. These days, and in the last nine years, I\u2019ve been reading a lot of crime \ufb01ction. I like the pared-down, simple, and almost spartan texture of crime \ufb01ction. Crime \ufb01ction is perfect for a lover of dialogue laced with violence. I read some of the genre\u2019s masters, such as Dashiell Hammett (The Maltese Falcon, Red Har\u00advest) and Charles Willeford (Miami Blues). In a contemporary vein, I enjoy the works of Carl Hiaasen (Stor\u00admy Weather, Tourist Sea\u00adson); he\u2019s funny and writes a great yarn. Other great crime writers are Jon A. Jack\u00adson, Law\u00adrence Block, and Walter Mosely. I also recently \ufb01nished Naked Came the Manatee, a \u201cjam\u201d novel with each chapter written by a different author. Authors include such names as Hiaasen and Elmore Leonard (another great crime writer), along with 11 others, all from Florida. It\u2019s mystery\/crime \ufb01ction and a great read; I\u2019d love to see something like this done in comics. Last, but certainly not least, one of my favorite writers in sus\u00adpense\/ crime drama: Stephen Hunter. I recommend Point Of Impact, Black Light, and Dirty White Boys. Howard Chaykin turned me on to Hunter\u2019s great stuff, and Howard never steers me wrong. Howard turned me on to James Ellroy (The Black Dahlia, American Tabloid) years ago, and I\u2019ve since read everything Ellroy\u2019s written, including his latest, an autobiographical odyssey called My Dark Places, about his search for the man who murdered his mother when he was only 10. Ellroy tears away at not only the evidence and facts surrounding his mother\u2019s murder, but at his own soul in the process. Last night I \ufb01nished a highly acclaimed and award-winning book called Snow Falling on Cedars, by David Guterson. It\u2019s set on an island in Washington state in the \u201950s and concerns the murder of a \ufb01sherman and the trial of a Japanese-American local accused of the crime. It\u2019s a great read, and it also touches just slightly on another favorite subject of mine in \ufb01lm and reference reading: medieval feudal Japan. If you\u2019ve never read the Lone Wolf and Cub comics reprinted from Japan, hunt them down. Frank Miller owes much to creators Goseke Gojima and Kazuo Koike. So do I, and so do a lot of Japanese manga readers. I\u2019m sure I\u2019ve left out so many deserving novels and authors. I didn\u2019t tell you how much I loved Moby-Dick or Ivanhoe or Dracula; F. Scott Fitzgerald, J.D. Salinger (every high schooler should read Catcher in the Rye), or Flannery O\u2019Connor; Watership Down; David Good and Raymond Chandler; Alan Dean Foster\u2019s Phlinx stories, about a psychic kid and his lethal best friend, a \ufb02ying snake named Pip; Edgar Allan Poe, H.P. Love\u00adcraft, H.G. Wells\u2014the list is long and hallowed. I guess that\u2019s why I love to read so much. There\u2019s always something wonderful waiting on the shelf.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":393,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[49,50,51],"class_list":["post-386","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-recommended-reading","tag-dan-brereton","tag-issue-32","tag-september-1997"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/eacottdesign.com\/combo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/386","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/eacottdesign.com\/combo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/eacottdesign.com\/combo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/eacottdesign.com\/combo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/eacottdesign.com\/combo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=386"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/eacottdesign.com\/combo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/386\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":408,"href":"http:\/\/eacottdesign.com\/combo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/386\/revisions\/408"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/eacottdesign.com\/combo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/393"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/eacottdesign.com\/combo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=386"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/eacottdesign.com\/combo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=386"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/eacottdesign.com\/combo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=386"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nI guess that\u2019s why I love to read so much. There\u2019s always something wonderful waiting on the shelf.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"