Still kinda recovering from a rough week with Joe, Mike and I both are in and out of sleep today. No major events, so I’ll do another shit synopsis of a book I just finished reading: Robert Twigger’s “The Extinction Club.”
The cover features a review from the venerable traveler activity guide “Time Out” promising “travel, history, philosophical ramblings, fibs and a marvellous sense of humour.” Spelling isn’t mistakes: an actual British book. It ended up decent overall, but, like most other British attempts at comedy, his jokes fell flat. Particularly stupid was a rail against backpackers. Twigger castigates “Lonely Planet” (popular travel guide) and backpackers as nothing more than a guide to and consumers of cheap things. We should trust him when he says the books should be destroyed: he was a backpacker and reads “Lonely Planet.” The half of the book that wasn’t weird stuff like that was actually pretty interesting if not a little pointless. It’s based around his attempts to write a book on Milu, a weird-ass species of endangered deer, but there’s little about the animals. Instead, he has FYI stories about the Boxers’ Rebellion in ancient China and philosophical ramblings of varying quality. The anti-technology rails were pretty low-quality, i.e. when Twigger laments the loss of a used book market: “Everyone accepted that there would be more cars and more crummy apartment blocks and that that was the price you paid for having electric gadgets and better healthcare, for ‘progress.’” Yeah, how dare anyone call being able to live longer progress, right? He makes up for the Luddite stuff with some interesting points, my favorite being a nice little nonconformist gem about how people can be alive but extinct: “an extinct individual will consume, party, work and die – all that the modern world requires of him – and he will do it willingly. The unwilling ones can be persuaded with further economically useful products such as tranquilizers, antidepressants, sleeping pills, recreational drugs, television.” Nothing amazing, but it did make me learn some English English and use a dictionary quite a bit. Read it if you want some postmodern oddness, skip it if you want something with a point:)