May you experience great literature this New Year

In retropect this final day of the first decade of the "new" millennium, this has been a holiday season filled with discoveries, mainly about myself, tribulations and hope, which I guess really can spring eternal if you keep an open mind. Though I greet the new year with much concern about what's next for me, I am also excited about discovering what's ahead.

Creatively, I seem to be peaking, just when I thought my best days were behind me. I keep repeating the mantra "James Michener" over and over again, reminding myself that this late writer accomplished it all into his forties and beyond, having his final of some 40 novels published before he died in his late seventies, I believe. If you have not read Michener yet, treat yourself to at least one of his stories in 2010 as your literary resolution. While he's a lot more like Steinbeck than King, you will find anything he's written hard to put down. If you are young, start with The Drifters, which most of us read as teens as we dreamt of travelling the world in search of love and adventure, and then try The Source, Hawaii... and perhaps the one I am reading now, Caribbean. There are so many it will take you decades to read them all, but it is well worth your time. May Mr. Michener's spirit smile on you.

Then again, reading appears to be a pasttime reserved for older folk. I hope that is wrong of me to say. I have derived such pleasure lost in books that I cannot imagine life without them. I started devouring H.P. Lovecraft after Bram Stoker
stok(er)ed my fires with his seminal Dracula and I was hooked on horror for life, but I also enjoy biographies - the interesting lives of Rod Serling, Alfred Hitchcock, Houdini, Bram Stoker, Nicolas Tesla, Klaus Kinski and the late, self-proclaimed Satanist Anton Lavey spring immediately to mind - and science fiction has always been a favourite genre, as well. Try anything by Robert Sheckley and Damon Knight, as much as Harlan Ellison, Larry Niven, Isaac Asimov and Philip K.Dick, all of whom I recommend for a good thrill on paper.

One of my favourite writers, Michael Crichton (Jurassic Park and, of course, the TV series ER, which he created) died last year, but a complete ms was found in his desk drawer and published, his swan song. Pirate Latitudes is said to be sub-par for a Crichton novel, which is probably why it sat dusty and lonely in his desk drawer, but hey, what a gift to his legions of fans.

And I still love reading the tiny tomes, and admiring the art, of another of my all-time faves, the late Edward Gorey. If you do not know about Gorey, take a look. You are in for a real treat.

Finally, there's Bram D. Eisenthal. You likely haven't heard of his work yet, but if things go well and he lives long enough, maybe he will improve on the two short stories he's had published so far, Migraine and Hard Night. Maybe... all he's gotta do is invoke the spirt of James Michener and, of course, spend a lot more time utilizing his God-given talent.

A Happy and Healthy New Year to you and yours. I hope it's a great 2010 for us all.