So after working at a bookstore for a year it seems that there's been a strange nihilism wash over me when it comes to reading books. Nothing feels satisfying anymore.
I go through one and the next hoping that this one will become my next favorite, or at the very least enjoyable. Perhaps it's because being exposed to so many new writers or older writers coming out with the same material has put me off towards modern and contemporary writing. Such people like James Patterson, Jojo Moyes, Liane Moriarty, even Stephen King come to mind. The same regurgitated boring narrative that's been written time and time again. The characters feel stale, the mystery is never a mystery because of the plot twists that you immediately assume and turn out to be true. It becomes disheartening to even try to find gems. Not that there isn't hidden treasures but when you're faced with common archetypes and classics just being reprinted incessantly it leaves you with the feeling that perhaps those golden artifacts you find in the midst of mediocrity are being hidden somewhere, elsewhere and that you'll never find them. It's alarming how sloppy writers have become. It's no longer about the quality of the writing but about how often you can print a book with the same idea just told differently and get away with selling it. In fact, many popular writers today have ghostwriters. All they have to do is stamp their name and wait for the money.
It's become an industry like any other. Sure, you don't have to take literature seriously and in fact your reason for reading can be purely for light entertainment, nothing too heavy, nothing that will make you feel depressed while you're sunbathing by the beach and that is perfectly understandable.
Sometimes you want a book to be a distraction not another thing that reminds you of the heavy blows of being alive. A big reason why I see a lot of people stray from Russian lit like Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. It's difficult to tackle something so heavy, not just in how many pages it consist of but the material inside and how it takes more than just reading but actually analyzing each sentence to fully grasp it's meaning.
However, I am of the firm belief that a book can consist of both humor and seriousness. That the universality of all art is that it's about duality, about containing positives and negatives.
That's when I stumbled upon the art/poetry book by David Shrigley titled Ants Have Sex in Your Beer. What first drew me in was the absurd title and although not explicitly recent (it being published somewhere in 2007) it definitely falls into the contemporary side of literature, or whatever you'd like to call it. There's an immediate strangeness to this book that I've only seen in zines and local artists that sit at community art festivals selling their jewelry and home-made paperback stories.
I immediately fell in love with the bizarre way it doesn't take itself seriously and in that gains more maturity than any pretentious writer trying to sound philosophical and failing when it comes to depth. It's humble in the way it's construed, it's almost like reading an artist's notebook while you sit with them in their living room watching television. It feels like a Monday afternoon.
You can read it in one sitting but go back to every little poem individually and laugh at the morbidity of some of them. There's one specific poem that I found alarmingly charming that I wish I could have written. see for yourself: