Books That I Enjoyed Paging Through in Libraries and Bookstores, But Have Not Read From Cover To Cover Until Now

The official picture posted online doesn’t do the building any justice. One of the first places my parents took us to in Winnipeg was the St. Vital Library. At the time, it looked the way I thought a library should look. It was all brick on the outside, and had winding staircases and rooms crammed with shelves of books on the inside. For some reason, I’ve always remembered it as a whimsical, gingerbread-gothic hybrid, all cupolas and gables, designed by some lovable, eccentric, and unknown local architect.
The building clearly isn’t a miniature Smithsonian, but rather something a little bit more modern. The quirkiness of the design itself can be chalked up to unusual shape of the property that the library was built on, and not just the whimsy of some lovable eccentric. And that anonymous architect has a name: George A. Stewart. So the building is a little bit more prosaic (though still something of an underrated local landmark) than I remembered it, but that isn’t terribly important.
What really matters is the world of education, enlightened ideas, and imagination that the City of Winnipeg opened up for a young boy who had blown his allowance on comic books, slurpees, and video games, and had nothing better to do with his time. Dickens, Zola, Descartes, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Joyce, Ginsberg, Shakespeare, Proust, Locke, Marx, Tolstoy and Hegel: a feast for the mind, and all free of charge.
Hegel was, well, I’d seen his name referenced in a back issue of Howard the Duck, and it took me all of one sentence to realize that Hegel wasn’t my cup of tea. Stephen King showed much more promise than any of those dead boring guys. The book that got me interested in his work was Cycle of the Werewolf. On my frequent visits to the library, I’d take it off the shelf, flip through the book, admire the beautiful illustrations by Berni Wrightson, and occasionally read a line or two from the text itself.
The only part of the story I read in its entirety was the chapter where the fat chick gets chewed up by the werewolf. Was Mr. King such a master of terror that I couldn’t bear to read the book? With all due respect to Mr. King, that wasn’t the issue. I certainly didn’t have any problems reading Christine, The Tommyknockers, or The Running Man. However, for whatever reason, I enjoyed paging through the novel, but never read it.
Cycle of the Werewolf wasn’t the only book that I’d leaf through and enjoy, but never actually read. This is a pattern that has repeated itself with all the books written by my favorite authors. I thumbed through The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test at the library and owned a used paperback of The Right Stuff, both written by Tom Wolfe, for years before reading either title, despite the fact that I enjoyed reading Bonfire of the Vanities. Before I even knew who P.J. O’Rourke was, I’d paged through National Lampoon’s 1964 High School Yearbook parody on many different occasions in the humor section of the bookstore, but it didn’t occur to me to actually read the thing until Rugged Land reissued it in 2003.
Of course, once I got around to actually reading these titles, I wished I had read them sooner. I thought I’d worked my way through that list until I had a conversation with my sweetie, and I mentioned that Cycle of the Werewolf was one King novel I hadn’t read, even though I’d enjoyed looking at those Berni Wrightson illustrations for years. About a week later, a first edition of the trade paperback arrived in the mail – it had even been signed by Berni Wrightson. The colors popped, and Wrightson’s line work seemed even more detailed and ornate than I remembered it.
Of course, the book sat on my shelf for a few weeks. I’d pick it up, flip through it, and admire Wrightson’s illustrations. I even read the part where the fat chick gets eaten by the werewolf. But I didn’t start reading it from start until finish. Until last night. I couldn’t get to sleep, and I started reading it, beginning with January. I made it all the way to May, and I’m going to finish it when I get home from work tonight.
It’s so good, in fact, that I wish I had read it sooner.
Labels: Architecture, art, Berni Wrightson, Books, Cycle of the Werewolf, P.J. O'Rourke, personal, Stephen King, Tom Wolfe
















