Quoc Bao Bao itibaren El Limón, Nicaragua itibaren El Limón, Nicaragua

Because I went through a Henry Miller phase I thought I would read some of his lovah's work as well. At the time this was the only Anais Nin book in the bookstore where I was working. It was...okay. Erotica is not my thing, though, so who am I to judge?

When I was about fifteen, I watched American History X. And it was, I guess, really good. It was shocking, and it was brutal, and I think it made me cry. It probably crushed some of my illusions at just the right time. But was it that great? Quite apart from the fact that the ending was a cop-out, I'm not convinced. I have this niggling worm of a feeling somewhere deep inside my inner ear that it's somehow... easier to write (or make films about) deep heavy shit like that. You know, all happy families are the same, all unhappy families are different in their own way kind of thing. For all that I love extreme racial tension and post-apocalyptic journeys, I'm much more impressed by a book about a woman going to buy some flowers. I'd rather read about some ordinary girl trying to decide who to marry than about death and destruction. Provided it's beautifully written and perfectly realised, of course (which it has been. Extra points if you can guess which books I'm referring to). This is Tolstoy to Chekhov stuff, and I choose Chekhov. But really, what the fuck am I talking about? This book was very nearly great. The pacing was brilliant, I liked the weird new vocabulary and the lack of punctuation, the dialogue between the man and the boy was brilliant. And I've always thought that despite almost everything, life was still worth living because of the art and the music and the sheer inexplicable worthiness of learning stuff. But here you have a book where all of those things are gone. Every single book was swollen with damp! I could deal with everything else, but a post-apocalyptic world without books, I couldn't deal with. But then at the end it turned out there was something to live for, and I won't spoil it, it's clichéd enough to guess, but well done enough that it doesn't matter. Tears are cheap, but I didn't shed any. So I liked it a lot, and I'm going to go see the movie when it comes out ($6 tickets at Nova on a Monday, bargain), and what's more I'm going to hope the movie doesn't slaughter the book, and I'm going to avoid Justin Clemens' discussion of same, because he's an idiot. I also think there may well be something in what Bram said in his review: "I bet more than a few writers and would-be writers read this and thought, “Damn, if only I had written this first,” rather than the actually true statement of “Damn, I wish I could write something like this.” " But I didn't love this book. I still prefer Chekhov.