I Love You, Because You Know Such Lovely People

Sometimes this project is rather like taking nasty-tasting medicine; there's not other way but through, so you just have to suck it up. I've had a few books along the way that have matched that analogy quite nicely, but the most unpleasant I have read (probably the most unpleasant book I have ever read) is The Wasp Factory. Good gravy. The basic plot of this story is that you have this very morbid teenager whose hobbies mostly involve a machine to kill wasps in a number of unique ways, collecting dead animal heads (which often involves killing the animals), and musing about the three murders he has committed. He indicates that he's killed his younger brother and two cousins; we'll return to that in a moment.

In addition to this lovely human being, we also get his brother who, at the start of the novel, has just escaped from a mental institution where he has been confined for doing such charming things as setting dogs on fire and giving small children lumps of dirt with maggots and worms in them. Yes indeedy.

The novel has a bit of a twist (though it's hard to really care about, because by then you just want to be done and take a hot shower), about which I have extremely mixed feelings. Extremely. I won't really go into it, but let's just say that gender is a very complicated topic to raise and I think even with the twist some aspects of this novel's treatment of gender are pretty problematic.

That said, it did raise for me some questions about unreliable narrators and what it even means to be an unreliable narrator in a fictional story, since there's not reality to be unreliable with regard to, really. I'm not sure if our lead is supposed to come off as potentially unreliable, but I did wonder at times. Which then led me down this rabbit hole of what it even means, etc. which, sadly, was the most interesting aspect of this book for me. So icky. Really a shame, too, because Iain Banks is hot.

I also read another Graham Greene, The End of the Affair. Which, okay, fine whatever, it was good an all, and had some interesting characters and a cool structure. But, the thing is, it's really just like ever other Greene novel that I have read; which is to say, so obsessed with this weird sort of Catholic guilt, this intense need for Catholicism, combined with this need for some sort of divine Catholic approval and a simultaneous hatred of Catholicism. It's hard to describe in a way that would really capture what I mean exactly, unless you've read a few of Greene's books, but suffice it to say: yeesh, dude, get over it.