Other People's Lies

Well loneliness and depression, isolation from my friends and hellish commuting have certainly done wonders for my reading. Even fiction has sneaked its way back in, as you’ll have noticed from previous entries on Valis and Ecotopia. Two other recent reads from the non-factual section of the bookshelf have been the novels Sideways by Rex Pickett and Thinly Veiled Autobiography by James Delingpole. Both funny, both very male – perhaps this aspect of them appealed somehow to my new monadic self. I felt some alienation from some of the ‘masculine’ attitudes presented in both books (but perhaps, again, this is just my hang-up).

I’ve not seen Sideways the film, although I’ve long wanted to, without ever realising there was a novel preceding it. Well now I’ve successfully achieved the tick in the box to denote ‘read the novel before seeing the film’ I can feel relaxed about renting the DVD. Renting the DVD… Where have all the video stores gone (long time passing by)? Everyone just seems to buy the things now (suckers!) or apparently renting them via the net is trés populaire. But I always like to avoid anything with a monthly direct debit attached to it if I possibly can. Modern life seems to full of these things that come with monthly direct debits attached – mobile phones, Sky, broadband, plus-accounts, gyms etc. etc. – You know that shit job you hate? Well if you weren’t whacking out £££ on all this useless crap every month – you could afford to go and do something else.

Anyway, rent the DVD – mind you it’s the sort of thing you see in Megastores for £4.99 these days – and how much less than that does it cost to rent a DVD in 2006?

Perhaps the film is better than the book? Write in if you’ve done both and let me know. It certainly made me want to learn more about wine. We could all do with more food and drink awareness – bring back taste!

Thinly Veiled Autobiography has no associated film, does include wine (but informs you little about it) and has the great advantage of being set in the UK and being written by a proper Britisher. So if you’re the same you can relax in its un-exoticness. Mind you its written by/about a public schoolboy who went to Oxford and wrote for the Telegraph and hung out with loads of posh rich people (its also about his anxiety about not being posh and rich enough to fit in) – so explained like that it hardly appeals and frankly you’d have had a hard time selling it to me with that write-up – but its also goddamn bloody funny. Humour is the great redeemer – and its the comedy of embarrassment to boot!

I only picked it up in the first place because I read Delingpole’s review of Shroom in Literary Review. In his author blurb, it talked about his preference for mushrooms over acid – since during a LSD trip he’d had his soul stolen by a man at the end of his cigarette called Mr Migarette. You can read all about that in Thinly Veiled Autobiography – reason enough surely?