Why did I do Eliminate Down? I, like any good reader, was buying books compulsively. Few things brought me more satisfaction than walking into a bookstore, spotting names and titles I'd heard about and walking out with a haul for myself to read eventually, in some distant future. These hauls accumulated over time, unattended. People would recommend books to me or let me borrow their copies, I'd take books out of the library, I'd fall down my own mysterious rabbit holes. The books stayed on the shelf unread, mockinglike. When the calendar flipped to 2024, I took an inventory of all the unread fiction I owned, put the books in a randomizer and read them in the order the randomizer spit them out. After finishing them, I'd write about them on this Substack. Sixty-two books in all, I finished forty of them. Overall, I'd give myself a B- on the whole thing. If you saw how much fun I was having doing other things, you'd give me a B- too.
The main goal of Eliminate Down was to finish books and write about them on a reliable and consistent schedule. The sub-goals of Eliminate Down were mostly unwritten, dependent on my mood, how much time I could dedicate to the project, and if I felt like holding myself accountable to them. I did finish books, forty isn't fifty two or sixty two but it is forty. I've got a full time job, a social life, other interests and other stressors, I'm happy with forty. I noticed that as the year went on, my average reading speed increased and my retention skills improved too. In past years, my reading schedule was irregular but owing to this project’s deadlines I carved out rituals for myself that made the experience as desirable as my other hobbies. More surprisingly, I did write about all the books I read! Did I like the write-ups? Not all of them. Were they out on a consistent basis? Well, no, but I did finish December's by December 31st and I didn't abandon the project midway through the year even if it definitely looked and felt like I was going to do exactly that. I have a poor track record of finishing projects I start, especially as I become disillusioned with their quality. One only need to look at my publishing history on this platform to confirm. A variant of this happened with Eliminate Down but I stuck by it.
One thing I've noticed with book discourse on the internet is that there is a comparative lack of it. You look at film, music or video games and there are multiple websites dedicated to deep dives into even the most narrow of tastes and objects. That hyperfixation drive is less present in literary subculture and there were multiple books I covered here where finding information or reviews of them presented a serious challenge. Books like Arc D'x, Mother London and Secret Rendezvous could be pretty dense and these books have so little written about them despite coming from established authors with famous or large bibliographies. Some of these books don't even have Wikipedia pages. I think if there is value in blogging and creating noise on the internet, it's in building out conversations about overlooked pieces of media and books have not received the same care & attention to chronicling that other forms of mass media have in the digital age. So I used that as motivation to push forward even when I disliked the project. You can read smarter essays about Dubliners or Crime & Punishment elsewhere. And while I'm not writing a dissertation on Secret Rendezvous, there are a vanishingly small group of people who can talk about it at all. Even if and when I'm unhappy with the write-ups, they exist and I am more critical of my own write-ups by necessity than potential readers likely would be. Should we all have access to academic databases, the world would be a better place but for now, we must rely on hobbyist yammering on Substack and Wordpress.
One of the unwritten goals was to better triangulate my own tastes. I knew what and who I liked but I wanted to bring myself to read authors who I thought I might like. Louise Erdrich, Nicholson Baker, and John Williams sat on my shelf for some time but it wasn't until I had a measure of structure that I actually dared to open their books. Sometimes this experiment paid off, I adored Baker's The Mezzanine, and other times it was a flaming wreck - like with John Langan's interminable The Fisherman. Reading through this forty book spread firmed up my tastes a fair bit, I developed my own palette to recognize more subtle gradations in why the genres & authors who appeal to me are appealing to me. Below is a tier list designed to cheapen that exercise and reduce it to a grotesque albeit easy to decipher ranking system.
As you see, I shamelessly enjoy the classics. Those are considered great for reasons that I found self-evident. I like crime and detective fiction a lot, especially when stripped down to its barest, most cynical forms as seen in Eddie Coyle and To Each His Own. Transgressive and experimental fiction like Secret Rendezvous and Pitch Dark drew me in, their sinister opaque horrors expanded my understanding of how writing can be used to express a full range of emotions from fear to envy to insecurity. Simultaneously, I love the inevitability and relative obviousness of a melodrama; the high emotions of Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea, Mildred Pierce and despite my criticisms - The Fortress of Solitude captured me from front to back. I was less fond of the adventure genre fiction, the Delanys and Burroughs were okay but never impressed upon me like I hoped. Most often when I disliked a book, it was because I thought it was trying to impress me. Anderson, Kleeman and Langan all committed the mortal sin of elbowing me in the ribs to ensure that I knew what we were laughing about.
The thing I dreaded most with Eliminate Down was talking about my favorite books. The stuff I disliked was easy to talk about, it's easier for me to be critical than it is for me to identify things to praise. Moreover, the books I loved the most were, as seen above, the ones with the most serious writing on them. I was provided a few options while writing about them. I could try and write an English 101 paper on why you should read Dostoevsky which is something you probably already know. I could have talked around the book, going into the circumstances around it, or I could try and pass off the task of talking about it completely - instead offering a few words of effusive praise and quickly shuffling away. I tried all of these approaches throughout the year and found each of them equally dull and not worth writing or publishing. I published them anyway much to my chagrin.
Eliminate Down quickly took on a punishing reputation internally. It wasn't so much that I hated the idea of being consigned to the list of books, there were runs of books that I greatly looked forward to and when I was reading books that I truly liked, it was an enriching experience. But I limited myself so much here. Obviously, that was part and parcel of its design but being unable to engage with what my friends were reading or what they recommended to me because of some bizarre project I developed for myself was alienating and greatly irritating. Stubborn as I am, I relented on myself in November and cheated a little bit. I read through Jon Fosse's Septology for a book club and shuffled the reading list around to better supplement that nearly seven hundred page tome. I moved Mildred Pierce, The Little Sister, and Sweet Thursday around Mother London because I could tell from the outset that Mother London was going to sink me like an elephant on a submarine if I didn't devote my full attention to it.
In the interest of continuing to break kayfabe, I never finished Mother London. Although I made a personal promise to actually finish all the books I would write about, I thought it would be a total waste of everyone's time to publish a December blog where the only topic of discussion was a sequel to a b-tier John Steinbeck book. As I'm writing this, I still haven't finished Mother London. That was a thick novel and as I've remarked to multiple people in my personal life, reading all of this fiction was making me restless. I am so, so sick of it. On January 1st, I had to dive into nonfiction, into textbooks, journals, essays, biographies, anything other than narrative fiction. I still feel the need to finish books I've started so I will be going back to it before handing it off but I had to draw the line in the sand somewhere. I cannot recommend this experiment to people. To use the cliche, variety is the spice of life and by October, I felt like running my head into a wall.
One of the other, less important but more practical goals was to not buy any books in 2024. This was a failure, though a happy one. I was dogmatic about it for several months but when I started traveling in the summer and fall, I visited bookstores and wanted to mark the occasion so I'd buy books there. I left Buffalo with five new books, I exited Ireland with ten new books, my Christmas holiday dropped ten more books in my lap. Some of them were those exemptions I had outlined in my first post, Ross MacDonald novels and gifts, but I was not as austere about it as I'd planned.
The other major issue I encountered with Eliminate Down is that for a hobbyist writer, it's a bigger project to tackle than I expected. Had I slashed and burned my social life, ignored my other interests and invested the time and energy into reading, research, and writing that this project demanded, I could have likely met my vision halfway. At the very least, I'd probably have finished every book. But between my real life responsibilities, the small subscriber base of this blog, and my own unproven critical chops, I simply lacked the hustle to develop this feature into a serious workshop for analysis. I made the choice for myself to emphasize quantity over quality in the write-ups. I wanted to read these books more than anything, the writing about them was secondary and often tertiary to whatever else was happening in my life. There's no shame in that, I've heard from more than one person that you should never publish something for free. I understand and agree with that notion but I am doing so anyway because it's the truth that what I have to say with Eliminate Down is not worth the cash.
My hope for my next year of writing is that I can use what skills and work ethic I did build up through Eliminate Down to write better essays on a broader range of topics that align better with my own interests. I hoped with Eliminate Down that I'd develop an expertise in 16th century religious conflicts while reading Doctor Faustus overnight that I'd be able to implement into each blog. This didn't and wasn't going to happen. Allowing myself to develop projects on less contracted time-frames should ideally help me write pieces that I'm prouder of. Maybe some of them will even be informative and useful, not just hazardous tastemaking excursions. As I said above, I couldn't really recommend that you pursue something like this - it was a silly idea and although I am happy to have read all that I've read, more than anything, I am thrilled to be done with this project. But, you might be wondering - what were the remaining twenty-two books?
As follows;
Pale Fire - Vladimir Nabokov
Dog of the South - Charles Portis
The Underdogs - Manuel Azuela
Dreams of the Witch House - HP Lovecraft
Season of Migration to the North - Tayeb Salih
The Impossible Fairy Tale - Han Yujoo
Day of the Locust - Nathaniel West
The Sons - Franz Kafka
The Dig - Alan Dean Foster
The Underground Man - Ross MacDonald
The Book of Imaginary Beings - JL Borges (was unclear if this was a novel, honestly)
The Moviegoer - Walker Percy
The Book of Evidence - John Banville
The Rings of Saturn - W.G. Sebald
Europe Central - William Vollmann
The Baron of the Trees - Italo Calvino
The Ruined Map - Kobo Abe
The Idiot - Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Winter of Our Discontent - John Steinbeck
Rum Punch - Elmore Leonard
Pleasure - Gabrielle D’Annunzio
Bend Sinister - Vladimir Nabokov
Yes, next year I will read more women, Mom.
Thank you all for reading this blog in 2024. I hope you enjoyed it and maybe even found the drive to read your own books or failing that, added the ones I posted here to your own ever expanding wishlist.
Interested in reading previous Eliminate Downs? Click here.
Well done and congratulations. Now keep on writing.