Shelfies #22: Nick Seeley

The shelf just over my workspace is something like my literary inbox, full of things I’m reading, things I want to read next, things I’m repeatedly revisiting, and a few curiosities. Most of them are new, the books I’m finding most interesting right now, but some have been on this shelf (or its equivalent, in other apartments) for years. I think I started Just Kids a decade ago, but found it too beautiful and heartbreaking to finish. It waits. Cat Fitzpatrick’s The Call Out has posed a similar challenge, though it’s only been there a few months.

The copy of Hugo Williams’ All the Time in the World was given me at the beginning of my junior year of college, more than a quarter century ago, by my uncle’s then-girlfriend. She had spent a lot of the previous summer hanging out with me and my high school buddies, smoking dope on the roof of my parents’ house, listening to The Sundays and Robyn Hitchcock and Gilmour-era Floyd on Walkman speakers, talking about life and dreams and travel. The book wasn’t the type of thing I usually read back then, but it grabbed me and never let go. The world Williams bummed his way through with that charming mix of naivete and insight felt so different from the one I’d heard about in terrifying American newscasts: somehow more hopeful, even as it emerged from the devastation of global war; inviting, vast, strange. Williams transformed my simple desire to GTFO of the DC suburbs into a wanderlust that eventually drove me halfway around the world myself, and never really let me go. This is one of the books I’ve dragged with me the whole way, along with my battered copies of The Hero With A Thousand Faces, my complete Eliot, and a few volumes of Stephen Dobyns’ poetry. 

(The Ken Kalfus book was a recent gift from the same uncle; I still haven’t read it. Lots of this shelf is aspirational. I waited so long for The Mirror and the Light that I need to re-read the first two parts now… when is that really going to happen? Maybe if I ever finish slogging my way through the last Dune books? Hah.)

When I’m deep in a writing project, I often struggle to read new things: my mind is just too focused on my own stuff. But I’ll almost always have one particular book that I come back to over and over, returning to favorite chapters for inspiration, or to make the task ahead feel less hopeless. It’s not always the most obvious. The project I’m working on now is epic space opera, but my current dark bible is The Shining. There’s just something about its perfect braid of character-plot-suspense, all arising simultaneously out of each other. It helps me focus on what I hope to achieve, even in a story that’s nothing like it at all.

The beat-up copy of the works of Poe was a gift from an old lover, gone from this world now, a casualty of alcoholism and mental illness and the grinding violence America’s legal system can direct at anyone, at any time. It’s not really in good enough shape to read, but it lives near my desk as a kind of talisman. Maybe sympathetic magic. Keep madness and mortality close at hand; ward them away. Cover everything with skulls. Keep writing, while the unread pile grows higher. One day it buries you.

Nick Seeley spent more than a decade working in the Middle East as a journalist and humanitarian analyst. They now live in Spain, working on being a full-time novelist. Their work includes the novel Cambodia Noir, and the long-form nonfiction piece A Syrian Wedding.

Shelfies is edited by Lavie Tidhar and Jared Shurin. If you are interested in sharing a shelfie, please let us know.