The Reading Lamp: Vonnegut's butthole and scary trousers

I also took a great deal of pleasure in the drawr-ings in Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions, especially the asshole...but I was 22 when I read it so my giggles were much creepier than the 13-year old Wayne's, I suspect.

Speaking of creepy: I wonder how much richer my childhood would have been had my massive collection of Dr. Seuss books included The Sneeches? I must read this book.

Your name: Wayne Lowther

What are you reading now? 3 books on the go: The Rifles by William T Vollmann, Tilt: A Skewed History of the Tower of Pisa by Nicholas Shardy, and The Abolition of Work and Other Essays by Bob Black.

Where are you reading them? Usually lying in bed.

How did you discover these books? I found The Rifles in John W Doull’s used bookstore in Halifax. I like Vollmann from reading past books. Tilt I found in a box of “Free Books” on the sidewalk. Abolition of Work was given to me by a friend.

What would your ideal desert island book be? Some of the past Reading Lamp interviews seem to think “desert island” means “beach resort”. I’m a bit more pragmatic. I’m assuming I’ll be stuck there for awhile, so it would be a toss-up between: SAS Survival Handbook or The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Erotica.

Who is your literary boyfriend or girlfriend? (Could be either a character or an author, and if it’s an author, he or she need not still be alive.) I would have to say my literary girlfriend is the main female character referred to as “V” in Thomas Pynchon’s book of the same name. If only because I think I’ve crossed paths with this profoundly enigmatic woman numerous times over the last twenty-five years.

As for male friends, I’d enjoy hanging out and having a few beers with Linus van Pelt.

What writer do you think should be zapped out of history/existence and their works therefore never written? Start with L. Ron Hubbard, and putting aside his whole insidious creation of Scientology; his science fiction is absolutely the least intelligent and least imaginative stuff out there. The guy was a hack of the highest calibre. This man has given nothing to literature and is probably at the root of the worse kind of “self-help” movements since the mid-20^th century.

What's your favourite either unknown or underappreciated book? Moravagine by Blaise Cendrars. I’ll let your readers look search it out.

Favourite childhood book? I didn’t come from a family of readers, so books were not around much. My grandmother had more books around for the pile of grandchildren that would visit, usually comic books.

There were Dr Seuss books, but I generally didn’t like them. I hated Green Eggs and Ham and The Cat in the Hat, but I remember finding a Seuss collection of The Sneeches (with stars upon thars) discarded in the garbage and really liked the stories and illustrations. It also had the most un-nerving story I had ever read when I was young, called "Pale Green Pants" (with nobody in ’em). The illustrations for it were really nightmarish to me: an empty pair of green pants chasing a little girl in pyjamas around in the woods in the dark; very weird and scary!

I was also an encyclopedia geek. Parents bought a set of World Book Encyclopedias in 1968 and I was the only one in the family who would look at them. I always had my nose in one on a rainy day.

First novel I read was Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut when I was 13. I got it out of the library of Quebec City High School, while researching some assignment. It was in really bad condition, as it was probably the most read book in that library. What made me want to read it were the funny pencil sketches (cool), especially the drawing of an “asshole” (even cooler).

Upon taking the book to the check-out desk, the librarian gave me a dirty look. I was really looking forward to reading this now! I wasn’t disappointed.

What's the most embarrassing book you've ever received as a gift? Did you read it? I’ve never received a book as a gift that I didn’t give a chance. I’ve been pretty lucky with my reading, although Roger, your last Reading Lamp interviewee, once lent me a copy of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, which I despised! Gaaahh!

Weirdest/creepiest/most awesome thing you've ever found inside a used book? Weird and creepy: A rubber stamp image of a coelacanth in my copy of V.

Awesome: A small 4x6 pencil draft of a map of some remote island atoll in the Pacific, I kid you not! It was found in an old volume of Encyclopedia Britannica in the library of the College of Geographic Sciences in Nova Scotia. Most of the books in this particular section of the library were donated by an influential cartographer who worked at National Geographic and who founded the cartography course at that school. This was probably some work in progress of his for a National Geographic article that he used for a bookmark.

How do you decide what to read next? I just let it come to me while browsing bookstores or find them on the sidewalk. Something in the back of my brain will say, “read this”. I’m willing to take chances with unknown material. I like your idea of the “page 40 test”.

Favourite author? Why? Jorges Luis Borges, the Rene Magritte of literature. Simple, concise and straightforward storytelling that manages to twist one’s brain around. He can write about just sitting in a chair, or walking down a sidewalk and make it sound other-worldly.