I saw this tweet today via my friend Kate and it sums up what I'm trying to arrest by keeping this blog: How to read books: 1. Buy new book 2. Put book on shelf with other books that you don't have time to read because you keep buying books 3. Buy more books — TechnicallyRon (@TechnicallyRon) January 11, 2020 Unread books on our bookshelves have a weird power that depends on the assumptions we make about them. In my experience, they can sit there for many years merely expressing that vague aroma of rich potential - which becomes increasingly mixed over time with a keen sense of rebuke for having neglected them. Eventually the shelves speak of little more than shame, as the books sit unindulged and my mind goes on unenlightened by their contents. This is especially true of books by people I know (sorry friends), books that were given earnestly by friends and family, and books on loan to me. Beyond a certain point, neither keeping them a moment longer nor returning ...
Strange to start this project with a sequel, but Doomed , the second part of Chuck Palahniuk 's Damned trilogy, just happened to be the book I was reading when I started making the list . So here it is. Palahniuk is one of those authors I have long kept going back to, having enjoyed several of his early novels and short stories as well as his Non-Fiction collection. He's best known for Fight Club and after that perhaps for the utterly horrifying Guts from his collection Haunted, which is one of the few short stories I know of to have gone viral, after it featured in Playboy . I read part one, Damned, a couple of years ago. That booked pushed a number of my buttons, being set in Hell (I can never get enough visions of the Underworld) and narrated by a sardonic teenager (which is who I really am, deep inside, clearly). I recall it being in turns entertaining and baffling. Sadly I got much more of the latter from this second instal...