My dark reading list in paradise resulted from chance. One book bought, one a gift, one borrowed. All loaded up into the suitcase minutes before rushing out into the cold and dreary Portland world, and then all read with a steady drip of dark rum mixed with POG juice (papaya, orange and guava, for the uninitiated) and the irregular heartbeat of waves breaking against the sand.

The cowboy and I were taking a creative breather from the frantic pace of cover design, editing and production of the third book in The Cowboy and the Vampire Collection. I was hoping a drastic change of scenery – inside and outside my head – would recharge my creative juices just before the onset of the next phase of craziness when the book is published in May.

I was quickly reminded: be careful what you wish for. The outcome of a dark-lit marathon in paradise? Question everything. Everything. Yep, that’s what happened after my spate of beach reading over a quick visit to lovely Kauai, garden island of Hawaii. Human life, the conundrum of mortality, the evolutionary context of consciousness, gorilla brains, the right way to live, the worst way to die, married love, married pain.

Oh yea, and on top of that, imagine this scenario too: the bleakness of your poetic soul as the Berlin Wall bricks you inside inch by daily inch, throwing you into an uncorking rodeo of human-on-human lord-of-the-flies style pecking orders in post-World War II East Germany.

Should I have stuck with light romance or zombies? No. In paradise, I discovered there’s a little more breathing room to think things through, a little more time to let the dark side surface peacefully, a little extra space to forgive, to try to understand. In fact, it’s the best time to go dark.

Below are three tropical reflections from my 2014 Hanalei Bay, Kauai reading list. Mahalo.

Back to Back by Julia Franck is a brilliantly crafted story about the impact of totalitarian society told through the prism of a single family’s tragedy. Sister and brother Ella and Thomas are innocent, young and happy children when post-World War II’s newly borne East Germany begins its descent into isolation, paranoia and institutionalized cronyism. Fuck me and I’ll give your family meat. Tell me about your neighbor and the apartment is yours. Tell me even more about your mother and your brother goes to medical school. As the siblings grow, the world closes around them in a slow perverse strangulation. Ella instinctively learns to trade on her youthful beauty while brilliant Thomas struggles to make sense of a world in which natural mathematical gifts are criminal. Even as a translation from the German, I found this to be perfect writing.

Tropical reflection: Humans do amazingly shitty things to each other in the name of power – at every level of a centralized hierarchy. Every family, every neighborhood, every community, every state. True anarchy – in which we are self-governed by an internal moral code – is the only hope for us. That is the penultimate evolutionary state.

The Gap: The Science of What Separates Us From Other Animals by Thomas Suddendorf is an overview of thinking about the, drumroll, gap between human and animal brains. At heart, the book seeks to answer these two questions: what makes us uniquely human and can animal brains shed light on the evolution of those uniques aspects of human consciousness?

Philosophically, the author concludes that our ability to “nest” multiple scenarios in our minds and, in turn, to seek out mental scenarios in fellow humans defines the cliff sides of the gap between man and beast. From an evolutionary standpoint, maybe, speculates Suddendorf, animals – at least the non-human primate variety – are akin to babies or small children when it comes to consciousness. But the more surprising conclusion drawn from this book is that, scientifically, there’s very little to report definitively because there’s next to zero research on animal brains.

Tropical reflection: Why so little scientific interest in animal consciousness? We race to gain comparative knowledge of the biological gap via animal genomics as a means of finding cures for diseases, but little similar neuroscience or cognitive research has materialized. As the waves pounded, here’s where my rum-addled brain wandered. First, our collective curiosity and capacity for self-reflection – ironically, the very differentiating attributes that exist at the human side of the gap – extend only to ourselves. Human primates see themselves (ourselves) as the penultimate creation, placed at the pinnacle of life by god, er, I mean, by evolution, and instinctively assume there is little to learn from animals. Either that, or we fear the shock to our systems – moral and economic – of what we might learn. Second, maybe, just maybe, an animal rights model could be premised on the idea that animals are like children. Protect them in a similar manner?

The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy. An old favorite. Death sucks. Knowing you (in this case, the “you” is Ivan, a well-enough off barrister in Russia enjoying the expected trappings of an upper class life) are going to die sucks a little less than death itself, but it’s pretty terrible when you reach the point when unbearable physical pain, soul-wrenching regret and volcanic marital rage are the only things standing between you and death, and so you treasure the pain given the light-extinguishing alternative. Tolstoy was apparently going through his own spiritual crisis when he wrote this novella, and it shows. Guilt about owning people (the peasants come off very well in the book, in the same way the slaves in Gone With the Wind or similar books of that shameful American era tend toward tap-dancing sassiness). Seems like Tolstoy might be have been worrying that the aristocratic pre-revolutionary Russian life was, at best, meaningless and, at worst, cruelly dependent on an economic system in which not only labor was unfairly expropriated but so were the human beings producing it. Writing as personal penance.

Tropical reflection: Nothing is reliable, not even my own mind. Reading this now for the third time, with a decade in between, I was struck by how much my reaction had shifted. In my twenties, I focused on the death part, later it was the religious aspects of Tolstoy’s book, but this time, my attention was drawn to the unjust economic system. If my perception of a book can change as the years accumulate, is any knowledge – or conclusion – ever fixed?

As I closed the last of the three books, I was reminded that the Russian dark night of the soul is a special place and I can easily climb into its sticky embrace. Getting back out is the hard part. But that’s what writing is for, right? Now, I’m turning back to cowboys and vampires; undoubtedly, these themes will nest themselves in a future plotline. – KMdeeo.ru