Topic: by Lenny
As many of you know, a friend and I are writing a novel, a satirical take on all those Left Behind books and the like.
When writing fiction I try not to read any, for the obvious reasons. But sometimes you can't help it. So, yesterday I was rereading the Illuminatus! Trilogy for the first time in ten(plus) years, and came across this passage:
"Got your book review read, Eppy?"
"Have it tomorrow, dear boy. Can't be any faster, honestly!"
"Tomorrow will do..."
"It's a dreadfully long monster of a book... and I certainly won't have time to read it, but I'm giving it a thorough skimming. The authors are utterly incompetent -- no sense of style or structure at all. It starts out as a detective story, switches to science-fiction, then goes off into the supernatural, and is full of the most detailed information of dozens of ghastly boring subjects. And the sequence is all out of order in a very pretentious imitation of Faulkner and Joyce. Worst yet, it has the most raunchy sex scenes, thrown in just to make it sell, I'm sure, and the authors -- whom I've never heard of -- have the supreme bad taste to introduce real political figures into this mishmash and pretend to be exposing a real conspiracy. You can be sure I won't waste time reading such rubbish, but I'll have a prefectly devastating review for you by tomorrow at noon."
"Well, we don't expect you to read every book you review..."
The book she refers to is, of course, the Illuminatus! Trilogy by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson. Then again, she could very well be referring to the book that I am writing with Josh.
Posted by mediafaction
at 12:01 AM EST
