Читать книгу A Fucked Up Life in Books - Литагент HarperCollins USD, J. F. C. Harrison, Professor J. D. Scoffbowl - Страница 5

I started writing a blog because I wanted to talk about books anonymously. The reason I did it anonymously was because I didn’t, and still don’t really, think that I am at all clever or insightful enough to have decent opinions on books. If I love them, I can’t really tell you why; and if I hate them I tend to just swear a lot and get frustrated. The best and most fitting anonymous name that I could think of for me was BookCunt. I fucking love books and I have a cunt. Job done.

The first book I reviewed was The Tiny Wife by Andrew Kaufman that had been given to me by a friend. After I reviewed that I didn’t really know what else to do. I didn’t have any other new books to review, and no one really knew about the blog so I wasn’t getting sent any review copies by anyone, so I posted a story about the time that a man chased me down the street because of Isaac Asimov. People liked it, they thought it was funny. And it was easy to write because it was true. It had happened just before I left to go to university as I was hanging around in town trying to find a job to make some money so that when I got to university I had some money to piss away. So, I asked my (ten or so) followers on Twitter what they wanted from the blog; did they want book reviews or did they want stories? And they all said stories, which was fine by me because I had a fucking shitload in my head just ready to tell. I carried on with reviews, as I started to get authors and publishers sending me things to read, but every Saturday I’d post a story of something that had happened to me.

I can remember every single book I’ve ever read, and I can remember where I was and what I was doing while I was reading them all. This is a collection of my stories, some that have been posted on my blog and some that have not, of some of the mental shit that has happened to me. They’re not all directly about me, sometimes I was just observing. And some of the links to books are pretty tenuous. But they’re all true and they’re all as honest as I can be with a bunch of strangers on the internet. I don’t think that my life has been as fucked up and mental as some of these stories would suggest. I don’t think that I’m the only person that this sort of stuff happens to, and I don’t think that any of it is particularly new or exciting. It’s just a bunch of stuff that has happened over the last 27 years, to someone who has spent most of their life hiding behind the pages of a book. Some of it makes me sad and makes me cry, and some of it makes me feel so fucking lucky to have been there. All of it is given to you, with love, from an anonymous book blogger.

BookCunt, August 2012