meta: bibliography

A book like this does not spring forth, fully-formed, from a vacuum. I would be lying if I said that there were no other books than the ones on this list that influenced me; as far as I am concerned everything we read, whether good or bad, leaves an impression, and that is how it should be. And there are good and bad books on this list, as there is fiction and non-fiction. I have not split out the types of books into, say, fiction, non-fiction, and memoir, because to do so implies that something in a memoir of heroin use that directly contradicts the facts provided in a non-fiction study of heroin is not true - I believe that people report their true experiences, however naive that might be. Better to say that I cannot judge the truth-value of someone's words based on my own lack of experience.

I haven't, also, put books that overlapped into multiple categories. While Mysterious Skin might properly belong in prostitution, homosexuality, and style influences, I have chosen to put it in prostitution, that being the main thing I came away from it with. And I have put in one odd category - homosexuality. While I do not believe that I need to study that as a subject to be able to write it realistically, given my own sexual history, it was an interesting memoir to read, and one that approached the subject from a slightly different perspective than most of the other books I've read on the subject, which were largely written by women and entirely aimed at women.

Ireland
Ireland's Holy Wars, Marcus Tanner
How The Irish Saved Civilisation, Thomas Cahill
Eyewitness Travel: Ireland
Irish On The Inside, Tom Hayden
Ireland From The Air, Peter Somerville-Large and Jason Hawkes
The Great Shame, Thomas Keneally
Saints, Scholars, and Schizophrenics, Nancy Scheper-Hughes

Mythology
Ancient Mirrors of Womanhood, Merlin Stone
The Koran
The New Oxford Annotated Bible
A Treasury Of Irish Folklore, Padraic Colum
From The Isles of Dreams, John Matthews
Legends of the World, Richard Cavendish
The Wordsworth Dictionary of Mythology

Prostitution
Assuming the Position, Rick Whitaker
Prostitution, Power and Freedom, Nancy O'Connell-Davidson
Mysterious Skin, Scott Heim
Chicken, David Henry Sterry
Twist, dir. Jacob Tierney

Heroin
Junky, William S. Burroughs
Last Exit To Brooklyn, Hubert Selby Jr
Permanent Midnight, Jerry Stahl
The Basketball Diaries, Jim Carroll
How To Stop Time: Heroin From A-Z, Ann Marlowe
7 Tattoos: A Memoir In The Flesh, Peter Trachtenberg
The Little Box of Drugs, Sanctuary Publishing
This Is Heroin, Robert Ashton
Trainspotting, Irvin Welsh
Drug Use and Misuse: Cultural Perspectives, Griffith Edwards et al.

Homosexuality
Young Man From The Provinces, Alan Helms

Miscellaneous
Layer Cake, JJ Connolly
High Risk, Amy Scholder and Ira Silverberg
Out of a Silent Planet, C.S. Lewis
Perelandra, C.S. Lewis
That Hideous Strength, C.S. Lewis

Style Influences
American Gods, Neil Gaiman
Neverwhere, Neil Gaiman
Preacher, Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon
Transmetropolitan, Warren Ellis and Darick Robertson
Dead Air, Iain Banks
Fight Club, Chuck Palahniuk