The Poor Ditching Boy

Well, it's happened: for the first time since I started this blog, I'm abandoning a book in the middle. I try not to do that (though lately I'm reading a lot of first-chapter-and-last-chapter for work), but it happens.

The book is Lint by Steve Aylett, a SF novel in the guise of a biography of SF writer Jeff Lint (something like Philip K. Dick seen through a fun-house mirror). I read about 40 pages; roughly a quarter of it.

It's clearly supposed to be funny and wacky, but I was just finding it dull and plodding. It's full of piles and piles of surrealism, which mainly just meant that the sentences didn't seem to track one to the next. I used to love wacky books, so it may be just that I'm getting old and crotchety. Or it may be that this isn't all that good; or maybe it picks up later on. It also seems to be the kind of book where the author throws in all of his own literary heroes to show how smart and hip he is; I decided that (rightly or not) when William S. Burroughs showed up in 1945 and was called a "paleo-cyberpunk." Aylett is just way too cool for my school, so I was out of there.

Life is too short to waste on cheap surrealism that isn't making me laugh, so I'm cutting my losses and moving on to reading something else. Not sure what yet; let's take another look at the shelves.