Driving points, you say knowingly

Home again home again. So much to write about - that was a lovely trip - but I'll restrain myself to writing about Catch 22, which the F-word bought for me to read on the train. Reading it contemporaneously with getting furious at the goddamn thugs in my industry who are willing to take complete advantage of our finest instincts for their own filthy rotten gain probably heightened how much I loved it, for love it I did. Lots of laugh out loud moments and a driving point. And find it hard to believe it was more relevant when it was written than it is now. It should be mandatory reading in highschool.

Speaking of driving points, though, it was a very boy book, and by boy book I'm not talking about all the raping and murdering and marching and moaning, but about the way it's written. Absolutely nothing left to the imagination, nothing for the reader to extrapolate - everything spelled out in detail, from the visuals to the theme. Not a beautiful woman sitting in the corner educating us through some sort of subtle Socratic dialogue, like a Jane Austen novel or something, no - about as subtle as a massive cock slammed down into a pile of mashed potatoes next to an 'Eat Me' sign.

I'm not complaining about it being an unsubtle boy book, though, because I'm a very boy girl, due to growing up in a house full of very boy boys and due to loving boys, and I like the occasional boy book. But I can't handle more than one such boy book a month or else I feel like I'm being nagged, even if I'm absolutely in tune and in agreement with the message. Maybe this is why a lot of boys don't read much. More subtle books are too girly for their poor boyish personas to bear, and then when they try to read the boy books they feel nagged. If I were them I'd probably just watch televised sport too.

I think there's also a problem with boy books usually being pretty fucking awful. You've got to be a fucking genius to nag people for 300 pages without it being a shitty book. So now we have naggy twats like Ian McEwan and Martin Amis dominating the boy book genre, both of whom compound their heavy handed crappiness by pretending they're also subtle, when they're totally totally not, and publishers keeping them in business just so boys can read a book every month or so without feeling girly.