Christ where do I even start?

This is the story of a young mans love for his right hand — which is also a man eat­ing space para­site. Not to be con­fused with Midori No Hibi which is the story of a young mans love for his right hand — which is also a Japan­ese school girl.

There is a lot of murder and a few grue­some killings, some romance and at one point the right arm, whose name by the way, is Migi, turns into a giant penis. Laughs are had by all.

I have been brain dead lately and/or study­ing so there has not been a lot of time for actual enjoy­able read­ing — a comic about space para­site murder was per­fect for me. So if you find your­self in the same pos­i­tion you should check it out.

The Dun­dee Lib­rary non-fiction sec­tion strikes again.

It helps me get my read on.

And learn me some books.

(hil­ar­ity aside this is an inter­est­ing and well put together book and raises a lot of fas­cin­at­ing questions)

I dunno about this book. It is a mys­tery. It is also sort of nuts.

Only recently re-translated into Eng­lish from it’s ori­ginal Ger­man this book is the basis for a movie called Inno­cence that you may remem­ber. You know, it was the one that got every­one super pissed because there was a scene where little girls went swim­ming with no clothes on a lot of reac­tion­ary idi­ots were like OMG PEDOPHILLIA and every­one else was like LOL WHATEVS IT IS ACTUALLY A VERY GOOD MOVIE. You remem­ber that right?

Well any­way, Frank Wedekind’s Mine Haha, as fuck­ing nutty as it is, is obvi­ously worth read­ing just because it man­aged to piss every­one off so much. Which is why when I spot­ted it on pre-order over on amazon I thought ‘Fuck yeah!’ and ordered it for my birth­day. My birth­day which is on the 9th of Novem­ber. Which is much dif­fer­ent from the date when I actu­ally received the book, which was around the 15th of last month. Which was March. There was some sort of prob­lem with the pub­lisher etc, etc and what should have been a fairly simple exer­cise in inter­net com­merce end­ing up being a test of my resolve to just say ‘Fuck it!’ and can­cel my order.

Of course in the end I didn’t because like I said, Mine Haha is an inter­est­ing book, deal­ing as it does with sexual adoles­cence, naked 8 year olds and creepy theatre trips. It is how­ever, not much dif­fer­ent from Lucile Hadzi­halilovic’s movie adapt­a­tion (which fea­tures a bonus mas­turb­a­tion with glove scene) so you may want to save your­self the effort and skip it in favour of the film. Either is fine.

Please see entry below.

Occa­sion­ally you want to read a good, uncom­plic­ated book that doesn’t take too much con­cen­tra­tion and makes you laugh. When I feel like this I tend to dig out the Terry Pratch­etts from under­neath the bed, try to get rid of most of the dust and get to it.

They may not be the greatest example of lit­er­at­ure in the world but they are genu­inely funny, well char­ac­ter­ised and thought­ful. I like them a lot.

I loved this book. Actu­ally loved it. There is noth­ing about it that isn’t good.

A shinto exor­cist who doesn’t actu­ally believed in ghosts, a 21 month long preg­nancy and a locked room mys­tery in need of solv­ing. Awesome.

The only bad thing is the fact that so far this is the only book writ­ten by Kyogoku that’s been trans­lated into Eng­lish. He’s writ­ten like 9 mil­lion of the things so why can’t I read more of them already?

For­tu­nately, I guess, there’s always the anime adapt­a­tion of the second book in the Kyōgok­udō series, Mouryou no Hako and a movie of the same if you can track them down. But it’s still not a book is it?

I liked this book. I just don’t really know why.

Art­fully writ­ten, at times deliv­er­ing what it say on the cover and smart. Very smart.

It’s just that the sub­ject mat­ter and at times the author made me so mad I wanted to throw the thing through a win­dow. How­ever, I can’t help but think I was sup­posed to feel like that — that it was writ­ten pre­cisely to make me feel like that.

Mas­ter­ful cer­tainly and unashamedly manipulative.

Also sort of like read­ing an In Cold Blood ver­sion of Less Than Zero.

I can’t really think about any­thing clever or witty to say about this book.

So it’s just good ok? Insight­ful, funny, inter­est­ing: all that jazz.

Let’s face it no-one is ever going to ask me to con­trib­ute to a book blurb.

I am pretty sure every bas­tard on the planet is read­ing this book right now. Which is kind of embar­rass­ing because no-one wants to look like all they do is read things that have recently been in cinemas (because that’s what dumb people do).

But in this case it doesn’t mat­ter because The Girl with the Dragon Tat­too is very, very good and I’m glad the movie and the sub­sequent fem­in­ists bitch­ing pro­jec­ted it onto my radar.

Entirely worth it, com­mand­ingly con­ceived and put together and def­in­itely some­thing you should check out if you enjoy a tight, engross­ing thriller.

I’m not even sure what this book was about. It fea­tured a police officer, some pedo­philiac child murders, Aber­deen and a really bad atti­tude towards woman and that was about it. It didn’t seem to be a crime novel or a thriller and it cer­tainly wasn’t a police pro­ced­ural. All it seemed to be was ten days in the life of a smug, tal­ent­less bas­tard incap­able of solv­ing crimes without fall­ing into extreme coin­cid­ences. It was really, really bad as far as crime nov­els go and if it wasn’t for all the dead moles­ted chil­dren I’m fairly cer­tain no-one would have paid that much atten­tion to it.

So that’s a hint for any aspir­ing crime writers — rather than get good at your genre you should just write sen­sa­tion­al­ists fear mon­ger­ing shite.

Although occa­sion­ally funny enough to make me laugh out loud (mostly at the Scot­tish­isms), I would not recom­mend this book to anyone.

Read some James Ell­roy instead.