Quote:
Originally Posted by Charlie Parker  George Pelecanos's Down By The River Where The Dead Men Go |
I think I’m going to pick this up and give it a try sometime over the next few weeks.
Currently reading
Nanotales by Ziv Navoth, which is just as silly as you’d expect from the name. Around a hundred ultra-short stories, each only taking around five minutes to read. Nice wee snapshots, it reminds me of
253 but is nowhere near as good.
Oh aye, favourite books. Erm …
253 by Geoff Ryman
A novel that covers seven minutes of time on a London Underground train. Each page is a biography of one passenger, telling what’s on their mind as they sit for this seven minutes. 253 passengers, 253 intertwined stories. Who’d have expected a book like that to actually manage to contain a narrative, let alone a shock ending? I lent my copy to an ex in Oregon when leaving her to come home, and it took me fucking
ages to get hold of a replacement copy.
Needle in the Groove by Jeff Noon
I fucking love Jeff Noon’s books. Everything from his psychedelic sci-fi fiction to his experimental attacks on the English language and attempts to be the next Burroughs or Joyce. The man’s a genius.
Needle in the Groove is his masterpiece, halfway between conventional narrative and trippy experimentation. For starters there are no sentences, no full-stops. Instead the book is written in a kind of verse. Not that it rhymes, but is has rhythm. It doesn’t rock, but it
rolls. Because the central conceit here being that music is a drug, both metaphorically and literally, the fact that it’s hard to read without building an internal rhythm and soundtrack is just beautiful. We follow the un-named bass player into a world of experimentation that he thought he had grown out of, joining and rejuvenating the best (unheard-of) band in the world as they reinvent music with the help of a new liquid recording medium. Everything starts to unravel and fall apart when he discovers that the other band members are
injecting the liquid music and getting high on their own creativity.
Pattern Recognition by William Gibson
Cayce is a coolhunter with an almost supernatural talent. She’s psychologically (and that manifests itself psychosomatically in physical symptoms) allergic to branding; to graphic and product identities. The stronger the brand, the harsher her reaction. She has built a globetrotting career around this as a sort of guinea pig for corporations wanting to create new retail brands. They show her proposed designs and if she has a reaction, it’s good. If not, the design isn’t working yet. Cayce gets drawn into playing detective on the trail of an elusive video artist who is posting sections of narrative online anonymously. Every advertising agency in the world wants to capture this incredible talent, but nobody can find him or her. Cayce ricochets from the Eastern Bloc to Tokyo, London to New York on the trail of this elusive auteur. It’s a lot more exciting than that sounds, and uses the exploration of corporate identity as a metaphor for Cayce’s exploration of her own personal identity.
The Fuck-up by Arthur Nersesian
Nersesian excels at the sort of dirty, grungy, fucked-up life stories that can only really work in an eighties New York setting.
Dogrun is a brilliantly redemptive tale of a girl who recovers from her no-good boyfriend’s death by throwing herself into a riot grrrl band.
Chinese Takeout covers the transformation of a penniless artist into a slightly less penniless artist via a doomed affair with a beautiful junkie.
Suicide Cassanova is just plain
wrong, lulling you into identifying with one of the lowest, filthiest, sex-obsessed paedophile stalkers ever committed to paper.
The Fuck-up though, is his best novel so far. It follows a guy through a rough year or so downtown, as he loses his girl, his friends, and his self-respect, dropping further down the job ladder with each position he takes. He ends up in a world of gay porn cinemas, low-rent rent-boys, and murder for hire.
Going Postal by Stephen Jaramillo
Another novel about an American loser in his early twenties. I have a thing for urban fantasies, I guess. Call me an old romantic. Steve Reeve comes from a long line of mailmen and is determined not to be one. He’s also unhealthily obsessed with the history of mailmen who have ‘gone postal’ and shot their colleagues. The record is thirty-something victims before being taken down by the police. Steve thinks he could do better. Steve has a temper. His Dad (a mailman) has just given him a gun. He doesn’t know who to shoot first. That’s all just the pyschological background for another story about a guy who loses everything but the will to live and builds a new life from the bottom up. The beauty here is in the details: Jaramillo paints the finest description of a night out in the big city that I’ve ever read.
