YOU DON'T NEED TO BREATHE, THAT'S SO MENTAL

Seriously, so funny!

YOU'LL BE BURIED IN THE CLOTHES THAT YOU NEVER WORE

"So I’ve always had this illusion, right? A fantasy that I've found myself caught up in. I had this very naïve preoccupation with the idea of the struggling, fucked up artist. In a way, I guess I felt like in order to be creative you had to live on the edge of madness and self-destruction. My heroes may have been great artists, but they were almost all tormented people. Charles Bukowski died an alcoholic. William Burroughs shot heroin for more than fifty years. Donald Goines was shot to death in a drug deal gone wrong. Yukio Mishima had himself ritually beheaded in the center of Tokyo."
- Nic Sheff, author of Tweak: growing up on methamphetamines, on his blog, nicsheff.blogspot.com

I read Sheff's book about a year ago, and I have to say it's nice to see that he's realised that that idea is, truth to be told, really fucking lame. It's such a boy thing, isn't it? Living like Bukowski, moving to some big city, taking drugs and just being so interesting and self-destructive and well...just so awesome, really. All the time. And of course, forgetting the writing part of it all or writing things that have been written a million times before by the guys they're trying to emulate. It's just so pretentious. Anyway, having said that, I appreciate that that was (obviously) not the only reason as to why Sheff started taking drugs and eventually got addicted to crystal meth. I'm just saying, for someone like me, what with all the depressions, the OCD and the in and out of therapy all the time, it just seems pretty fucking self-indulgent/stupid/lame to actively try to add some more drama to your life.

Read Among other things, I've taken up smoking, then Salinger's Franny and Zooey (loved it, cannot believe I didn't read it earlier) and now I'm reading The graduate by Charles Webb. It's really good.

I TOOK MY HAND OUT OF MY POCKET, UP CAME A FIST, ONE MORE ABUSE

So, after I finished The beach, I re-read The Coma and The tesseract, also by Alex Garland. They are (obviously) awesome. Highly recommend them. Today, my books from adlibris finally arrived; Elizabeth Kostova's The swan thieves and Among other things, I've taken up smoking (one of the best titles ever) by Aoibheann Sweeney.

FRAGGING. BAGGING. KLICKS. GRUNTS. GOOKS. CHARLIE. MIA. KIA. LZ. DMZ. FNG. FUCKING NEW GUY

Read The catcher in the rye by J.D. Salinger and I really liked it. I read it the first time when I was 14, but it just didn't register. I remember a couple years back though, a friend of mine told me that she thought I resembled Holden Caulfield. "I just imagine that you go on about things the same way he does", she said. And I was like "What, do I seem that close to a having a nervous breakdown?" Haha. I don't know though. Perhaps when I was younger I was a bit like him, but not now.

Anyway, I'm re-reading Alex Garland's The beach. Look, I know I go on and on about that book in this blog, but I just can't get over it. I'm so bad at describing why I like books (so glad I'm gonna be studying English literature for 3 years), but I'll try. It's the way it's written, that somewhat staccato-ish flow, the use of war terms, the way you just recognize yourself in Richard, the way Garland depicts his slow descent into madness, and the way he describes how easily your ideas of what is right and what is wrong can change. And the dreams/visions Richard has of meeting Daffy. Oh, I don't know. I really am horrible at describing books, and I just can't do The beach justice; I can't praise it enough. I know a lot of people have seen the movie and thought it sucked (which I didn't but it wasn't very good either) but they changed things around too much (I mean, Richard's American in the movie for Chrissake. I think Leonardo Dicaprio is an amazing actor, but you just don't change things like that. Richard is so typically English. It's like High Fidelity; what the fuck were they thinking?). So do me a favour, just skip the movie and READ THE BOOK WHATEVER YOU DO. I mean, it's just so fucking good.

HOW DO YOU STOP YOURSELF DOING A BAD THING IF IT ONLY HURTS YOU?

Started reading The outcast by Sadie Jones yesterday, finished it today. So now I find myself, yet again, in that "What the fuck am I supposed to read?"-state. Hate it.

WHERE DO YOU GO NEXT WHEN YOUR FIRST NOVEL TURNS OUT TO BE THE FASTEST-SELLING DEBUT IN AMERICAN LITERARY HISTORY?

I just learned that Elizabeth Kostova (author of The historian) has pusblished another book, The swan thieves. I read The historian last summer and while I didn't think it was especially well-written (though it seems like many of the critics thought it was), I did like the story. It's not one of those books that I'm likely to forget, though that may have more to do with the fact that it was so completely unlike the books I normally go for than it being really good. Anyway, I'm excited about this new one, but a bit disheartened after having read the reviews, which are extremely mixed. Here's what Kostova herself says about The swan thieves and if you scroll down, you can read what The Observer thinks about it:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/jan/24/swan-thieves-kostova-review-okelly

JUST FOR THE RECORD, I DO NOT CONSIDER MYSELF AN EVIL PERSON (THOUGH HOW LIKE A KILLER THAT MAKES ME SOUND!)

"One likes to think there's something in it, that old platitude amor vincit omnia. But if I've learned one thing in my short sad life, it is that that particular platitude is a lie. Love doesn't conquer everything. And whoever thinks it does is a fool."
- The secret history, Donna Tartt