Soooo when I’m reading a book, I’ll sit with a flashcard and write down all the new words/words I didn’t know had different forms/ words it would not occur to me to write, and then I upload the words to Anki so that I can test myself on them and hopefully memorise them. I’ve been doing this for about a year and have racked up nearly 1100 words that I wouldn’t otherwise use! From the near-uselessness of reglet or machicolation to the newly essential magniloquence, prolixity, experiential, or steatopygic. If you perform this exercise, no matter what your enjoyment of a book, no reading is ever truly wasted. And you rarely get through a Will Self novel without a new word or two- ha! so what happened should not have surprised me too much, but check this out:(In some of these you can see my sparkly toenails. You’re welcome!)[Goddamn image errors! Ahhh I'll fix it later...]I filled one of those cards by about pg 200/278, which was incidentally around the point that the book stopped making any sense. I would have filled two maybe three cards if me and Will hadn’t been collecting the same words all this time. But I dunno… I feel like what I have picked apart here is the secret contents of a little notebook of words that Will kept on his writing desk, cynically ticking off each one as he put them in this story, and this kind of lexicographical clinicality cannot help but extirpate the ultimate murated form- oh sorry were you not keeping up with me and Will? I mean it takes you out of the story. There there, you’re not as clever as me and him, it’s okay, you’re only anyone, it happens.Yeah but because I’ve been collecting so many words from so many different books for so long, and still managed to find so many new ones, seems like evidence to me that Will was trying super hard to be obfuscatory. Why would he do that? Because he wanted to prove he was clever. Why would he want to prove he was clever? Because he was scared. Why was he scared? First novel, they’re pretty much always not so great (unless we’re talking about The God of Small Things of course, because in that case the book was pure horseshit!)But hey! Great writers are the ones that kept going. And Self went on to write The Book of Dave, Tough Tough Toys for Tough Tough Boys, Umbrella, and the first half of How The Dead Live!I don’t know if the story was any good, I was too distracted. And I’m gonna give you the list of words, so I wouldn’t recommend reading this novel given that the list of words is all I took from it :SI read that a DJ can become competitive if he keeps an excel sheet cataloguing the BPM of different songs in different musical genres (probably some program does this for them nowadays), so as a writer’s equivalent, you can’t see my 1100 words- but you probably knew more of them than me anyways :D I don’t see any harm in at least sharing Will’s Fun list though- not necessarily words I didn’t know, but also those it doesn’t occur to me to normally use :)(Well these 5 are from Inherent Vice:CopaceticPraetorianTessituraYuccaVig)And now- and I should say, a handful of repeats, a few I’m pretty sure I already have in my Anki pack and a number that I’m not sure if I read correctly from the card, but I definitely do not remember the context:EmbrasureSylph-hoodConciliatoryFurbelowFlutingMacramePatinaDeja entenduHinterlandShambolicDjellabaChittiesPiltjurriPelfLapidaryShofarObeisanceGallimaufry PeccadilloDemiurgeFurfendBetokenPanatellaHypnogogiaObdurateBassoUndulantHittitesAutohagiographyMoueConcertinaVermiculationHomunculusStogiesPerforcePeregrinationSanatorialStupaGroyneIchorRuckleShanghailAgadirConveyanceConsanguinitySprogEidetikerScrungyVestigialStentorianSpindriftCogitationCrepitationAdumbrateMicturationMondialSubstratumBedizenedNuminousCostermongeringAmbitPrelateRosicrucianMutableAlembicAludelAthenorCaduceusHypostaticalPrestidigitationCapaciousScryerTetragrammationThaumaturgicalAvoirdupoisPeregrinationSanatorialChattelInsoucianceBillet(s)-douxAppliqueBibelotsBaizeDerogatedRocSoukAssertoricsKapokEminence griseHackleAntistropheSquirearchyRazureMillenarianPudendumPurdahPurulentEfflorescenceIntrojectConfreresBilharziaPrimogenetivePrimum mobileRuckedCoenobitesHydrolithTransmuteFoulardCherootSojournTrompe l’oeilAntinomiesCorroboreeAtaraxyPerniciousBourseWadisEpiceneCyclotronSempiternalEmollientPulerBassoFemicideEmbonpointSaccadeFricasseesCloistralVitiateFerruleEnbusNoumenalBurrFiligreePartagas perfecto (a type of cigar??)FeloniousRetroscendPrefatoryRetroscendenceBilharziaRiverineDyadPiscineCalcineSchmutterSchnekenBreviaryTempusBurghersRemonstranceGimcrackHomiliesAccretionsMacadamCurareInvestitureFiefdomSadhuStentorianUbietyTeleologicalBombastBibulousBeadleGyroscopicProsceniumAdumbrateNuttingFarouchePoitrinesApostateCetaceanEmbrocatoryTonsuredSchoolmarmsLicentiateUrspracheDendrochronologyNeolithicConiferousArbrophileInappetencyAurochsAuspicationHere’s another two lists for you. My Idea of Fun:In bed with a book, drinking tea or beer, playing videogames, being indoors when it rains, making a lasagna and eating it for dinner every day of the week, peanut butter rice cake sandwiches, the film Goldeneye, PJs fresh from the tumble dryer, watching Inside Amy Schumer, The Jeselnik Offensive, Maron, Louie or 30 Rock.Not My Idea of Fun:this book.
In a way you have to take this as a kind of fantasy. Ian Wharton could have any number of variations of mental illness and The Fat Controller could be an hallucination or could indeed be The Devil. You are sad for this boy Ian as he grows up, painfully awkward without a father and pity him his social climbing but distant mother and wonder where his relationship with The Fat Controller aka (Mr. Broadhurst/Samuel Northcliffe) is going. You wonder a lot about The Fat Controller too and Ian's Eidetic memory and whether there is magic involved or whether Ian is in fact an idiot savant of some kind.... I was disappointed Will Self didn't take the eidetic memory idea to another level but I guess that's the non-fiction fan in me. Will Self's choice of words can take your breath away with their aptness and so do the few truly violent passages that appear. One is never really sure if they in fact happened in Ian's real life or in his imaginative headspace. His forays into a medical cure by Deep Sleep prove nightmareish when he arrives in The Land of Children's Jokes. The characters get crazy with fabulous descriptive passages verging on the psychadelic until you begin to lose the plot a bit. And the plot is that you the reader make a judgement, Will Self likes audience participation and at the end you get to make up your own mind.There are some seriously funny parts and some violent instances that shock you like when you have first been slapped on the face & wonder what hit you. It's an awakening experience. Not the kind of book I could read a lot of normally but it totally distracted me from the horrors of my own life while I was reading it ~ and that is probably my idea of fun at the moment..... _______________________________________________________________________ Seems quite a few people objected strongly to this book. Granted it's strange so far...but not yet shocking. I like Will Self's writing and this is no exception. What's interesting is how the main character has an Eidetic memory and what he does with it.
What do You think about My Idea Of Fun (2005)?
Will Self is a writer of advanced technical ability and has a talent for neat observation when writing about things that interest him. The problem is that the things which interest him in this novel - squalor, violence, the moral bankruptcy and intellectual vacuity of the 80s - are not, um, my idea of fun. Which would be the cheap headline review, if I had a headline... it's a book about how one person's meat is another man's poison,which turns out mostly inedible. The prose is clever, but at times the cleverness gets the best of it and it becomes stultifying. The Fat Controller, a glib, hideous dandy here used as a handy personification of all that is evil and venal and grasping in this world, speaks with a hilarious purple loquaciousness which would be more effective if it didn't come perilously close at times to the tone of the rest of the book. The narrative begins in an unpleasant blurt of confused violence, starting things right slap bang with a good old-fashioned decapitation and stumpfucking set against a stodgy dinner party, told by a narrator who knows he is very clever and makes all sorts of allusions to things that we don't know yet. This is Self's way of letting us know what we might expect from the rest of the book, and if I had any sense I would've stopped reading there -- but after that initial hump a coming-of-age story ensues which drags the reader in, prompting him or her to half-care about the novel's oily protagonist and the semi-real world he inhabits. It's all well and good until he reaches adulthood, whereupon the book jumps to the third person and renders up two chapters full of galling, thick-as-sludge expository humbug about the quotidian horror of marketing flacks, junkies and psychiatrists. Will sounds here like he fancies himself a social gadfly, but he's not very good at it; and for a writer with such obvious skill in prosody he's a complete duffer at rendering dialect. That last deficit seems to be indicative of a lot of what's wrong with this book. Fulminating from the pages comes a palpable contempt, not just for middle-class pretenses and the venal emptiness of the me decade, but also for every single character in the book, and in a way for the reader. Everything is sneered; the poor, downtrodden and powerless come in for as much stick as the well-heeled; The Fat Controller, Mr. Evil, is the only halfway-elegant presence in the entire narrative - and the narrative talks down to us, even as we discover how low and horrible a creature he really is. Self's intentions here may have been satirical, but the book comes off as an uncomplicated celebration of psychopathy and its self-aggrandizing mythologies. Not good for the soul, and eminently skippable.
—Isaac
OK. This has got to be the weirdest book I have ever read. The story is about Ian who I guess, lives in several alternate realities, or maybe dreams.One of these places is the Land of Children's Jokes where he finds an armless and legless man in a swimming pool - and guess what his name is? Bob.There is also a baby covered in blood in the corner eating razor blades. This answers the question, 'What's red all over and sits in the corner?' There are other, more scary things in the Land of Children's Jokes.Ian doesn't live there all of the time (I think this is one of the true dreams Ian repeatedly has.) Most the time he lives in a world where a man called The Fat Controller is his mentor. This man teaches him how to retroscend - or sink back into the history of a person, place or thing. This ability allows him to see what came before when the before is an unknown. The Fat Controller teaches him many other things as well.In one of Ian's realities he is a murderer of people and dogs. While the book was not graphic about the murder of the humans, it was graphic about the murder of the dog. Nothing that I read before or after the incident gave reason why he did this. For this reason alone, I would say don't read the book because the torture of the dog was horrific.I've read two of Self's books now and neither have made any sense. I won't be reading any more. Harrumph.
—Sherri
A truly ghastly experience, My Idea of Fun records the memories, justifications and sheer relish of a delusional maniac, serial killer, animal torturer and all around repulsive fellow, couched in prose so purple it's no longer a part of the visible spectrum. As the protagonist's predilections are presented on the first page, you can't say you didn't know what you were getting into. Against the chidings of my conscience I continued reading, fascinated, much as you can't not look at a grisly automobile accident as you wheel by on the highway. You can't help but admire Self's turn of phrase, his dictionary squeezings, his calculated yet slick deployments of rib-cracking funniness, but you nonetheless wish he weren't quite so sick. The book is a compelling enough read. There are a couple flubbed hallucinatory sequences of a William Burroughs variety which I flat out skipped. I frankly didn't give a brown M & M about our protagonist's career in advertising or his (possibly meant to be loathsome?) yuppiedom. Self fell asleep on the job more than a few times, misplacing his character's characteristics, straining and failing to shock, including flat or pointless scenes. Only the scenes in which The Fat Controller played a part were gripping, though inevitably gripping a part of you you'd rather had never been gripped at all. By the end I was just turning pages and feeling icky. That the editors or the author were feeling somewhat insecure about whether or not this book was to be taken as satire is evidenced by the book's anxious subtitle A Cautionary Tale. Wash yourself thoroughly after reading this one, though that may not suffice. A colonic might be more appropriate. For the very susceptible, an exorcism.
—Caterina Fake
