Books that made me, feat. George Salis
George Salis is the author of the novel Sea Above, Sun Below, which was praised by Alexander Theroux and Rikki Ducornet. He's also the editor of The Collidescope, an online publication that celebrates innovative and neglected literature. His fiction is featured in The Dark, Black Dandy, Sci Phi Journal, Three Crows Magazine, and elsewhere. His criticism has appeared in Isacoustic, Atticus Review, and The Tishman Review, and his science article on the mechanics of natural evil was featured in Skeptic. After a decade, he has recently finished working on a maximalist novel titled Morphological Echoes. He has taught in Bulgaria, China, and Poland. He's the winner of the Tom La Farge Award for Innovative Writing. Find him on Facebook, Goodreads, Twitter, and Instagram.
The book I am currently1 reading
I’m currently picking at Abel Posse’s A Long Day in Venice: A Memoir (translated from the Spanish by George Henson). This is a book I helped get translated and published by Betimes Books in 2022, after I tracked down the Argentine author and interviewed him on my literary website, The Collidescope. I also reviewed his wonderful The Dogs of Paradise at that time. Unfortunately, he passed away at the age of 89, not long after the memoir’s publication. I just got to the part where Abel meets Borges, a character who is always delightfully mystical whether you come across him in fiction, nonfiction, or somewhere in between.
The book that changed my life
As readers, we’re always changing in some way or another, albeit imperceptibly. However, when reading Ulysses, I did perceive and revel in a prolonged change, one that involved a higher awareness of words. Joyce used words in multidimensional ways, not to mention multi-sensory, rather than writing the prose as a mere window into the story. This, combined with his equally heightened awareness of form, is one reason why Ulysses was a life-changing book for me, making me a better reader and writer after a three-month deep-read that included Gifford’s guide and the New Bloomsday Book.
The book I wish I’d written
Toni Morrison said something to the effect of one having to write the book one really wants to read. This is what I’ve been doing for the past decade or thereabouts. I’ve recently finished line editing the almost half a million words that comprise my novel, which is titled Morphological Echoes. In essence, the book is a modern mythos grounded in reality but utterly webbed in surreality, taking place across time and space, including other planets and alternate/overlapping timelines.
The book that changed my idea of what literature can do
Instead of invoking Ulysses again, I’ll mention Joseph McElroy’s mega-novel Women and Men.2 His vast scope is simultaneously microscopic due to his penchant for chaos theory and what one might call “psychological economics.” The BREATHER sections are a revelation, the experience in total akin to Don DeLillo squared if not hypercubed. Even if the second half of McElroy’s masterwork collapses in on itself, it’s a reading experience like no other and points the way toward future forms within that ultimate form: the novel.
The last book that made me laugh
I find truly humorous fiction hard to come by. The stories of Garielle Lutz3 are sometimes funny in a shocking, soul-disturbing way, if that counts. A visceral audacity underlies the laughs. And I always appreciate a funhouse-mirror character roast in Alexander Theroux’s fiction.4
The book that had the most influence on me
Some years ago, Norman Mailer’s Ancient Evenings proved immensely helpful, as far as getting into the mythological mindset required to write within that world, as well as the underworld and overworld. This is what I needed before I wrote the novel-length Ancient Egyptian part that exists in my Morphological Echoes.
The book I think is most overrated
This is a question that threatens to get me in trouble with the many flimsy-skinned individuals on the internet. I look to Paul West to bail me out, as it were: “I do not recall the names of minimalists, if indeed there are any writers wholly intent upon reducing the wonder and the enigmatic abundance of life to glum sentences whose only virtue is to be grammatically correct and not draw attention to their maker. Minimalism is close to mediocrity and mindlessness, a way for the ungifted to have a literary career, and for readers who really hate literature to pretend to be reading something serious.”5
The book that changed my mind
I think it’s important to read things one disagrees with in an attempt to avoid mental complacency and the comfort of the echo chamber. For instance, I read Robert Lanza’s Biocentrism in full, but the ideas still struck me as pseudoscience fueled by a thinly veiled hope in some kind of afterlife. Sam Harris’ Free Will, on the other hand, made me realize that our feeling of agency is indeed an illusion despite my initially believing such a notion ridiculous.
The last book that made me cry
If laughing while reading is rare for me, crying is even rarer, but by no means impossible. I can think of several examples, the most notable one being Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud & Incredible Close, a novel that caused the tears to flow multiple times, particularly when I made the mistake of reading the ending at a restaurant.
The book I couldn’t finish
I’ve become more adept at abandoning books because the number of books left to read versus the number of years left to live is a dismal equation, even when assuming decades. Life is too short to remain tethered to something poorly written or uninspired. One noteworthy case of abandonment is my attempt at reading Miss Macintosh, My Darling by Marguerite Young. I admire a writer who can stay so true to her vision for so many years, readers be damned, but I couldn’t quite get on board with her insistence on making her book smaller on the inside than on the outside via repetition and the recycling of the same dozen or so images. In theory, it’s a book I should love for its cosmic inclination and poetic obsession, and it’s a beautifully made object, so I hope to crack open my first-edition copy later on in life.
The book I give as a gift
There’s no one book that I give to everyone, like Paul Giamatti’s character in The Holdovers. I do give books as gifts more often than not. A recent example is The Arrival of Autumn in Constantinople by Norberto Luis Romero (translated from the Spanish by H.E. Herbert), which I gave to William T. Vollmann.6 I figured he of all people would appreciate the diversity of style and locations among the stories, much like his own collections.
My earliest reading memory
I started reading voraciously in middle school, a bit later than normal, maybe. I remember anticipating the Scholastic Book catalogs each month and, of course, judging books by their covers more often than not, opting for fantasy books and anything that might evoke my video game obsession at the time, Diablo 2, even if the book turned out to be something very much different, such as Cornelia Funke’s The Thief Lord. I also enjoyed the Deltora Quest books. House of the Scorpion, The Game of Sunken Places, and Inkheart are more examples of the titles I remember with some degree of fondness.
My comfort read
Sometimes it’s nice to have a book one can pick up and put down over the course of months if not a couple years or so, something you know is there whenever you need it. The Complete Gary Lutz was the most recent of those comfort reads, knowing I’d always bask in beautifully constructed sentences describing disturbing emotions and situations. Before that, Janet Frame’s fables. Before that, Paul West’s The Secret Lives of Words.
The last book that made my top 10 list
Top 10 is not enough, but three relatively recent books that have amazed me in more ways than one include The Stones of Summer by Dow Mossman7 (a great American novel suffused with magical realist imagery), The Tunnel8 by William H. Gass (an anti-academic tome of wunder-misery and tainted nostalgia), and Darconville’s Cat by Alexander Theroux9 (an anachronistic morality tale that doubles as a kaleidoscope of logophilia divine).
Current as at April 2024.
George interviewed Garielle and published an article on 2 December 2022.
Sheer Fiction, Vol. 2 by Paul West.
George interviewed WTV, which can be accessed if you support his Patreon.
George interviewed Dow and published an article on 13 August 2023.
George published a review of Darconville’s Cat on 7 March 2020 and then interviewed Theroux on 5 July 2020.