Smithereens, 101 Places, Country of the Blind, Brought to Bed and Lullaby

- "Smithereens"

I was visiting Big City when the floods came. I had one spare t-shirt and pair of underwear, my basic toiletries, some I.D. cards and my mum’s copy of David Copperfield, which I was halfway through. It was the only book I had with me, stranded from home, with no power and limited phone signal. Two days into my gruelling routine of sitting around, reading, getting up to walk down the road and check the water level, going to the loo, sitting around more, and checking the water level again, my brother offered me his collection of books. Hooray for brothers! Hooray for Micallef! I was about to throw bloody Copperfield in the river.

If you think Micallef is fucking hilarious, you will find most of this collection fucking hilarious. I am one of these people and I enjoyed it a great deal. I think I’ve mentioned before, here, that I rarely actually laugh at funny things I read. Because of that, books that make me actually laugh are exceptional. This was one of those.


- "101 Places Not to See Before You Die"

It will come across as petty, that I am making complaints about a flippant comedy book, but I’m doing it anyway. I do think a book should try to keep to its premise. Reading through place #89 not to see, “The Inside of a Spotted Hyena’s Birth Canal”, place #21, “An Outdoor wedding During the 2021 Emergence of the Great Eastern Cicada Brood”, and place #18, “A Stop on Carry Nations’ Hatchetation Tour”, the author had read something interesting and decided to make an excuse to include it.

There are no end of interesting tidbits that could be twisted to be “a place not to visit” – for a historical event, “XVille in year” (e.g. #34: “An Island off Germany’s East Coast, January 16, 1362”; #83: “Ancient Rome on or Around the Night of January 18, 64 A.D.”; #91: “The Yucatán Peninsula When a Giant Asteroid Hit the Earth”), say. But the whole point of picking up this book is that multiple versions of “1000 Places to See Before You Die” exist, and out of all the overhyped, expensive, crowded and/or disappointing tourist traps, many overlap with suggestions in these books. It’s funny to read about all the reasons not to bother, all the places that aren’t actually that interesting, all the reasons they’re overhyped. If you’re going to include joke entries and interesting facts about body farms (interesting, yes, common tourist destination, not yet), why not 1000 Places?

We’ve got place #59, “Stonehenge” (also the title page image, natch), #37, “Mount Rushmore”, #68, “Any Place Whose Primary Claim to Fame Is a Large Fiberglass Thing”, and #3, “Euro Disney”, and some of these write-ups are hilarious. I don’t see any good reason why the book couldn’t have been what it wanted to be.


- Country of the Blind

… Some of these are really good. Because clearly the whole internet gives a shit, these two were my favourites:
- Under the Knife
- The Remarkable Case of Davidson's Eyes


- Brought to Bed

If I ever wrote a book it would probably be a little like this, because this was more of a cracked list of interesting quotes, than a finished work. Still interesting. (This is 'Brought to Bed' by Madeleine Riley, about literary representations of the experience of childbirth in certain literature -- not 'Brought to Bed: Childbearing in America, 1750-1950', the medical history by Judith Walzer Leavitt)


- Lullaby

I’ve read that Chuck Palahniuk writes the same book over and over, but sometimes does it a bit better. Based on seeing ‘Fight Club’ and reading ‘Lullaby’, I’m going to assume that that is true. It saves me some reading time, because ‘Lullaby’ was actually one of three books I had on a list of ‘these actually look interesting, by Palahniuk’.

So I don’t think there’s much to say about it. It’s the same story he tells again and again. Some guy has some things wrong with him and he uncovers or creates some bizarre, semi-magical way of changing the world in increments, and philosophises a little on how we are all corporate drones in the meantime. The musing on how we’re all slaves being controlled by THE MAN would be less annoying if there was more acknowledgment of the fact that this is true for everyone, every time, every place. I get the impression that while Palahniuk has some idea that this is his expression of ‘the human condition’, and not purely a railing against modern culture, he falls a little too far into the pattern of sneering at the sheeple to make it an expression of human souls, rather than an expression of being a bit of a hipster dick.

A problem I have reading a lot of books is that my brain keeps threads on what other people reading the book might get from it, and why I have a problem with that, or the actual personality and viewpoints of the author, and why I might have a problem with that. You can choose to view that as a modern problem, with everyone living inside their own heads, or just part of a wider pattern where every culture has in-jokes and sardonicism and intertextual analysis.