| Page Contents | ||
|---|---|---|
| Zoe Clarins | The Sex Business | 2008 |
This book describes sexual interactions stripped of embellishement or emotion and achieves a disturbing effect. While part of you feels horrified, part of you feels attracted. Where else but in transactional sex can you feel a dark pleasure without crossing a moral line?
| Muriel Coleridge | The Science of the Novel | 2004 |
That looks like a made up name. Anyway, Coleridge argues that what drives novels forwards are decision points or logic gates where events can veer in either of two directions. Perhaps that's why most lives cease to resemble novels - most lives are driven, through a kind of fatal inevitability, to a state of shrivelled options, so that even the choices that exist seem so shrunken in their range hardly to count as variety. There's more to Coleridge than logic gates but not much. A good if depressing read for a hard stool psychologist.
| Denise Forbes | Losing and Making Friends | 2002 |
Yes, she's Dennis Forbes' wife, but she probably thinks of him as her husband. Of course, few would read this book without an agenda. So, let's assume you're afflicted by Forbes' astutely observed, three-pronged friendship dilemma: on the one hand, dwindling circle of friends through natural wastage - migration, diverging pairings and interests, inertia; on the other hand, lengthening times between encounters with friends where the friendships survive only through shared nostalgia or habit; and, on the other, other hand, unfilled and seemingly unfillable vacancies, there being few prospective candidates with complementary gaps. Let's assume, moreover, that you project these trends forwards with alarm, wondering where you'll end up. Will this book help? These things can be written down but can they be taught? Could reading about them, while filling the void during the act of reading, increase self-consciousness, unnaturalness and desperation: the sort of unattractive qualities that repel others, inverting the aim of the book? Ask your intuition.
| Dennis Forbes | Reflections from the Streets | 2003 |
We're on a mission, right, so we read books for clues. The shiny metal cover gets your attention, if you're vain, but is misleading, because this is a collection of aphorisms that Forbes, an urban taxi driver, dreamed up over a twenty year period. Good idea to write them down, Forbes, we wish we'd done the same.
"It's getting harder to be an idiot. You need more qualifications."
"There is light at the end of the tunnel, but the light is black."
"Everything that can be done badly, will be being done worse."
| Judy Ann Holden | Health Tips for Paranoids | 2006 |
An essential book if you're both neurotic and a hypochondriac. "Avoid breathing if you're walking through the air behind someone who coughs" sounds sensible, for three minutes anyway, whereas "don't look in the window or go into charity shops for conditions you don't want to get" sounds barmy: surely it's all right as long as you don't touch anything. A paranoid, neurotic, hypochondriac friend told me he was horrified to read some slants he'd overlooked. That's a recommendation, by the way.
| Derek Meerins | Fraud: a Handbook | 2001 |
This is an interesting read. While most books about fraud tell you how to prevent it, this one tells you how to commit it. The author had plenty of time to reflect on these matters while in prison. What if he's wrong, and you don't notice the flaws? Good luck.
| Dr Hilary O'Uest | The Anatomy of Failure | 2005 |
Since ninety seven percent of endeavours of any kind fail, why are a hundred percent of books about endeavours about successes? Good question, even if the answer is obvious. Another ninety seven is: ninety seven percent of people whose endeavours fail, never try again. Dr O'Uest assembles these and other statistics, interviews hoards of the silent three percent who persist, sees them as successes, and treats us to some startling, speculative, psychological twaddle. Her book couldn't find a publisher. Undaunted, she published it herself, started a magazine on the same theme, "Fail Together", got invited to give some lectures, went on tour, and pretty soon became ineligible for her own material.
| Dr Esclo Ryder | Salt-free Restaurants in the UK | 2007 |
This slim volume is a droll social comment. For years, the health pages of newspapers and magazines have run regular articles about the health benefits of a low salt diet. In response, how many salt-free restaurants have evolved in the UK? That's right: none! If you want to eat healthily, you can't eat out.
| Veronica Scales | Split in Two | 2009 |
Half way through this bleak dissection of a relationship breakdown, Scales remembers that we might like to read about the initial attraction, a description so unconvincing that one wonders if Scales is interested or even remembers. In which case, she wants to cling to her partner simply because he's there. Scary.
| Chloe Reid Shaw | The Multiplier Effect | 2000 |
Article in a colour supplement. The common sense observation that anything you see will occur a million times elsewhere and elsewhen. If you see a tap dripping and a light left on, there will be a million taps dripping and lights left on, and not just today, but every day. If you see food left on people's plates in a cafe, or food left over on a kitchen table after a party, ... . If you see small household items discarded, heaped under a lamppost at the side of the road, ... . Whatever you see, apply the multiplier effect, and despair.
© Stephen Balmer