You know what's wrong with me?

Thursday, February 18, 2010 3:24 PM By Simon , In , , ,

The only writer I've read every single book of, every page, is Bret Easton Ellis. Not Jonathan Lethem (I couldn't get past the first page of the Omega comics), not Chuck Palahniuk (I've sworn off of him since reading Guts), not even my Childhood Beloved Louis Sacher (you know what? I don't like sequels. There, I said it). The depressingly glossy-grungy universe of American Psycho, Less Than Zero, and Rules of Attraction is the one I've been partially submerged in since I was eleven.

Out of that entire bunch, you know what the cheeriest one is? Rules of Attraction. The one that opens mid-sentence with a girl remembering getting raped apathetically, and involves a very graphic suicide and sex scenes that'd make Pamela Anderson cross her legs uncomfortably is, honestly, the lest bleak of his entire library. Sure, Lunar Park is genius and brilliant and I love it to death, and American Psycho spawned an awesome movie, but really. I used to have a soul, man.

The second closest, maybe, is Douglas Coupland. His genius novel, in My Humble Opinion, is Girlfriend in a Coma, but at least he made one that was so happy and sitcom-y in it's pacing and execution, JPod. Then there's The Gum Thief and Generation X...what was I talking about?

Yes...well, I need a writer that has a manageable amount of books for me to go through, that is not described with the words 'disaffected young people' or any synonyms of the sort, that has one book one may describe as 'genius', and that has written something in and about the twenty-first century, because I've been reading non-stop pre-seventies books an I'm sick to death of Cokes and jazz music described like porn.

Zadie Smith? The guy who wrote Crossing California? My beloved Marcus Alexander Hart?

I bring this up because I think I need to review more books. I read plenty, but I never have anything to say afterwards.

Well, g'day, humble people.

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