I'm thinking about instituting a 2 out, 1 in policy, in which I'm allowed to buy one book for every two I actually read. Not sure I've got the moral backbone to actually deny myself though. Although I am quite good on staying off hard drugs, booze and destructive activities, so buying books isn't the worst thing in the world.
In today are:
Luke Haines's second memoir, Post Everything. In case you've not heard of him, he was the monstrous and misanthropic lead singer of critically-loved and commercially negligible 90s band The Auteurs. Bad Vibes was a malevolent, wounded and hilarious account of his rise and fall during the Britpop era.
The Alastair Campbell Diaries Volume 3: Power and Responsibility. I love post-hoc rationalisation, and this is the mummy and daddy of all of them, given the huge number of immoral, amoral or just plain wrongheaded decisions requiring post-hoc rationalisation. Obviously even the full-stops aren't to be trusted, but it's compelling reading.
Iain Sinclair's new polemic, Ghost Milk on the cultural death of our cities under the weight of 'iconic' projects, 'regeneration' and capitalist homogenisation, played out on the margins of London. For some reason I didn't have a copy of his seminal Lights Out for the Territory either. If you like reading material that makes your head spin with a mix of horror, intellectual envy and admiration, he's the writer for you.
Finally - for academic purposes only, you understand, Mitzi Szereto's Pride and Prejudice: Hidden Lusts. I genuinely am interested in popular cultural appropriations of Austen (hence my love of Clueless), so this should be fascinating.
By the way: did I lend one of you my copy of Gender Trouble by Judith Butler? I can easily get another one, but I'd have to heavily annotate it again, and it's never the same. If you've got it, bring it back!
3 comments:
Speaking of which, have you finished with my Hamlet essay, Vole? Loaned it you in 1994. Hope it's not tucked under the lino in some student house with a yellowing copy of the Mail!
That's entertaining. I seem to be running and read one, buy three policy at the moment, which is doing bad things to my, well, my floor space, frankly. The shelves got full a long time ago. And then, of course, I read on in this post and think, hmm, Iain Sinclair, have never read, note to self.....
Totally recommended. First one I read was Landor's tower: the labyrinthine actual and mental voyage of a strange book dealer through Wales.
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