Books I've actually finished lately: 36

James Sallis does Vernon God Little meets Lolita in post-Palahniuk Breaking Bad white-trash noir Napoleon Dynamite with guns. For girls.

12 out of 50 of the 'coolest' books (EVER!!)

Here, according to Shortlist.com are the 50 coolest books in existence.

By which they, of course, mean novels. All but two written in English (I include Trainspotting). All but one written after WW2.

Of which I have read approx. 12. To wit (and in Shortlist's order):

On The Road
Naked Lunch
Slaughter-House-Five
Generation X
A Confederacy of Dunces
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Trainspotting
Fight Club
Watchmen
The Great Gatsby

and halves of Middlesex and The Crying of Lot 49.

I make no apology for the remainder, nor any judgement on the issue of 'cool'. The caveats and small print one might apply to such a list, however (any list of this nature, but this one in particular), would/probably ought to include books I regret bothering with (Naked Lunch); books that have certainly deterred me from reading anything else by the same author (Lot 49) and/or books I have no intention of reading (Dice Man, Fear of Flying, Neuromancer, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, The Wasp Factory, Morvern Callar, The Secret History); authors I have persevered with but whose books turn out all to be remarkably similar (Kerouac, Coupland); authors not represented here by their best work (Fitzgerald, Vonnegut, HST); authors by whom I have read other works (Hemingway, Calvino, Heller, Ballard, Amis, Bukowski, Murakami, Orwell, Capote, Wolfe, Franzen, Chabon, DeLillo); and books I have consumed, instead, as film (American Psycho, Clockwork Orange, Perfume, One Flew..., Nineteen Eighty-Four, and - if it can be counted - Howl).

Palahniuk - in context

You wake up at Meigs Field. You wake up at SeaTac. You wake up at O'Hare. You are Chuck's Exhausted Location Scout.

(Non-)fiction

The most I can ever do is write things down. To remember them. The details. To honour them in some way.

- Chuck Palahniuk, Fugitives and Refugees: a walk in Portland, Oregon

Semantics laid bare

In Chuck Palahniuk's wilfully quirky - not to say 'patchy' - travelogue of his home town, the author offers us (should we be interested) 'a list of places to get lucky in Portland'.

Only question is whether luck, per se, has anything to do with the case where the listed premises - sex shops, clubs, brothels, etc. - are concerned (where, frankly, luck ought to be rendered moot by cash).

Beyond

The only trouble with the fringe is, it does tend to unravel.

- Chuck Palahniuk, Fugitives and Refugees: a walk in Portland, Oregon