Splinters

I've been getting some interesting books sent to Spike Towers here in Bangkok. Some I've not read yet, but as I'm always grateful when publishers go the extra mile to send me books out here (good one, anyway), here's a quick list and wholly uninformed precis taken from reading the back cover and flicking through the pages:

A Mis-Guide To Anywhere
Travel guidebooks are ubiquitous, but the Mis-Guide aims to reinvent the very idea of travel and get the reader to see wherever they are through new eyes. It's a spiral bound plastic covered affair with a fantastic jumble of glossy photos and text throughout, perfect for flipping open and seeing what happens. The words swing into clumsy academese a wee bit too often - how sick am I of hearing the phrase "construct a narrative" - but its heart is in the right place and there's an undeniable sense of glee about the whole enterprise. which I like a lot. It's the sort of book you might initially dismiss with a snort of derision and then wind up furtively reading cover to cover. The official Mis-Guide site has a lot of extra info.

Real Punks Don't Wear Black - Frank Kogan
I'd never heard of Frank Kogan until I saw this book from the University of Georgia Press. I had high hopes with a title like that for some enlightening - or at least entertaining - music criticism. Kogan has been writing about music for 35 years and also edits the suitably well-titled Why Music Sucks fanzine. This chunky book collects stuff from all over his writing career but I couldn't find anything by random flicking that grabbed me. Much of it seemed to be transcripts of woolly conversations that focussed on musical minutiae and used "kind of" and "like" a lot. Simon Reynolds and Jon Savage it ain't.

Fifteen Minutes - Mark Connelly
Most of the fiction I get sent leaves me not so much cold as wholly frigid. Mark Connelly's 15 Minutes attracted my attention because 1) it's very, very short and 2) it has the Chysler Building on the front cover. I love the Chysler Building. The synopsis carries on the good work with a very nice precis provided by the quote at the end:

"Growing up in the shadow of the Chrysler Building in the Sixties, George Sabro hungered to enter the world of the rich and famous he watched on television. A series of events in the Seventies led the Times Square bartender to become a paid lover, celebrity photographer, Studio-54 semi-regular, and briefly a millionaire. Now reduced to washing dishes in a coffee shop, George is desperate to get his fifteen minutes of fame before turning fifty. Hanging up his apron, he picks up a cereal box, walks onto Sixth Avenue, and starts taking hostages.

"A darkly comic novella about one man's attempt to achieve Andy Warhol's fifteen minutes of fame."-Jeff Magnin

I'll be reading this next, I think.

The Sexual Revolution 2.0: Getting Connected, Upgrading Your Sex Life, and Finding True Love - or at Least a Dinner Date - in the Internet Age - Regina Lynn
Written by Wired magazine's resident sex columnist, Sex Rev 2.0 has inevitably already caught a lot of attention. Lynn's columns are one of my regular stops online, because I'm fascinated by where technology is taking sex - and it's taking it in some particularly strange ways these days. It's a pithy looking book too, which is always good. Lynn writes with a lightness of touch about sex that is missing from many of her peers, so seeing how she moves up to a full book rather than a 1000 words a week will be interesting.