Disaccumulation Briefing No.3

MailerMailer’s book on Chicago was great, but I have a Mailer anthology. I never got around to Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities, and I have too much to do, and it is too many centimetres wide for my ‘circumstances’. I’m keeping Bauhaus To Our House though. Black Dahlia by James Ellroy I read, but cannot for the life of me remember why or what I got from it.

I’m getting rid of Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler, I also sent Ghosts in the Machine to Barnardo’s. He was a dodgy geezer, a rapist, and his victims included Orwell’s wife.

I just got rid of Hell’s Angels and Fear and Loathing by Hunter S. Thompson. Frankly, I find the fetish of supposed transgression that these books peddle infantile these days. This stuff seeped into mainstream culture and I don’t think that’s such a good thing now. I do like Roy Harper’s ‘Hell’s Angel’s though, from Flat, Baroque and Beserk.

Jay McInery and Brett Easton Ellis were a shout from their time, they did their work, but aren’t needed on the shelf anymore. Douglas Coupland was and is their heir, but I am only keeping Generation X, Shampoo Planet and Life After God have gone.

Diary of a Nobody by George & Weedon Grossmith is great, a real lesson in how not to be, but not a place I need to revisit.

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