2006 books

12) Jack Kerouac, Tristessa, 1960
Two trips into the junkie houses of Mexico City in pursuit of Tristessa, a beautiful Mexican morphine addict, make this one of Kerouac's most uncomfortable and tragic books. The "kickwriting" occasionally goes into overdrive and Kerouac often risks losing the reader if you don't keep up with the pace. It's simply a long meditation on a slow loss, and one (as usual) fuelled by plenty of drink and drugs.

2006 books

13) Jack Kerouac, On the Road, 1957 [ RE-READ ]
The 'big deal' about this book was mostly lost on me when I read it back in 1978. This time around having since learned more about Kerouac I can understand what set him off on his road back and forth across the US, but the excess of stimulants still leaves me non-plussed. Neal Cassady, incarnated here as Dean Moriarty and being both the heart and tao of the book and the whole Beat Generation, was the focus around whom the more observant Kerouac bracketed his own search in the character of Sal Paradise. There are some great passages and the last trip into Mexico feels like an encore to an already epic story, the whole of which is written in rather sentimental style compared to his later 'stream of consciousness' approach. I still think he was intellectually lazy in comparison to Burroughs or Ginsberg but On the Road – or more specifically Dean Moriarty himself – still takes you on a fast and thrill-seeking ride, the impetus of which is hard to shake off.

2006 books

14) Joseph Roth, The Legend of the Holy Drinker, 1939
A tale about the last days of a Paris down-and-out whose life is suddenly filled with small miracles, Roth drank himself to death in similar fashion at the age of 45, a month after he finished writing it. It's short and concise but enjoyable, a mature economy with words being very evident, and through this you get the sense of the last throes of an aimless life, a knot unravelling. Roth is worth exploring more.

2006 books

15) Michel Houellebecq, Lanzarote, 2000
Houellebecq at first seems deliberately trite, offensive and careless, but this is only to show the shallow arrogance of his protagonist. A pointless solitary holiday in Lanzarote leads to an encounter with a Rael-like extraterrestrial cult plus superficial graphic group sex with lesbians, then an unexpected look into what can happen to a life that has experienced too much. The superficiality of Lanzarote's narrator is quickly exposed, leaving him discomfited by more seismic sexual tensions that he glimpses elsewhere, a contrast mirrored directly in the geological surface of Lanzarote's once volcanic landscape. Clever if, necessarily, very adult stuff.

2006 books

16) Fritz Leiber, The Dealings of Daniel Kesserich, 1936
Not having read Fritz Leiber before, this is probably a good place to start as it's an early novella that was first published only as recently as 1996. A straightforward tale of time travel, mass delusion and grave-robbing, influenced in small part by H.G. Wells but more so by H.P. Lovecraft as Leiber was in correspondence with him at the time. All the right elements are here: murder, mystery, a mad scientist, strange neighbours and an undercurrent of horror, to the degree that it reads pretty much like classic Lovecraft in all but name.

2006 books

17) Karel Capek, R.U.R., 1920
The Czech play that gave us the word 'robot' and one that I suspect would still make for a good performance, especially the lively prologue. It goes where you mostly expect, taking a docile humanoid robotic workforce, winding them up and setting them on the rampage to world domination. Good fun too, and the mighty Capek wrote with a modicum of originality, saying things that have often been rehashed by lesser skiffy down the years.

I shouldn't laugh, but...

What's the one thing a Virgin stewardess has got that a British Airways stewardess hasn't?
A BA rejection letter...