Finished this Sunday last the Noel Coward's diaries and very interesting they were too.

Still plowing through Churchill's The Second World War.

Reading a biography of Edgar Allan Poe by Jeffrey Meyers which I bough the first edition hard back in 1992, but only just got around to reading it.

Also on the go some mediocre biography's on Duke Ellington and Aleister Crowley.

I like to have several books on the go at once now, takes me years to read a book, unless it really puts the hook in me. Don't read fiction anymore and haven't done for a great many years now.

Ninety-Two in the Shade by Thomas McGuane

I'm a big fan of the Beats, especially the holy trinity of Kerouac, Burroughs and Ginsberg. But I think Burroughs is the most relevant to these times, he mapped the psychic topography and offered procedures to protect yourself from indoctrination and humilation before the gods.

Alan Johnson 'This Boy'. London Labour MP who is less of a careerist than the new breed. Interesting observations on West London in the 50s and 60s.

'The Black Gang' by Sapper

Upper class hero Bulldog Drummond and his friends work as undercover vigilantes to defend Blighty from Bolshevism. All the work of foreigners, Jews and bent politicians. By page 10 he has already taken the cat of nine tails to a couple of them - ' flog them to within an inch of their lives. "It is the punishment for their method of livelihood." By the next chapter he has rendered the dodgy MP completely insane and fit only for the madhouse. A period piece. Drummond speaks like Bertie Wooster, old bean.

Surprised it got past the politically correct commissars in the public library.

Les Particules élémentaires by Houellebecq

Dick's contemporaries have not aged very well at all, he was a great philosophical writer. Between him and Burroughs, you've got all the tools to protect yourself from the constant psychic attack of our times e.g. the Liverpool Care Pathway. The abuse of language is reptilian. And it's all around.

Charles Portis - True Grit
Deleuze & Guattari - A Thousand Plateaus (You can take the grad student out of school, etc etc)

I think next up I want to read Year of the Machete, an oral history of the Rwandan genocide. I used to read a lot of African literature in High School, as the dry and pitch black African sense of humour really appeals to me. It tends to go from 0-100 and back very quickly, something that endeared me to a lot of West African folks when I lived in London.

Last edited by mhalat (2017-06-28 18:37:07)