My Weekly Book

An amusing column by Charlie Brooker in Comment is Free from The Guardian today on compulsively reading the work of writers (mainly crap columnists) you don’t like:

Joe Mott’s blog heaves with demented beauty

I actively enjoy reading people I can’t stand. When they write something particularly horrid, a wave of nausea surges through me and my pulse quickens. I am hooked on it, like a base jumper compelled to leap off chimney stacks for the adrenaline rush. Consider it a sickness.

Previous obsessions have included Liz Jones of the London Evening Standard (specialist subjects: new age spa treatments and marital despair), and the Barefoot Doctor, who used to write for the Observer.

The latter took over my life for several months. Everything he said incensed me. He gushed a wild river of bullshit, which I swam through open-mouthed, savouring the taste. I even bought one of his books - a “guide to urban survival”; an incredible how-to manual apparently designed to help shallow, cosseted airheads become even more self-obsessed, justifying their unhinged narcissism as spiritual development.

It outlined concepts such as “people-surfing” - which seemed to involve deliberately developing superficial relationships for personal gain - and “visualisation”. If you wanted a new laptop, he said, you should picture yourself throwing a magic lasso around it, and before long it would be yours in real life (assuming you walked into a shop and bought it at some point).

I read the book from cover to cover, pausing occasionally to hurl it across the room in disgust. Even the typeface annoyed me. It was brilliant. Read on here…

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This entry was posted on Monday, February 26th, 2007 at 10:47 am and is filed under 2007 - Ephemera. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.