Joel Gersmann's 1986 reading list found the Broom Street Theater artistic director bathed in literature. Among the 40 volumes in which he immersed himself over the previous 12 months: Rhythm-a-ning: Jazz Tradition and Innovation in the '80s, a collection by Village Voice critic Gary Giddins; Love Is a Dog From Hell and two other collections by poet Charles Bukowski, whose work, Gersmann writes, "is always something of a lazy dart game" with "a few hits and a series of wild throws"; Coagulations: New and Selected Poems by Jayne Cortez, whose work is "steeped in the oral tradition of tribal war chant" and draws "inspiration from the gutter and the armpit"; The Path to Power, volume one in Robert Caro's biography of Lyndon Johnson; The White-Boned Demon, Ross Terrill's biography of Mao Zedong's fourth wife, "a genuine piece of feminist revisionist history"; Anne Rice's Interview With a Vampire, which "has the imprint of grand kitsch only several steps higher than The Rocky Horror Picture Show; and Conversations in the Cathedral, Mario Vargas Llosa's "saga of political and spiritual death, broken dreams and shattered ideals" that Gersmann likens to "Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks combined with William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury" and is "without a doubt my favorite book for 1986." Gersmann continued to write his annual reading-list wrap-ups until 2004. He died in June 2005.
The Ghost of Readings Past
From the Isthmus archives, Dec. 26, 1986