"What I am about to tell you may make me sound like a crazy person. So I need you to remember, to bear in mind very carefully, that I have an IQ of such monstrous proportions that if, for the sake of argument, I were totally insane - if the palace of my intellect were a scray ivy-covered mansion in Louisiana with peeling paint and dead flowers and a garden full of murdered corpses planted by a man named Jerry-Lee Boudain - I am so much more intelligent than anybody else you will ever meet that there would be no way for anyone to tell.I'm not crazy. I just deal with physics which is so complex that it basically sounds - outside of peer-reviewed journals - like nonsense. Like contracts and tax law."
We don't talk a whole lot of books in these pages - appropriately enough since we're a film site and not a book site - but every now and then I just have to make an exception. And, you know, it's cold and blustery and snowy outside - perfect reading weather, in other words - and everybody's out shopping anyway and I just so happen to have stumbled across the most remarkable new author that I've found in ages, so what the hell. Got a geek on your list? Pick up a copy of Nick Harkaway's The Gone Away World. Heck, get one for yourself.
I picked it up yesterday and am about a hundred and fifty pages in. So far it's got kung fu, pig-generated electricity, post apocalyptic truckers, ninjas, pipeline sabotage and a super-weapon that selectively destroys matter by stripping it of the information that defines it. It's also got a fuzzy, shocking pink cover and is jam packed with astounding, energetic, constantly surprising writing. This is such an incredibly fully formed, totally unique piece of work that it's pretty hard to believe that it's Harkaway's first novel, that he got it this right the first time out. Todd likes.
Since I am a nerd in need of more awesome reading material. Or, at least will be after I've read 12 or so books for this terms brick-like essay. This also takes for granted that I live trough the entire thing, which is in no way certain.
But once I do, even if I have to come back as zombie, I will read this.