Read/reading: The Rules of Attraction by Bret Easton Ellis, The Curse of Lono by Hunter S. Thompson and Ralph Steadman.

Not Ellis’s finest work, but there are points where it hit me right in the gut. There’s this mood that Ellis gets across sometimes that (and forgive me for being pretentious here) feels like a sense of melancholy at seeing the world a little clearer than most others, and it’s something he does startlingly well. What pushes this below his other books is a noticeable absence of plot - nothing really happens, here, and his stream-of-consciousness style isn’t very forgiving. Still an interesting read, though.

I have no idea where I’m going to keep Lono while I’m reading it. I have the huge hardback version.

Read/reading: The Casual Vacancy by JK Rowling, The Rules of Attraction by Bret Easton Ellis.

Hm. This one was fucking dark. Beginning with a massive trigger warning, there’s also a laundry list of things that would never fly in the Potter books, and sometimes you get the impression that Rowling’s enjoying herself a little too much in being quite so grotesque.

That said, it’s as well-written as her work for children, with all the added narrative and verbal complexity you’d expect from an adult novel, and while the ending leaves you feeling totally hollow (this is not a pleasant book) it is still a good ending in the sense of it being impressive. You’re led to care about some truly loathsome characters, and it’s a brilliant indictment of where small-town thinking can get you. In a nutshell: if you read the Daily Mail, don’t read this.

The Rules of Attraction is about the only fiction paperback I have that I haven’t read, and I’m not sure why - I picked it up a few years back for £2, and never got around to it. Time to start!