Tag Archives: Martin Amis

How I Pick What to Read Next

23 Tuesday Jun 2026

Posted by in Literature

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In a world of algorithms and Goodreads, how does a person pick what to read next? Since creating my own website in 2011 to write things I’ve also used it to track what books I’ve read. But the following describes what tends to guide me in what to read next.

I’ve had two editors named “T” who got me onto excellent books. The first, Tathagata Bhattacharya, is a novelist himself who comes from a distinguished line of writers. His father is the great Bengali radical novelist Nabarun Bhattacharya, and his grandmother is Mahasweta Devi, a legendary writer and activist famous across India and beyond. T got me onto Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate and also Yeshar Kemal’s novels, The Wind from the Plain, Memed, My Hawk, and They Burn the Thistles. It’s easy to read T’s novel, General Firebrand and His Red Atlas, and feel his love for both Vasily Grossman and his father’s works.

T’s wife is also a dear friend of mine, Nila Bhowmick, and her non-fiction books–How Not To Be a Superwoman and Lies Our Mother Told Us: The Indian Woman’s Burden–are brilliant. I’m excited to read her upcoming novel.

My second editor T, Tyler, got me into Roberto Bolaño’s novel 2666. I’ll forever be indebted to him for this. Today we have a book club featuring just that book, ie we talk about 2666 whenever we hang out. He also loves Martin Amis’ Times Arrow, which absolutely floored me, and Hemingway. Maybe because of him I read The Sun Also Rises. Some Morley Callaghan stories, too. He got me into Point Omega by DeLillo.

Another friend and ex colleague, André Forget, an excellent novelist in his own right too, also guided me to me several excellent novelists. JK Huysmans, Goncharov, and Gaddis. His love for Orhan Pamuk pushed me to read The Black Book, an excellent novel. Against Nature, Oblomov, and The Recognitions are all masterpieces. I had read Pamuk earlier, The Snow, and quite liked it.

I have a recollection of Tathagata praising Kemal far above Pamuk, but I spoke to him more recently and he quite loves them both. I associate my two friends with each of these legendary Turkish authors.

Andre’s novel In The City of Pigs was truly excellent. It floored me! Not just because it was set in Toronto and felt familiar in theme and content. He’s friends with some outstanding contemporary novelists I doubt I would have otherwise found: Noor Naga, If An Egyptian Cannot Speak English, Fawn Parker’s Hi, It’s Me and What We Both Know, and Naben Ruthnum’s A Hero Of Our Time, and his body-horror novella, Helpmeet. Naga, Parker, and Forget were all longlisted for the Giller, while Ruthnum was outrageously snubbed.

I’ve often thought, “surely there must be outstanding contemporary novelists, I wonder who they are!” and I’m obliged to Andre for helping to answer this. I’m very confident in recommending any of these writers to anybody. Andre also edited After Realism, a great, gutsy collection of contemporary literature.

My darling Amanda directed me to The Shadow of the Wind, A Night To Remember, and many other cool non-fiction books. Friends in India put me onto Ambedkar and essayists like Khushwant Singh. Doug Miller at Miller Books got me reading Lethem and Auster, two very cool, impressive writers.

Sometimes I consult my favourite dead novelists by reading what they love. My love for Bolaño has got me to read more Bolaño than 2666 or Savage Detectives, but also his favourite works, like Don Quixote and Hopscotch by Julio Cortázar. Next I plan to read another dear love of his, Nicanor Parra.  

I’ve also read some Pablo Neruda because Bolaño doesn’t like him and I wanted to see why, for my own curiousity and to better understand By Night in Chile. The truth is, the Neruda I read I really loved. Sorry, Roberto! I’m sure I’ll learn more about your distaste for Neruda’s poetry and politics and come to see your point of view, but meantime, I found the language sadly very dazzling and beautiful. I wanted to dislike him, but it turns out the poet many said was the 20th century’s best is in my opinion very good.

Years ago I met a contemporary writer, Daniel Perry, through a mutual friend, and his work is excellent. I loved his short story collections, Hamburger and Nobody Looks That Young Here, and his recent novella Modern Folklore is outstanding. Along the same lines, Sofi Papamarko’s short stories Radium Girl was great.

Sometimes friends who aren’t novelists or my editor recommend books to me and I’ve been led to excellent works that way. That’s how I found Cloud Atlas and A Brief History of Seven Killings.  

Of course, there’s always Vladimir Nabokov as guide. His literary lectures on Russian and European authors is an incredible way to find great novels and have an absolute genius by your side as a literary companion. I read Dickens’ Bleak House, Proust, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Kafka, and of course my dearly beloved Nikolai Gogol this way. Reading literary criticism about a difficult text can be a wonderful motivator to read it. For years I’ve had Nabokov’s lectures on Don Quixote on my shelf, and finally got to read that because of Bolaño .

My dad really loved JM Coetzee, Disgrace, and so did I. He loves Maugham and maybe I’ll read that soon. I told myself I would.

So long as you love what you read, there’s probably no bad way to get recommended books. I’ll just say that sometimes you don’t know what you need next, and trusting an algorithm to reverse-engineer a list for you based on what you’ve read already may be looking backwards instead of forwards. It may very well direct you to books you enjoy, but there’s a type of book it won’t put in your hands, and that’s the kind of book I’ve been chasing. Sometimes I wonder if satisfaction comes in higher tiers we don’t know about yet, and can’t dream up until we do. Then again, YouTube directed me years ago to Alice Coltrane.

Sometimes, knowing a book has delighted someone I know and trust helps me read it, in the way a joke is genuinely funnier when you hear a friend laugh at it. Friends and writers I admire have no commercial ulterior motive and I know they’re suggeseting a book because it means something to them, even if I don’t end up loving it. In a way, reading a friend’s favourite is like holding a three-way conversation. I wonder if American literature has an outsized impression on me, but even so, maybe I’ll read Gass, Vollman and John Williams soon. Maybe Clarice Lispector. I mostly use Twitter now to connect with like-minded readers and music fans, and these writers are popular there. Technology can be a useful tool if used correctly. It all comes down to people in the end.

Honest profane comedy, James Joyce, and jerking off

04 Wednesday Apr 2012

Posted by in Statements

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As mainstream discussions in print, blogs and on TV panels increasingly feature a class of people unfit to talk and write, I felt not just pleasure but sincere relief after seeing live comedy for my first time. It was local amateurs performing in the basement of a seedy little bar last week, and though I expected the comedians to be worse than TV professionals they were upliftingly smart and engaging. After each of the first three acts talked about masturbating, it dawned on me: comedians are honest. I realised that while a certain amount of blunt exaggeration is built into the delivery, comedy must contain a resounding truth. If the audience feels they are being lied to, they will not laugh. Laughter doesn’t just signal empty amusement, laughter signals that a truth is resonating. Nobody nails personal truths like comedians.

Profane comedians are not simply vulgar boors saying inappropriate things to get an easy laugh from other vulgar boors. To be sure, stupid easy jokes infect this artistic genre, as no genre is immune from trash, but don’t let parlour manners prevent you from seeing that unrefined language is necessary to describe unrefined truths about our species. Yet because they’re regarded as “only” comedians, their insights aren’t taken seriously. Nonsense!

If you think the subject of masturbation is only the province of Jay & Silent Bob (who I love, by the way) and other juveniles, think again. In the 2004 Vanity Fair article “Joyce in Bloom,” Christopher Hitchens recalls some heavyweight writers focused on masturbating: Mark Twain in, “Some Thoughts on the Science of Onanism”; in Money, Martin Amis reminds us that masturbation is thankfully economical (“overheads are generally low”); naturally, there is Philip Roth’s obsessively meditative Portnoy (“I am the Raskolnikov of jerking off!”). But Hitchens calls Ulysses the ultimate “mastur” piece because Joyce’s libidinous novel weighs in on sex and jerking off with unprecedented length, style and complexity. Included too, for good measure, are pissing, shitting, burping, farting, eating—anything bodily. This is fused with the minutiae of a single day’s happenings in Dublin 1904 as an alternative epic vision to the various falsely-enlarged ones entrenched in us by national jingoism, religion, and other myths.

Zach Bowen says in Ulysses as a Comic Novel, “The reader is left with the paradoxical impression that the every man in each of us is vital and unique, that the trivial aspects are in fact more rationally and meaningfully heroic than the rantings of tragic heroes caught in their own self-inflicted moral dilemmas.” Hitchens echoes this, “For all its soaring, Ulysses repeatedly comes back to earth in the earthiest sense, and reminds us that natural functions and decay and frustration are part of the common lot.” This is the mark of a serious writer who cannot be dismissed as a juvenile vulgarian, yet Joyce’s territory overlaps immensely with the comedian performing in the seedy basements of downtown bars.

We tend to take too seriously any so-called highbrow author we don’t know and attribute to them an air of solemnity that doesn’t fit them at all. Hitchens recalls Joyce’s well-known quip: after a stranger in a café in Zurich seized him by the mitt and asked, “May I kiss the hand that wrote Ulysses?” Joyce responded, “No—it did a lot of other things too.” Hitchens saw this as evidence of Joyce’s personal pride in the department of masturbating. Perhaps people expect men in togas and long white beards to descend from the mountains and issue grand profundities about life. More likely these days, people prefer neatly packaged pseudo-mystical truths written on the lining of their yoga bags. But there can be no fundamental truths about the human condition that ignore the fact that we have human minds and human bodies, and all the low, sordid things that entails. Like Joyce, comedians nail this.

So, humourless people who think being grotesque automatically makes you ineligible as a serious thinker have it exactly backwards: we can’t talk about our species honestly if we exclude the bodies’ various functions and impulses—our prime motivator. The refusal to stare our human condition in the face leads either to the abhorrent repression of sex found in various cults and basically every religion, or to agonizingly naive formulations like “racism is bad” or “world peace is good.” Good comedians ignore these hollow clichés and address more complex, less-immediately uplifting formulations like, “our hidden, subconscious motives are coarse, irrational and fundamentally absurd.” Unlike banal pundits who risk nothing and say only what their audience expects, comedians are refreshing because they are disproportionately atheists, cynical, irreverent, and incredulous. Louis CK isn’t just hilarious, he’s a courageous and relentless thinker who confronts the uncomfortable aspects of family, work, life and sex head on. I’d way rather hear his perspectives on life than those of pious strivers or media “experts,” usually self-proclaimed or endorsed by Oprah. I think Joyce would agree. It’s no coincidence that comedians have always been some of the most forward-thinking, hate-free people out there. Rather, they don’t hate people for their race or gender but, quite appropriately, for generally being stupid and barbaric.

It’s a shame that Joyce, the certified genius, is needed here to show that humour and frank examination of our bodies is a required element of being a serious thinker. Dismissing the honest observations of profane comedians for being obscene is no better than banning Joyce’s work, which was indeed internationally banned until it was internationally hailed as a first-rank masterpiece. Calling a comedian merely “funny” is a backhanded compliment. Any stand-up act is only funny if it’s truthful. So any time a comic or satirist, anonymous or famous, makes a keen observation we all recognize about our irrational impulses and bodily functions that everyone is afraid to say in public, don’t just call them funny. Be grateful for their honesty and call them a hero.

Also, as a rule, ignore anyone who tries to sound profound when talking about the human race if they’re incapable of discussing jerking off.

Republican morons: all just different shades of disgrace

28 Monday Nov 2011

Posted by in Politics

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Even staunch Republicans can’t deny that the leaders on offer today have never been more pathetic. They are not merely poor or bad, they are abysmal. It’s beyond embarrassing, and if it were my country I’d be ashamed that such abjectly inadequate people could be taken seriously at all, let alone be poised for a Presidential race.  Such a thing could only take place in an anti-intellectual climate that celebrates stupidity. It’s hard to describe without it sounding like exaggeration. British writer Martin Amis published a terrific collection of his journalism on a cross-section of American topics in the 80s called the Moronic Inferno, a perfect phrase for the climate that enables such monstrously stupid politicians.  We expect left-wing media to attack Republicans, but it should be noted whenever the right does. The Canadian right has stepped forward in this regard.

The National Post did a segment Saturday where eleven writers named their pick for Republican candidates, followed by a brief explanation. They mostly sounded jaded and hopeless, as if they were picking which gun they’d use to shoot themselves in the head.  My two favourite NP writers, George Jonas and Robert Fulford, opted for “none of the above.”  Beyond pessimism, Jonas suggested politicians should be drafted since anyone who believes they possess all it takes to run a country is a lunatic, and should be disqualified on these grounds alone.  Fulford said it’s the worst lineup of potential candidates he’s seen in his lifetime.

This week’s Maclean’s discussed Republicans in an article titled “American Idiots.”  It proposes that perhaps becoming a presidential candidate is no longer solely a political objective, but a financial one. Presidential candidates are assured of fame. Politics is merely branding.  This perspective explains why Herman Cain was so stunningly unprepared to answer basic questions about Libya. Even more revealing was his explanation for the gaffe: “I got all this stuff twirling around in my head.” This should disqualify him off the bat: thinking is a non-negotiable job requirement for the leader of the free world.

The article notes that the New York Times looked at Cain’s calendar of campaign events and found that “19 of the 31 days of October were blank.”  Commentators suggest his campaign is fake, just a publicity stunt masquerading as politics. Maybe this is true, maybe not: what’s the bigger disgrace? For a serious political campaign to be so stunningly amateur as to be mistaken for a joke is pathetic, but is it worse or better than using the most serious office in the country for such shameless pursuit of profit? Instead of work on his campaign, the devastatingly prudent thing to do, Cain promoted his book. This is a scandal! It used to be that if you wanted to gain money, fame and notoriety from the President’s office you didn’t try to become the President. A blowjob sufficed.

But this isn’t a dictator ruthlessly inserting himself.  This is democracy. Pathetically, Cain actually has voluntary support, making Americans complicit. The bigger problem is that Cain is not out of place beside Gingrich, Bachmann, Perry, Palin, and Trump, and too many voters are OK with this.

In Ancient Greece, citizens not only voted for politicians, but could vote to ostracize for ten years any politician who they felt was a threat to the state.  While there’d be no politicians left in Greece today if this were still practiced, it would allow the US to filter politicians who perniciously hijack the political system to get rich. Although, it is shameful that this can’t be entrusted to the voters good sense. But Presidential candidates must all be devoted, capable politicians who know about the world and care about the country. Does this really need to be said? It’s a bizarre, scary world when this statement is not overwhelmingly self-evident, but it cannot be overstated.  This is a race for President of the United States, not high school.

But even ostracizing politicians is a band-aid solution if the climate of stupidity which enables them doesn’t change. Otherwise, a new moron will rise.  Any aspect of culture, media, or even advertising which actively or passively encourages or takes advantage of people’s stupidity is guilty of contributing to fanning the flames of the moronic inferno.  This should not be considered an “elitist” view, a term stupid people use as a shield. And anyway, movies like Dumb and Dumber, intelligence only lacquered in low IQ, aren’t the target of my criticism.  I’m talking about Fox News and everything else that trades the collective IQ of the country for ratings and money. I am not so naive to believe this will ever stop. Indeed, money at all costs is practically the country’s guiding principle.  Perhaps Obama recognized this essential hopelessness and won on a slogan of “hope.”

I fear the media get a kick out of bashing Republicans so much that a part of them is glad they’re there. Bad for politics, good for journalism. But this isn’t funny. This is a deplorable state of affairs that jeopardizes the country, and even the world. Millions of Americans understand this and helplessly watch their country sink into a bog. The focus of concerned, responsible adults should be on rising up; laughter just makes the sinking more enjoyable.

Democracy isn’t inherently good or bad, as Jonas reminds us in an earlier NP article from last week: “democracy is only a method of succession.” It fails without a body of intelligent, discerning and informed citizens. The Maclean’s article suggests that Mitt Romney, “the only serious Republican candidate,” is stuck at 21% support since he fails to make attention grabbing gaffes. He alienates his voters by refusing to behave like a vulgar spectacle on a reality TV show. This is his obstacle.

I was seriously disappointed in American intelligence after the show Arrested Development got cancelled (though intelligent Americans created it), but politics is important.  Countries need more than one plausible political party. The States has only two parties, but one is pathologically immature and obstinately refuses to care about the good of the country. I love the United States. This isn’t disappointing, or funny. This is terrifying.