Craig Stone's Blog, page 9

New covers for Life Knocks and The Squirrel that Dreamt of Madness…

I finally managed to find a bit of time in my life to sort out my book covers.

I’ve also finally managed to edit the beast that is Life Knocks, and it’s now a bit of an epic. Don’t worry if you have previously purchased the book, a free Amazon Kindle update will be happening soon. Or, if you can’t wait, feel free to splash out on the £1.94 again – the new read is totally worth at least £5.99 – so you would still owe me £2.11.

There will be no more updates.

I’m in chats to get the paperback version of Life Knocks out, via a self publishing company in the UK called Matador http://www.troubador.co.uk/matador.asp

If all goes well, The Squirrel that Dreamt of Madness will follow.

I can finally move on from these two books.

I have loved them, but we both need to go our separate ways; for the children.

How a major publishing company cannot see the potential in these books, is beyond me: I label them all silly hens.

However, if any publishing company wants to get in touch, I’m available, and ready to take that label off your beak.

*So, fellow bloggers, what do you think?

*If you’ve previously mulled over buying my books, will these covers tip you over the edge and make you purchase?

New cover for Life Knocks…

Life Knocks UK  link: amzn.to/LifeKnocks

Life Knocks UK link: amzn.to/148waOy

New cover for The Squirrel that Dreamt of Madness…

Squirrel UK link: amzn.to/x5JTYe

Squirrel US  link: amzn.to/151zjPM

** that bit bloggers ask bloggers a question, “the hook” – I usually don’t ask questions because if nobody answers, I’m going to feel uncomfortable,  out of place, possibly scared; a chainsaw out of gas, lost in a woods at night. Alone. The parents of dismembered trees closing in…

I just right mouse clicked for correct spelling, but WORD has clearly had enough!

See.

Look closer.

There ya go.

10 ways to tell if you are turning into a depressed Atlantic Puffin…

1)      You are persistently sad, anxious and feel empty inside. Invisible even – this, despite noticing that your nose turns a brilliant orange when thinking about sex.

2)      You find yourself taking long baths and, during these baths, you push the water away from you so the water comes back in small waves. Despite sitting in small waves of your own making, you feel hopeless and pessimistic.

3)      You visit the local swimming pool, and discover you can fly like a bird underwater. This should be amazing. Or at least petrifying. Instead you feel guilty and worthless. You take a hot shower for an hour afterwards, and later consider cutting yourself with a sharp blade, to feel something again.

4)      You have a loss of interest and pleasure in hobbies you once enjoyed, like sex. Instead of masturbating to online porn, you find yourself pecking small herrings out of your next door neighbour’s pond at 3am.

5)      You have decreased energy, fatigue and constantly feel slowed down. Yet, despite this, when you move your arms up and down you can flap them up to 400 times per minute, reaching speeds of up to 55 miles per hour. You hate yourself for this. And you hate yourself for hating yourself for this.

6)      You have difficulty concentrating, remembering anything, or making decisions which cause blackouts. When you wake from these blackouts you always find yourself sitting high up on a cliff facing the wall, miles from your house, with rocks on each shoulder. Surrounded by seagulls.

7)      Your sleeping pattern is erratic. You either can’t sleep, wake up too early, or can’t stop sleeping. When you can’t sleep you suffer from severe stomach trouble. When you wake up, you always find you are sitting on an egg and have strong urges to mother.

8)      Your weight is impossible to control, you sometimes eat all the fish in your neighbour’s pond at 3am, other times you stand, pensive, trapped inside your own head wanting to eat the fish but not knowing if the fish want you to eat them. Their feelings are suddenly more important than yours. This period can go on for weeks, and ends with you squawking.

9)      You think about killing yourself all of the time, but when you try taking a thousand paracetamol, you can’t because your mouth has become a beak and you can’t pick up tablets with wings.

10)   You are restless and irritable; you don’t want to see any people. You hop out of bed and onto the window ledge. Look up to the sky, and launch yourself towards the sun, and in the direction of the Atlantic.

Paris Brown: Goodbye. Good luck. And on behalf of any adult with sense; I’m sorry.

Paris Brown has quit.

A 17 year old is too young to vote but old enough to be destroyed by the media. The victim of a massive and vindictive over reaction by our press.

I watched Sky News earlier in the week show repeated shots of Paris breaking down in tears apologising to the media for tweets taken out of context from when she was 14 years old. 14!!! I’ve read her tweets. They are not how the media reported them. I feel sorry for this kid.

This is our moral compass in Britain now? Bullying a 17 year old to tears? Bullying her into tears and then kicking her carcass out the door for messages she tweeted three years ago??

The Daily Mail didn’t just find these tweets. The Daily Mail already had their front page ready, they just needed to find some loose terminology in how Paris Brown expresses herself on-line. Paris Brown, not privately educated; The Daily Mail knew if they went back far enough, they would find something they could spin and run their hate campaign.

But they didn’t find anything. They went back years. All the way back to when she was fourteen. They trawled through over 4,000 tweets.

And they still didn’t find anything.

So they made it up.

And they made you believe what they did.

They took the handful of tweets they could spin, and they spun them.

I will take what the Daily Mail has labelled Paris Browns “views on gay rights.” – I’m not going to go into the race tweets, or the others, I could – but it’s all the same principle and this post is going to be too long, and even more repetitive than my usual posts if I do

Remember: Views.On.Gay.Rights.

Okay, so for this to piss people off to the extent she is labelled racist and homophobic through the national press, I’m thinking she has to be saying something like “no faggots can get fucking married eva, hate them all!! They shouldn’t be able to vote or marry!!” – sorry, but I am trying to make a point. That would be a tweet about gay rights, a tweet that would have rightly got her sacked and made an example of.

Here is what she actually tweeted, as published in the Daily Mail:

Hmm…Nothing about Gay Rights at all! She isn’t even talking about sexuality!!! She sounds like a 14 year old pissed off with kids trying to sound cool to her mates!! Let’s set her on fucking fire!! Let’s run through London with her dismembered head on a spike to make us feel like good people!!!

Paris Brown called some children faggots because they were pissing her off and kept knocking on her front door. When she was fourteen. The children were not gay. She did not use the term in a derogatory way to highlight or use the sexuality of the children against them.

She was not the commissioner of anything when she tweeted her thoughts. She was a kid.

Words are interpretable. The meanings of words change from generation to generation.

I would not use the word faggot because of its connotation to me, and my peers, but that does not mean it has the same connotation to someone else.

How can we accuse Paris Brown of failing to take into account the historical connotation of the word faggot (to us) when she was fourteen years old, when as adults, today – we are failing to do the EXACT SAME THING to her?!

“faggot” before my generation was a word used to describe a bundle of sticks. Tolkien used the word often in The Lord of The Rings trilogy.

So is Paris Brown homophobic now, but wouldn’t have been forty years ago?

If Paris doesn’t get how we understand the word, is it such a reach to think we might not understand how she used it?

If Twitter had been around for one hundred years, and I went through every account from before forty years ago, do I have a right to attack, accuse and destroy anyone for using a word because of how I tell them I’ve decided they used it?

How can anyone persist with telling Paris Brown her own intentions, when Paris Brown is in tears, saying to the world, “how you are telling me I intended my words is wrong.”

The rational response is to apologise to the wrongly accused, not chase her through town with pitchforks, tie her up, and burn her alive whilst screaming about what a wonderful person you are.

The anger should be directed at the Daily Mail.

The Daily Mail, who accused Paris Brown without the needed to justify their false accusations, are the same paper who told the world Stephen Gately died because he was homosexual. Or does everyone just forget that the Daily Mail accusing anyone of being racist and homophobic is pure hypocrisy, deliberately intended to inflame at the expense of a teenager?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2009/oct/16/stephen-gately-boyzone

Where was her trial before judgement? How in the media can someone be labelled as guilty and the fight be all about trying to prove the truth?

The media are not law, they have no idea. They are bullying pricks with cameras who believe they are more than they are.

Now Paris Brown has stepped down after being bullied by the national press, and slammed by the public.

This entire story leaves a bad taste in my mouth. It reminds of how nasty we are with each chance we get to show compassion. The desire for moral supremacy is the gold of fools. What is it with people thriving and becoming so vocal only when inside a pack defined by ignorance? The mob would rather attack Paris Brown in numbers than seek the truth as individuals.

She was fourteen and stupid.

Bring me a parent who thinks they don’t have a daft fourteen year old child, and I bring you a daft parent.

The message to any kids in normal education is pretty clear: stay there. Join the dole queue. If you come near any important government role we will fuck you up forever.

This was our chance to forgive, to learn, to grow.

This was our chance to get to know the real youth of today, to build trust, to learn how to connect to prevent real crimes in the future… but unfortunately the plan has been destroyed by something far worse; the bitter youth of yesterday.

Paris Brown may end up on the dole now, with no future, and the Daily Mail and all its disillusioned readers will hate her for that too.

Margaret Thatcher: She lived with criticism, let her rest in peace.

My knowledge of Margaret Thatcher isn’t great, I am 32, so did not personally suffer from the Poll Tax, though my parents surely did.

I know she was in power for a long time, which takes balls. I know she reduced the national debt.

I know she divides opinion.

I know to piss off that many people you have to be honest, speak your true mind regardless of popular opinion, and not care what an entire country of strangers thinks of you.

I admire that.

I admire that more when I stop to consider we live on a planet inhabited with people who care more about how popular they are, and will alter their own opinion in order to increase popularity, than who they really are.

At least people knew who they hated and why.

Today we love an image we don’t think to question.

I know when she travelled to America, America stopped and took notice because it was a big deal; a far cry from the English politicians of today who whiten their teeth and sit, tails wagging, hoping for any thumbs-up political crumbs and appearances on American daytime TV shows.

I don’t know enough about all the bad things she is meant to have done, but even if I did – even if I had been financially destroyed by the poll tax and her ideas – I would not be rejoicing her death.

There is a saying, “he who holds onto a hot coal, only burns himself” – meaning anyone still angry with Margaret Thatcher, after she is dead, is only putting lines on their own face.

Some people might say I didn’t live through it, I don’t understand, her mistakes didn’t take money out of my pocket. And to those people, I say, you are correct. I am sorry you suffered. But I also say, it doesn’t matter now, she’s gone. Dead. It’s over.

All the anger aimed at Margaret Thatcher in life has no purpose now but to serve anger itself.

She lived with criticism.

Let her rest in peace.

The real monster is the monster making you think Mick Philpott is the real monster.

I am not defending Mick Philpott. His acts are well documented, and horrific.

I am questioning the government for hiding behind the UK press, the press who flooded the UK with endless Mick Philpott stories during the same week the government officially cut UK benefits for the working class and disabled.

If you are going to make your cuts and you believe they are justified, don’t hide.

Stand up. Take the flack. Argue your reasoning.

Instead, as the government fuck the poor, we are all too distracted by our bloodthirsty craving to appear morally uncorrupted.

The UK government timed their benefit cuts to come into force at the beginning of the same week the verdict of the Mick Philpott trial was announced.

Instead of David Cameron defending himself against a backlash from disabled people and those losing out on housing benefit, he is instead able to criticise those on welfare under the angelic light of being anti-Mick Philpott  with the full backing of the people he is taking money from to pay for the mistakes of his bankers.

The press want you to hate Mick Philpott.

The government need you to.

The government threw a grenade at a disabled person and, just before it exploded, the press pointed to a monster they created standing behind us.

By the time we all look back, we won’t remember why we looked away.

In a time the poor should be revolting against this government’s benefit cuts, the poor are being turned against themselves.

The pitchforks are out, but the villagers are holding the prongs against their own chest, because the newspapers are sending the message out that the real problem is them.

Behind the scenes, the press are still pouring all the right drinks into all the right government glasses.

David Cameron is still having big mansion wank parties. The leaders of our press, government and banks are standing in the same room masturbating frivolously over an ever soggy poverty biscuit.

Nothing has changed; worryingly, if you look closely and ignore the press, everything is slowly getting a little bit worse for the masses, and somehow, despite stealing trillions, yes TRILLIONS, a little bit better for the rich.

The newspapers traditionally read by the poor, are owned by the rich; they manipulate the thought processes of the too easily manipulated.

The documentary on the Trial of Mick Philpott shown on ITV the night of the verdict was not cobbled together in an hour. The programme was made months in advance.

Mick Philpott is a beast, a certain type of monster, but not the monster.

He killed six children. We can fathom the death of six children. We can understand the death of six children just enough to hate the act until our blood boils.

What we find a lot harder to fathom, because of its epic gargantuanousness, is this:

The welfare cuts in disability allowance alone will take £26billion over 5 years away from disabled people, roughly the same amount as the government paid RBS to get them initially out of trouble.

Coincidence, or, are the poor paying for the mistakes of the rich and instead of complaining, chasing a witch created by the media?

We have been thrown a bone, and look how we chew.

How many people like Mick Philpott could be educated for £26billion?

EVERYONE.

More, but not just more, better education means statistically less idiots. Less idiots means less domestic abuse, less alcohol abuse, less violence used to resolve problems, and in the most extreme cases less death, less murder.

Yet we pay bankers millions and teachers a pittance.

In any system based on logic, awareness and fairness for all, that is the wrong way around.

Children born from the educated means a higher chance of educated children.

Our system is not designed to be fair for as many people as possible. That’s why hospitals are closing, the poor and those in need are being fucked, teachers are underpaid; and all to sustain the big bonuses of bankers who have consistently proven beyond doubt they are criminals.

You don’t kill a monster by pulling out a toenail called Mick Philpott.

£26billion thrown into education would not guarantee solving everything, but it would open minds to other ways of thinking. I can’t see it doing any harm.

There are not many master criminals, but there are many criminals who never got the chance to master anything.

The actual money owed to the UK government for supporting banks since 2009, at one point, was £1.162trillion (TRILLION) pounds.

They still owe something around the region of £500 billion (BILLION) pounds. And official figures are probably way off.

Tony Benn said if you can find money to kill people, you can find money to help people.

I say if you can find money to kill people AND find a way for bankers to steal trillions, then there isn’t just enough money to help people in the natural pot, before the wars and theft.

There is enough money to save and love all the people of England.

There is enough money in our pot alone before we corrupt it, to save and love the world.

Mick Philpott is an under-educated moron, a poor idiot who grew up into a heartless wanker, nobody can argue what he became; but what if he had gone through private education when he was younger.

What would the outcome have been?

Who could he have been?

Our bankers stole £1.162 Trillion (!) – How about we don’t pay that money back to the banks and instead pay it back into education; let the bankers mistakes pay for more schools to reduce class sizes and pay the teachers more, but instead, the money is being pumped straight back into banking.

Why are banks at the top of our hierarchy? Why aren’t schools and education?

We do what the media tells us to do.

The press want you to think Mick is the monster of last week because the real monster of last week is so big we cannot see or fathom it.

The real monster stole so much money we can’t count it.

The real monster is taking life from the disabled.

The real monster creates the uneducated.

The real monster is closing hospitals.

The real monster feeds off the poor, sick and old.

The real monster gets the poor to blame the poor for what it takes.

The real monster is not Mick Philpott; the real monster is what is making you think Mick Philpott is the real monster.

You are not more special for screaming louder than everyone else how much you hate Mick Philpott, you are not a better person for sharing a Facebook meme with his face on it wanting him to die.

You are exactly the same person, only you are repeating and promoting the message the government wants you to repeat.

Tell your children with heartfelt passion all about evil Mick Philpott; forget to sit them down and explain why they are hungry and there’s no food in the fridge.

That, is madness.

The more you hate Mick Philpott, the more you forget who failed to provide him with a reasonable chance of being anyone other than who he became.

You are a robot, complaining about the rust on your wheels as your maker pulls the plug.

The pitchforks are out. The people want blood. And because of a well timed press release, the people don’t want the blood of the rich people at the top making them poorer, they want the blood of the poor.

This is dog eat dog, we are in a cage, our owners in their suits are looking down on us from above, laughing at how easy it is to get away with what they are doing.

Go fetch.

Sources for the banking and disability figures:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2011/nov/12/bank-bailouts-uk-credit-crunch

http://www.scope.org.uk/sites/default/files/The_Other_Care_Crisis.pdf

The pic at the end titled “it’s media” is not mine. I’ve been unable to find the source. Whoever made it, a cap tipped in your direction fine Sir/Madam.

A wild book appears

Reblogged from Matt Hill, writer:

For a smallish lump of squashed, sliced, graffitied tree, this beautiful-looking thing causes one of the weirdest feelings. Or even twelve of them at the same time: chufties, relief, embarrassment, hope, fear, pride, anxiety, awkwardness, gratefulness, nakedness, bewilderment, gratitude.

To be honest I’m still waiting for Jeremy Beadle to bob over and show me where all the hidden cameras are. But if he doesn’t show up, there will be wine.

Read more… 41 more words

Matt Hill's brilliant The Folded Man is launching in London on the 22nd May. Anyone near should go and grab a copy. And if you aren't near, start walking now...

A little bit of reasoning, as to why we are here.

A grey haired man fell over. Stumbled, hit the pavement hard with his palms facing down.

The man walking behind the fallen man stopped.

He leant down and offered his hand, which the older guy took with an embarrassed smile.

The fallen man was assisted to the nearby wall.

The younger man used his bottle of water to clean the gravel from the old man’s hands.

I took this photograph to remind me of the billions of kind acts people perform every day. Not for money, not for gain.

The acts which turn a stranger into a friend for a moment, then back into a stranger again.

The random acts of kindness we would never know existed, if we didn’t see them for ourselves.

The true instinct inside us, the you our media fears.

A little bit of reasoning, as to why we are here.

Grumpy Cat is a classically trained actor living in Peckham.

Grumpy cat, famous for his appearance in memes across the world, is a classically trained actor living in Peckham, London.

This news may hit those people hard who have spent hours posting pictures of Grumpy Cat all over the internet, genuinely believing he was caught in a moment before coffee and just after receiving an unjustified parking ticket.

“These people, posting pictures of me, laughing, they need to know – that’s not really me. I’m actually a happy go lucky cat. I feel like their laughter is hollow. Empty somehow. Every time I see a new meme I feel like I’ve been put in a Brighton bin by an old lady living with emotionally repressed noodle thinkings.”

I nod my head, though I only understand the beginning of what Grumpy Cat just said.

Grumpy Cat has arranged for this interview.

He asked me if we could meet at his local cafe for a coffee, so he could get his side of the story out and clear his conscience.

So I said yes, because I’ve got nothing else to blog about.

So he sits opposite me now. In a cafe in Peckham; lapping coffee and talking quickly.

Grumpy Cat has a really dry nose. I wonder if it’s possible for him to catch a cold; but I have no time to dwell on the thought, as he continues to talk…

“I mean, what is so funny about cat pictures attached to a few words anyway? What has happened to you fucking people? You used to laugh at true comics. You used to laugh at originality, now originality is scorned, seen as a curse, and you people have gone from laughing at John Cleese to crying in hysterics at pictures of cats? You know, John Cleese, he wrote entire sitcoms, you know who is writing these cat memes? People who haven’t had fucking sex yet. Virgins. Young adults. Or, worse, old people. Old people who think they know what funny is because the internet tells them when to laugh, and all because their friends type “LOL” next to these pictures. So they replicate, then think they’ll write their own funny memes because, for some stupid reason, every human thinks to be popular is the answer to all their internal fucking problems.”

He stops talking.

He’s a bit sweary.

I don’t think I’d like to see him drunk. Or on catnip, or on whatever potion cats use to create regret and self loathing.

I narrow my left eyeball slightly.

“You listening?”

I nod my head, tell him to go on. Tell him I’m making mental notes and it’s all going in.

“Well, you know, memes are not comedy. Memes are a bunch of clapping monkeys replicating what isn’t funny because nobody is in the same room, so nobody really knows that nobody else is actually laughing at these fucking cat memes. So everybody is suddenly assuming what comedy is. Comedy is changing, is what I’m saying. And it’s changing from funny to seriously fucking embarrassing and shit.”

Grumpy cat sips his coffee and shoots me a look like I’ve just caught him putting a pencil in his arse whilst pretending to be a pencil sharpener on the desk of a banker from Barclays.

“You mind if I smoke?”

I shake my head again.

Once, I would have added it’s a free country; but I remember it’s not a free country. Not anymore. Now everything has a price and nobody can afford to pay it.

So I look up and say:

“Up to you, though I don’t think you can smoke inside.”

Grumpy Cat lights up. Right here. In this cafe. Literally not giving a single fuck.

There is a moments silence between us.

The silence falls over the entire cafe, like a cloth over a dining table surrounded by people waiting for anybody else to make the first complaint.

He takes a long puff and his eyes turn into two gold pots filled with catnip at the end of rainbows.

He continues talking.

“You know what I think? You humans have this idea, this theory, that the universe is expanding and eventually it will have to contract. Well, I think you’ve reached the limits of your own universe inside your heads. I think you’ve reached the limits of your comedy, you have reached the edge of your intelligence; and you don’t realise it because it’s happening slowly, but you are contracting back into being monkeys. In fact, looking at what you laugh at, looking at your wars and your leaders, I think you are already there. And you are worse than monkeys, because when you guys are dumb, people die in their millions.”

For a cat, he’s making a lot of sense to me. A bit arrogant.

A bit hoity-toity.

A bit la de da; but far more intelligent than his image of being a pencil sharpener or cat meme picture.

“Anyway, my owner filmed me as a kitten running up his leg. I grabbed his penis with my claws. The video went viral. I couldn’t go out anymore. I put on weight. I got really fat. I was huge. A video of me at my lowest and fattest went viral too. I felt like I couldn’t escape. That’s when I started smoking.”

He takes a long puff on his cigarette.

A woman opposite coughs and looks over. But she’s stunned into not complaining, and whispers to her friend I appear to be talking to that cat from the internet.

He takes another puff, wraps his claws on the wooden table in front of him, like he’s rolling an invisible coin across the surface beneath his paw.

“I felt like nobody knew me. Everywhere I went, I was that fat cat from the internet. I lost weight by jumping on a trampoline. It takes a long time to lose weight bouncing. When I finally felt like myself, whoever that is, I auditioned for a cat meme agency. That’s how I landed the role of Grumpy Cat.”

I look down at my coffee. Milk, two sugars. I pick up the silver spoon and tap it against the side of my mug, twice. The cup makes a dinging noise that reminds me of the school bell ringing back when I was a kid in education.

From this moment on, I think, the dinging noise will remind me of talking to Grumpy Cat.

I tap the edge of my mug again and listen to the ding to confirm it.

I see Grumpy Cat, and the school bell fades into lost memory.

Grumpy Cat licks his top lip with a dry tongue full of sharp bits, then speaks:

“So, tell the world Craig I’m much happier than people think I am. Or at least tell the people on your blog that I’m not really grumpy. Though, I’ve got to say, being thought of as Grumpy Cat is making me grumpy.”

“Let me get this straight, for the blog. You want me to tell the people I can to start thinking of you as happy, and you want me to do that before you become so grumpy you become the cat they think you are now?”

Grumpy Cat smiles. Takes a puff from his cigarette and pops his collar on his leather jacket.

“That Craig, is why I chose you. I knew you would understand. And here, put this photograph of me smiling at the end of your blog. And tell everyone you know to stop pretending to laugh out loud at things they’re not laughing out loud at. It’s making comedy a false economy.”

“A false comedeconomy?”

“Precisely.”

The cat formerly known as Grumpy slides a photograph of himself smiling across the table to me.

I take the photograph and put it in my inside pocket. Then lean back in my chair.

As I thank Grumpy Cat for the interview, I feel a hand on my right shoulder.

The hand squeezes my shoulder hard, and before I know what’s going on, I feel another hand on my back.

My feet are off the floor.

I’m still holding the spoon.

The door opens.

I’m on the street.

The angry voice of a disgusted man with sausage breath drowns my ears, calls me sick, tells me the police have been called, shouts at me what sort of man brings their cat out in public and forces it to smoke.

I go to explain, but he wouldn’t understand.

I go to offer a counter argument based around eating a pig, that was alive, being worse than sitting opposite a perfectly healthy smoking cat, but before I can make sense of anything a figure is coming toward me and I think I’m about to be kicked.

The fat shape grabs the spoon out of my hand, then taps me gently on the forehead like my brain is a shell and he’s trying to crack open new thought processes.

I hear a voice telling me to think.

Think.

I am running now, running home to my flat.

Because I have an important message from Grumpy cat.

Review of The End of Mr Y.

4/5 stars.

Hate the main character, not the book. Hate the main character AND the book. But don’t hate the book because of the main character. I mean, to give this book 1 star because you didn’t like the main protagonist is crazier than a clown glove reaching out of a cuckoo clock one minute before the hour…because the book, all books, can never be written with “you” specifically in mind. So, in short, get over yourself.

In a literary world engulfed by werewolves and vegetarian vampires, supported by a television schedule hell bent on nullifying the imagination of the planet, books like this are hard to find.

I mean, people watch Eastenders every night, what do people know?

Is it perfect? no. There are blocks of text, and on occasion the book gets engulfed in its own need to make the events plausible, almost (in my opinion) takes itself too seriously – but just reading a book that takes you into another book and then back round and into conciousness itself has to be worth a look.

Ariel, student/teacher of sorts reads a book she isn’t meant to read, and everything literally spirals, but not out of control, from there.

I would give this book 5 stars, but I’m more philosopher than scientist, so I tend to prefer floaty words of squish to structure; not that there aren’t plenty of lovely turns of phrase in The End of Mr Y.

For the originality of story, for the unabashed belief in writing the impossible – Scarlett Thomas, bravo.

*throws bouquet onto stage*

You can buy The End of Mr Y here:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/End-Mr-Y-Scarlett-Thomas/dp/1847670709