Good Reader

When I first joined the creative writing course I took last year, one of the first things our lecturer said was that good writers are good readers. A simple and clearly correct thought certainly, but one which I confess I have sometimes failed to live up to. As a rule the only time I spend reading books these days is in the half hour lunch break at work. Since I now drive it would be unwise for me to continue to read on my daily commute, as I once did in between curses aimed toward the collected drivers of the North Yorkshire branch of First Buses. So one of my resolutions for this fine year was to read more books, and to read more widely than I am used to.

In order to aid my effort, I have signed up to GoodReads, which will help me track what I have read this year, as well as let me contribute reviews of those books, which the writer in me will benefit from by trying to get a deeper understanding of what I have read, what I liked and disliked about it, and all that Jazz. I’ll also stick these reviews up here, because I am a shameless whore for self promotion. I’m already on book number three for the year, which sounds impressive until you realise I started the first one last year, the second one is only 200 pages long and I only started the third one today. Not quite as impressive but a good start to the year. I’ve also got a to-read pile that is a nice mix of classics and new, and different genres and levels of accessibility.

American Pyscho – Bret Easton Ellis

The perennial ‘I must get round to reading that’ American Classic, all my information around this book came from the buzz that accompanied the film. As is so often the case everyone who read the book maligned how little of the book’s greatness made it into the film, and since I loved the film I made a mental note to read it someday. While I am now exceptionally glad I did, unlike the film I will not be feeling any need to revisit the book again.

The story of one man’s descent into an utterly unbridled insanity that goes completely unnoticed and unremarked in the greed centred Wall Street scene of the late Eighties, this book has a tremendous sadist’s eye view on the world. Nothing is left aside in Bateman’s life, not the inane conversations about restaurant bookings, the obsession with eighties pop music, or the stomach turning gore drenched descriptions of his killing sprees. After reading the book I had a conversation with someone who loved the book but couldn’t get past the gore. I felt the same, which is why by the end I was skipping whole chunks until things went back to normal (for Bateman anyway) again. In fact, I think this is what Ellis wants us to do. He signposts the need to skip ahead early on when he has Bateman spend five pages of dense unpunctured text going on about Genesis and Phil Collins. To me he is saying to his audience ‘yes this man is utterly unhinged, why don’t you go and make a cup of coffee and when you get back he’ll be back to taunting the homeless or something more interesting.’

The whole book is like one great long diatribe against a cruel and empty world, a world that taunts the unfortunate and the poor, that sees anyone not like them as utterly devoid of merit from a man who looks around him at this world without meaning and jumps to the wrong conclusions about his own place in it. It is both captivating and repulsive, and as the book goes along and Bateman gets less hinged so too does the gore and the madness. The utterly unfulfilling end only adds to the bewildering state the novel left me in. A tour de force of language, of imagination and well worth reading, even if I’ll never want to read it again.

How To Leave Twitter – Grace Dent

As someone who has an often fluid relationship with the world’s greatest networking site I wasn’t sure what I’d make of this going in. The title suggests a missive against social networking and yet it comes from someone who a quick check reveals is still very much ‘on Twitter.’ I also saw that many reviewers found the book preachy and dictatorial over how should behave on Twitter, and non-tweeters might find it all too dense and difficult to get into.

I can kind of see their point to an extent, but I also think they are missing the point entirely. This is an extended ode to God’s own social network, from someone who has a huge amount of affection for it and happens to also be a thoroughly entertaining writer. And that is the point; this is Grace Dent’s view on how the twittersphere should be, based on how she enjoys using it. Because that is what makes Twitter such an enjoyable experience, it is what YOU make of it. You shape your own Twitter experience by choosing what you post, who you follow, it is your own personal corner of the internet. Think someone is irritating on Twitter? Hit the unfollow button and problem solved. Dent’s book is quite vociferous in setting out her opinions of what the do’s and don’ts are of Twitter, but that doesn’t mean you have to live by them.

There are parts of Dent’s Twitter that I don’t recognise at all. She alludes to a constant stream of flirty sexual contact between tweople, but as a man who has been in a relationship since I joined I’ve never partaken, nor seen much evidence of it in my timeline. Or it could be that I’m so utterly dreadful at flirting that I utterly missed the massive amounts of flirtatious behaviour right under my nose. I also disagree hugely with some of the parts where she points out behaviour that she sees as unacceptable on Twitter. I’m pretty sure she’d unfollow me within a couple of days out of boredom. But that doesn’t really matter because that’s her view, not mine, and she puts it across with flair and excellently crafted humour that means that even when I disagree with her I’m still chuckling at her observations.

As a directional tool for how to use Twitter, it’s flawed. Which means it’s a good thing that isn’t what it is. It’s a personal take on a modern phenomenon which will have its audience of Twitter users chuckling at its honesty and its ire, as long as they are not so utterly pompous as to think they themselves have all the answers. I’m pretty sure Grace Dent doesn’t really think she does either, but it’s fun watching her pretend she does.