mind-blowing

House Of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski

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PREMISE: A young couple – Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist Will Navidson and his partner Karen Green – move into a small house on Ash Tree Lane. It soon becomes clear that something is terribly wrong – their new home is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside. What happened next is loosely recorded on videotapes and in interviews, and impelled an eccentric old man to compile – on loose sheets of paper, stained napkins, crammed notebooks – a definitive account of what took place at Ash Tree Lane that seems to unveil a thrilling and terrifying history.

When you have a minute, go on Goodreads and check out some of the reviews on this book. Particularly the 1 star ones. I could pick any at random to make my point but I’m choosing one of the twattiest by a guy named David (cool name, bell end) who states his “overpowering disgust at the people who continue to naively read this book“. He relates the authoring of this book to the downfall of society (?) and concludes by saying “I fear for the future of humanity”. What a wanker.

I love this book and would urge anyone to read it. It’s like nothing you’ve ever read before. But that’s just my opinion. Some people clearly don’t like it and some do. That’s how reading works. And, in general, any type of art. I’ve read a few books I didn’t like but I can’t think of any time I then felt disgust at people who did like them. Fuck off David. I fear for the future of humanity mainly due to colossal fucknuggets like you.

American Tabloid by James Ellroy

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PREMISE: We are behind, and below, the scenes of JFK’s presidential election, the Bay of Pigs, the assassination—in the underworld that connects Miami, Los Angeles, Chicago, D.C….

Where the CIA, the Mob, J. Edgar Hoover, Howard Hughes, Jimmy Hoffa, Cuban political exiles, and various loose cannons conspire in a covert anarchy…

Where the right drugs, the right amount of cash, the right murder, buys a moment of a man’s loyalty…

Where three renegade law-enforcement officers—a former L.A. cop and two FBI agents—are shaping events with the virulence of their greed and hatred, riding full-blast shotgun into history….

My all-time favourite book. Read it more times than I can remember and it’s an absolute fucking monstrous ride through America’s shittest period every time I read it. Follow it up with The Cold Six Thousand and Blood’s A Rover and you have the finest body of non-fiction fiction ever written. Totally masterful and, for me, something everyone should read if you want to understand even a little more of the assassinations of JFK, RFK and MLK, the Bay of Pigs, Vietnam and the utter corruption of the United States. This may be fiction, but it’s likely right on the money.

The Deluge by Stephen Markley

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PREMISE: In the first decades of the 21st century, the world is convulsing, its governments mired in gridlock while a patient but unrelenting ecological crisis looms. America is in upheaval, battered by violent weather and extreme politics. In California in 2013, Tony Pietrus, a scientist studying deposits of undersea methane, receives a death threat. His fate will become bound to a stunning cast of characters—a broken drug addict, a star advertising strategist, a neurodivergent mathematician, a cunning eco-terrorist, an actor turned religious zealot, and a brazen young activist named Kate Morris, who, in the mountains of Wyoming, begins a project that will alter the course of the decades to come.

From the Gulf Coast to Los Angeles, the Midwest to Washington, DC, their intertwined odysseys unfold against a stark backdrop of accelerating chaos as they summon courage, galvanize a nation, fall to their own fear, and find wild hope in the face of staggering odds. As their stories hurtle toward a spectacular climax, each faces a reckoning: what will they sacrifice to salvage humanity’s last chance at a future?

This is probably up there in my top 5 favourite books of all time. Scarily, eerily, worryingly-as-fuck accurate in terms of (a) what’s likely to happen with climate change and the planet and (b) what can happen when people as stupid and as stupidly dangerous as Trump continue to get into power. An absolute must-read.

2023 Portland Award winner.