104/12 - February 2008

Posted on the March 9th, 2008 under 104/12 (2008), Books by Dan

#1 - Belle Du Jour, The Intimate Adventures of a London Call-Girl by Belle De Jour
#2 - The Further Adventures of a London Call-Girl by Belle De Jour (30/1/08)
#3 - Lessons from the Land of Pork Scratchings by Greg Gutfeld (12/2/08)
#4 - The Naked Jape by Jimmy Carr and Lucy Greeves (21/2/08)

Reading:
The Yiddish Policeman’s Union by Michael Chabon
Zodiac by Robert Graysmith
It’s Superman! by Tom DeHaven

Up Next:
For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemmingway
Don’t Feed the Ducks by Liam O’Connell

Purchased:
Vineland by Thomas Pynchon
Crash by J.G. Ballard
The Princess Bride by William Goldman
The Old Devils by Martin Amis

Recommended To Me:
The Damned United by David Peace (by Prof. Scott)
The Girl’s Guide to Modern European Philosophy by Charlotte Greig (by Katie B)

Anyone else have the feeling that I’m going to have a lot of catching up to do in the Summer? I should have read 20 books by March 1st…

104/12 - January 2008

Posted on the January 23rd, 2008 under 104/12 (2008), Books, The London Adventures by Dan

Read:
#1 - Belle Du Jour, The Intimate Adventures of a London Call-Girl by ‘Belle Du Jour’.

Reading:
The Yiddish Policeman’s Union by Michael Chabon
Zodiac by Robert Graysmith

Up Next:
The Naked Jape by Jimmy Carr and Lucy Greaves
For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemmingway
Don’t Feed the Ducks by Liam O’Connell

Purchased:
Vineland by Thomas Pynchon
It’s Superman by Tom DeHaven
Crash by J.G. Ballard
The Princess Bride by William Goldman
The Old Devils by Martin Amis

Recommended (to me) Reading:
The Damned United by David Peace (by Prof. Scott)
The Girl’s Guide to Modern European Philosophy by Charlotte Greig (by Katie B)

Reading, Writing… (part one of two)

Posted on the January 17th, 2008 under Books, Life, The London Adventures by Dan

I sat in the library hammering out the first chapter of that novel, the one that’s been fudging around in my head for (now) quite literally, years. Sadly upon re-reading I had the violent compulsion to wrench the screen from it’s wall mounting, throw it to the floor and beat it with my hands and feet screaming ’You bastard!’… which wouldn’t have been too good for a library computer.

My problem is that as I’m currently on a rather large Michael Chabon bender* I am obsessed with having such deliciously delicate prose as the master. I finished reading ‘The Adventures of Kavalier and Klay’ late last year and I’m midway through ‘The Yiddish Policeman’s Union’, as far as I can tell, I should have been reading Chabon years ago – few writers of angsty, grown-up literature (or the sort that grown up people who live in London and read in coffee shops whilst chatting up nubile young literature graduates read – and no, despite four months here, I’m still not that pretentious. I don’t have the cheekbones or fringe to carry it off). Anyway, the point Is that I’m feeling rather inadequate as my literary voice has disappeared, as much as I can drench these little ditties in irony and sarcasm, doing the same for a full blown novel is doing some harm.

It’s one of two things I’m mulling around in my head at the moment, the other is that in 2007 I had made the new year’s resolution to get a 5 minute pilot into Channel 102, and didn’t. In 2008 I made a similar resolution but time has so far been unkind. The two ideas that I’m trying to turn into a reality is a me-fronted parody of ‘Secret Diary of a Call Girl’, entitled ‘Secret Diary of a [Male] Call Girl’ – the gag being, that no-one as unprepossessing as myself** would never be able to engage in having people pay me for sex. The other, which has the benefit of being slightly more promising (as in it’s not one-note) is entitled ‘The Game’ and is inspired by my reading of Metro every morning on the tube.
Whilst not a sports fan, if you ignore the final 3rd of the Metro you suddenly find yourself lacking anything to read (and I could never get away with reading books on the tube. Every time I pulled it out, there would be a crush at Green Park and it’d be wedged into my face so fast I’d have to pull paper from my sinuses), coupled with my Monday evening’s quiz team’s inability to answer sports questions, means that I’ve started to read them. What I’ve found is not the sport itself that’s interesting (I am talking about Football, after all) but the business that surrounds it – the playing, the moving, the shaking, the personalities off the pitch which actually do sound like some sort of engaging, West-Wing esque drama surrounding the fortunes of a football club.
Which is what the show is going to be based on – I’ve never seen a film relating to the business of sports, rather than merely glamourise the excesses of the sportsmen themselves – and if I can make said show funny, then I shall push it into production post-haste.

Speaking of which***, I’m a little excited and almost tempted to give Ian McEwan’s Sebastian Faulks’ Bond novel a go – or I was until he revealed, derisorily, that he had ‘fired it out’ over a couple of weeks. Sadly I had hoped that perhaps Chabon’s taste for writing would mean that serious authors would write books about things like explosions and boobs, as opposed to the inertia one middle aged man feels when his wife goes mental (Waterland), his child is stolen from a supermarket (A Child in Time), he gets stalked by a mental Welshman (Endless Love), but no, as far as Faulks’ is concerned, he fired one out like a casual piece of public toilet onanism after seeing a particularly attractive woman sidling past in the street.

Moving on..

*A pun, surely?
** Fugly.
*** Or not, since when I re-edited the passage, the segue was lost in the annals (hurr) of time.

52/6 #9 - #12

Posted on the August 22nd, 2007 under 52/6 (2007), Books by Dan

Extracted by my paper diary.

# 9 15 / 8 / 07 - East of Eden by John Steinbeck
I curse the name of the teachers who felt ‘Of Mice and Men’ was below me at school. I condemn those who fed me the agony of Atwood, Golding and Shakespere whilst all the time, the dyslexics and the lumpenproletariat luruxiated in the work of this great man. Today I have read a truly great novel and I am humbled by it.

# 10 18 / 8 / 07 - Animal Farm by George Orwell
For my birthday I asked for the Complete works of Orwell, I’d left it on my shelf until now, Lord can that man write. On a tangental note - has anyone noticed that people describe Facist states as ‘Orwellian’, despite Orwell’s strict stance as a Democratic socialist. It’s somewhat of a cruel irony that his name in death has come to mean what he stood against in life.

# 11 19 / 8 / 07 - Burmese Days by George Orwell
Christ, what a miserable book.

# 12 21 / 8 / 07 - The Brentford Triangle by Robert Rankin
I’d promised myself a light read after crawling through two and a half Orwell novels. It was like a cool breeze during a heatwave. If I’m not very well behaved, I might take a sojurn through all of Rankin’s work. I had promised myself that whilst I wouldn’t discount re-reads from the challenge, I’d be a lazy person if I delved into safe territory.

Reading Meme

Posted on the August 20th, 2007 under Books by Dan

Purloined… Haha, Loin… from Professor Scott

# What are you reading right now?
I, Claudius by Robert Graves, Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell, Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand, Dr Iain West’s Casebook by some nobody, Gravity’s Rainbow & The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon and Ulysees by James Joyce

# Do you have any idea what you’ll read when you’re done with all that?
I’ll probably want to die, if not, then I’ll find something easy, like a Robert Rankin to melt away my brain over my holiday in Edinburgh.

# What magazines do you have in your bathroom right now?
The last two months of SFX (The Bumblebee Cover and the Star Trek cover, or ‘The one in which I was horribly misquoted and still haven’t been contacted about my free bloody book). This month’s Sky magazine and one of the Evening Standard Saturday supplements with Kate Nash on the cover, sent to me by one of Rachel’s best friends, despite the one time I met her, I managed to make a bloody awful impression.

# What’s the worst thing you were ever forced to read?
Everything at school was an unbelievable chore, but I’ll single out The Handmaids Tale by Margaret Atwood as the worst novel I’ve ever read, which has probably irrevocably damaged my perception of feminist literature from that batty, wizened old hag.

# What’s the one book you always recommend to just about everyone?
Snuff Fiction by Robert Rankin is the man’s magnum opus.

# Admit it, the librarians at your library know you on a first name basis, don’t they?
Sadly Lowestoft library has been turned into a wretched place where they try to encourages proles to read. As a consequence, it has a ‘Chillout’ zone, a ‘Chat Zone’, a ‘Teen Zone’ - various painted areas of the gloriously 60’s brutal open space, which means that I can choose to park my bum on any number of multicoloured sofas, flick through a meagre CD and DVD rack, or sod all else really, because there’s not one sodding book left in the place.

Not even excepting the time I found the fat mentalist wanking himself to death in the erotic section of Ottakars’ Norwich (Why are they always sandwiched inbetween the Sci-Fi and the Chick-Lit?), I have always enjoyed the visceral, audible experience of buying a book, clutching it as I go home and reading it, owning it and buying and constructing shelves to house them.

# Is there a book you absolutely love, but for some reason, people never think it sounds interesting, or maybe they read it and don’t like it at all?
I spent the bulk of my childhood failing to convince people to read Snuff Fiction by Robert Rankin, my adult life will probably be occupied with me trying to do the same with East of Eden by John Steinbeck

# Do you read books while you eat? While you bathe? While you watch movies or TV? While you listen to music? While you’re on the computer? While you’re having sex? While you’re driving?
No. I read on the throne.

# When you were little, did other children tease you about your reading habits?
Mercilessly. Either I was reading Robert Rankin novels, which I laughed so loud at that I was known as a weirdo, and obviously any Sci-fi in my hand banned me from polite society.

# What’s the last thing you stayed up half the night reading because it was so good you couldn’t put it down?
Probably ‘East of Eden’. But I was reading it during a night shift. I couldn’t go home and sleep at the time.

52/6 #8 - My Tank is Fight!

Posted on the August 12th, 2007 under 52/6 (2007), Books, TV / Media / Music by Dan

10/08/07 - My Tank is Fight by Zack Parsons
Twenty brilliant deranged yet entertained inventions from WW2, some of the also-rans in Hitler’s quest for the Allies-beating superweapon, discussed with a frankness, delicacy and humour that makes a book like this entertaining enough to wish you could make it required reading for history classes.

The Norwich Odeon (Formerly the UCI) now has a digital projector in screen 8, which is where Rachel & I watched Transformers for our 5th anniversary. Aside from my usual quibble of being tired of watching enormous blurs because they can’t be bothered to render in the detail and slow the footage down, the film’s awesome. A true spectacle.

52/6 #7 - Box 132

Posted on the August 7th, 2007 under 52/6 (2007), Books by Dan

5/8/07 Box 132 by Alex Shearer

It’s odd reading a novel about attempted adultery recommended to you by Cheryl ‘Dalek Box Set’ Bardell* in her second or third letter, written to me in year 9 (We would pass them between classes and sit reading and writing responses in the afternoon’s classes. Except I’d usually avoid her until the next day so I could type mine. Think my handwriting’s bad now? You should have seen it then). I can’t fathom why I remembered the title of the book, so many years later when I found it for £1 in Bookthrift, 9 (Fuck, I’m old) years later.

Sadly the context is more interesting than the novel, which has ‘Really low-budget British Feelgood romantic comedy’ (Which will bomb at the box office) written in it’s DNA like a stick of rock.

* My one reader will at least remember her by that moniker.

52/6 #6 - Picking Up the Pieces

Posted on the July 31st, 2007 under 52/6 (2007), Books by Dan

29/7/07 - Picking Up the Pieces by Paul Britton

The sequel to ‘The Jigsaw Man’ follows Britton as he tries to balance his criminal work with his job as a NHS psychologist and the cases here are far more personal. No longer do we deal with famous killers like Fred and Rose West or the Bulger killers, now we’re onto smaller stories about a man who killed rabbits because he couldn’t kill his abusive father, a woman who was ‘posessed’ with a repressed personality and a man who thought he was a werewolf. Read both back-to-back, and marvel at how Britton manages to solve a case using only a photo of the dead body - the rest of the information is missing.

52/6 #5 - The Jigsaw Man

Posted on the July 31st, 2007 under 52/6 (2007), Books by Dan

28/7/07 - The Jigsaw Man by Paul Britton

Paul Britton was a forensic psychologist before the term was invented. A police officer asked him once how he would go about creating a ‘profile’ to catch a killer, and in a flash this oop-north NHS doctor became single-handedly responsible for solving and catching some of Britain’s most lethal killers. Not only is this an amazing account of his work, it’s a brilliant insight into how psychological profiling works - not to mention all the way through, you’ll be thinking ‘Why hasn’t someone made *this* into a TV show yet?’. I might phone his agent and find out how much the rights are myself…

Either way, the scariest thing about this book is that it’s all true.

52/6 #4 - Tunnel Visions

Posted on the July 24th, 2007 under 52/6 (2007), Books by Dan

24/7/07 - Tunnel Visions by Christopher Ross

This book is either
a) A self-effacing witty discourse as to the mundanities of working on the London underground through the eyes of the world’s smartest man - a philosopher who has travelled the world, being blown up, taught kung-fu in the far east, smuggled things in the middle east and wound up a tubie for the intellectual pleasure of it all…

b) A self aggrandising hagiography (Like there’s any other kind) with embellishments of a wannabe Indiana Jones figure who presents himself as a ‘philosopher’ as he travels the world seeking enlightenment…

c) A thready narrative from a writer who has grasped hooking his audience but confuses his conclusion by having an entire section of the book as snatches of philosophical musing without conclusion.

Either way, I enjoyed it. Tomorrow’s book’s a little heavier though.