Show me the books he loves and I shall know the man far better than through mortal friends - Silas Weir Mitchell
I have already told before, the Inside Reader is my favorite serial, not only for once, someone else is sharing their preferences on books, but also it gives people the chance to know a bit more authors and their mind and heart: Tell me what you read and I will tell you who you are. But lately I have the feeling that my LiveJournal is too such a small thing for the lists it hosts; authors write lists that are so important and deep, that I really think this place is too humble to contain them. Like for Jameson Currier: I really feel honored to host him today; Jameson Currier's list is not simple a "list of preferences", I think it's a part of his life.
Jameson Currier's Inside Reader List 
1) “Michael Tolliver Lives” by Armistead Maupin. Back in the late 1970s a friend gave me a copy of Armistead Maupin’s novel “Tales of the City”, which set me onto a course of coming out as a gay man and writing about gay lives. As I made my way through other gay books by other gay writers, I also made my way through Maupin’s thrilling six-volume odyssey of his family of queer characters at 28 Barbary Lane in San Francisco. These books were lent to friends and passed along to other friends, who lent them to other friends. There were phone calls and discussions at bars and dinner parties on which book we liked best and what character was our favorite. The series ended in 1989, with Michael “Mouse” Tolliver HIV-positive, and in 1989 many of us believed that this was not a good sign; within the eleven-year publishing period of “Tales of the City” and its sequels, life in the gay community had significantly changed because of the impact of AIDS. “Michael Tolliver Lives”, published in 2007, reunites us with Michael almost two decades later, now approaching 55, buoyed by a drug cocktail and “glad to belong to this sweet confederacy of survivors.” This book made me burst into tears of joy — a rare feat. Written in the first person — from Michael’s point of view — “Michael Tolliver Lives” at times feels more like a memoir than a novel to me, perhaps because I harbor the belief that Mouse is an old friend I haven’t heard from in a while (and delighted to find is still around). I could not put this book down, tugged by the glow and melodrama of memories — both Maupin’s and my own. Paperback: 320 pages
Publisher: Harper Perennial (May 20, 2008)
Publisher Link:
http://www.harpercollins.com/books/9780060761356/Michael_Tolliver_Lives/index.aspxISBN-10: 0060761369
ISBN-13: 978-0060761363
Amazon:
Michael Tolliver Lives Michael Tolliver, the sweet-spirited Southerner in Armistead Maupin's classic Tales of the City series, is arguably one of the most widely loved characters in contem-porary fiction. Now, almost twenty years after ending his ground-breaking saga of San Francisco life, Maupin revisits his all-too-human hero, letting the fifty-five-year-old gardener tell his story in his own voice. Having survived the plague that took so many of his friends and lovers, Michael has learned to embrace the random pleasures of life, the tender alliances that sustain him in the hardest of times. Michael Tolliver Lives follows its protagonist as he finds love with a younger man, attends to his dying fundamentalist mother in Florida, and finally reaffirms his allegiance to a wise octogenarian who was once his landlady. Though this is a stand-alone novel—accessible to fans of Tales of the City and new readers alike—a reassuring number of familiar faces appear along the way. As usual, the author's mordant wit and ear for pitch-perfect dialogue serve every aspect of the story—from the bawdy to the bittersweet. Michael Tolliver Lives is a novel about the act of growing older joyfully and the everyday miracles that somehow make that possible.
2) “Eighty-Sixed” by David B. Feinberg and “What I Did Wrong” by John Weir. I owe a big debt of gratitude to David Feinberg for being instrumental in my finding a publisher for my first collection of short stories, “Dancing on the Moon”. Back in the mid-1980s David and I were in a writing group together and I had the chance to read the manuscript of his novel, “Eighty-Sixed”, as he was writing it, about an urban gay man’s lovers and friends pre-AIDS and post-AIDS, embellished with David’s biting humor and irony. Anyone wanting to get a sample of David’s wicked and insightful wit should start here, but equally as good are his subsequent stories and essays that can be found in “Spontaneous Combustion” and “Queer and Loathing”, even as they progressively become sharper and angrier as David’s health deteriorated due to AIDS. I also recommend John Weir’s novel “What I Did Wrong” published in 2006. “What I Did Wrong” captures David with uncanny precision in the character of Zack, but it also vividly captured the narrator Tom’s grief and imbalance following Zack’s death. Tom’s “lost boy adrift” sort of life mirrors the lasting affect that AIDS has had on friends and survivors — in a way that doesn’t go away with aging and the passing of years. This is also a deeply felt book about having a New York relationship and the experiences of a certain generation living in the city, in the same way that “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” or “Bright Lights, Big City” or “Slaves of New York” are about New York experiences. This was a profoundly good and satisfying read for me; in many passages of this novel Weir’s prose is stellar and lush, particularly in its last, glorious paragraphs. Paperback: 336 pages
Publisher: Grove Press (July 12, 2002)
Publisher Link:
http://www.groveatlantic.com/#page=isbn9780802139023%20ISBN-10: 0802139027
ISBN-13: 978-0802139023
Amazon:
Eighty-Sixed "Wickedly fun . . . [Eighty-Sixed] stands out for its frankness, ferocious wit and total lack of sentimentality or self-pity. . . . A harrowing first-person account of gay life in the age of AIDS."—The New York Times Book Review
Paperback: 256 pages
Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics) (February 27, 2007)
ISBN-10: 0143038796
ISBN-13: 978-0143038795
Amazon:
What I Did Wrong When John Weir’s debut novel, The Irreversible Decline of Eddie Socket, was published in the late 1980s, it was immediately recognized by critics across the country as one of the most perceptive, unsentimental, and beautifully written accounts of the political and emotional consequences of AIDS on both individuals and a community. In What I Did Wrong, his long-awaited second novel, Weir has written another powerfully moving—and often disarmingly funny—book about loss, character, and sexuality in the post-AIDS era, a survivor’s tale in an age when all the certainties have lost their logic and focus.
( books from 3 to 10 ) About Jameson Currier: Jameson Currier is the author of two novels, Where the Rainbow Ends, nominated for a Lambda Literary award, and The Wolf at the Door, and four collections of short fiction: Dancing on the Moon; Desire, Lust, Passion, Sex; Still Dancing: New and Selected Stories; and The Haunted Heart and Other Tales, which was awarded a Black Quill Award for Best Dark Genre Fiction Collection.
His short fiction has appeared in many literary magazines and Web sites, including OutsiderInk, Velvet Mafia, Blithe House Quarterly, Absinthe Literary Review, Confrontation, Rainbow Curve, Christopher Street, Harrington Gay Men’s Fiction Quarterly, and the anthologies Men on Men 5, Best American Gay Fiction 3, Certain Voices, Boyfriends from Hell, Men Seeking Men, Mammoth Book of New Gay Erotica, Best Gay Erotica, Best American Erotica, Best Gay Romance, Best Gay Stories, Circa 2000, Rebel Yell, I Do/I Don't, Where the Boys Are, Nine Hundred & Sixty-Nine, Wilde Stories, Unspeakable Horror, and Making Literature Matter.
His AIDS-themed short stories have also been translated into French by Anne-Laure Hubert and published as Les Fantômes.
His reviews, essays, interviews, and articles on AIDS and gay culture have been published in many national and local publications, including The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, Newsday, The Dallas Morning News, The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, The Minneapolis Star-Tribune, The Philadelphia Inquirer Magazine, Lambda Book Report, The Harvard Gay and Lesbian Review, Dallas Voice, The Washington Blade, Southern Voice, Metrosource, Bay Area Reporter, Frontiers, Ten Percent, The New York Native, The New York Blade, Out, and Body Positive.
He currently resides in Manhattan.
The Wolf at the Door by Jameson Currier
Paperback: 282 pages
Publisher: Chelsea Station Editions (April 1, 2010)
Publisher Link:
http://www.chelseastationeditions.com/id1.htmlISBN-10: 0984470700
ISBN-13: 978-0984470709
Amazon:
The Wolf at the Door Ghosts? Angels? Hallucinations?
When a death occurs at Le Petite Paradis, a guesthouse in the French Quarter of New Orleans, the spirit world becomes unsettled, or so Avery Greene Dalyrymple III, the co-owner believes. The son and grandson of Southern evangelists, Avery is also an overworked and overwrought middle-aged gay man, a cynical “big-time drinker and sinner” fairly certain he can maintain a family of “other deviants and delinquents stumbling along Bourbon Street” to keep him company.
But Avery is also the only person in contact with the spirit world on his property—ghosts from the house’s origins during the 1820s—and he must use the history left behind from another ghost—a gay man from the 1970s—to find a way to restore peace to his household and rejuvenate his faith.
“Currier is one of the few writers who can be equally literary, erotic, dramatic and damn funny, sometimes all in the same sentence.” --Sean Meriwether, The Silent Hustler
"I love, love, love this book and I love New Orleans and I love Jameson Currier’s skill. Put that all together and you have one 'helluva' read." --Amos Lassen, Eureka Pride
Portland Queer: Tales of the Rose City 
Portland Queer: Tales of the Rose City 
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Paperback: 256 pages 
The Wolf at the Door by Jameson Currier