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The 200 Best Tracks of the Decade So Far (#3, Kanye West - Runaway) – Jeremy D. Larson (Pitchfork) I’ve been really enjoying my very particular way of reading Pitchfork’s 2010-2014 tracks list (listening to this Spotify playlist, working my way from...

The 200 Best Tracks of the Decade So Far (#3, Kanye West - Runaway) – Jeremy D. Larson (Pitchfork)

I’ve been really enjoying my very particular way of reading Pitchfork’s 2010-2014 tracks list (listening to this Spotify playlist, working my way from #1 down, reading each entry in time with the song it’s about).

There’s some great writing in there (I suspect this won’t be the last passage I share) and this piece in particular absolutely nails its subject. In the space of a paragraph, Larson moves from being purely descriptive, in a way that’s ensures you’ll be able to hear that note in your head, and into a larger reading of the song and its context in Kanye’s career.

That’s enough to be envious of. But the bloated magnificence of My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy is my own personal white whale as a blogger, and seeing someone pin it down this effortlessly turns me a shade of green previously only seen in emoticons.

Kanye West Runaway Pitchfork music journalism Jeremy D Larson

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Forever destined to be introduced as a ‘much-anticipated follow up’, Seconds jettisons a lot of Scott Pilgrim's tics, including some of the playful ways it meddled with the comics form and gleeful breaking of the fourth wall.

But this is one of the places where those tendencies seep back in. Seconds is narrated in third-person, by captions which hang in the air above Katie’s head. And throughout, Katie directly addresses - and, in this case, contradics - the way her story is being narrated.

As the captions use free indirect speech - staying just outside of Katie’s head, but heavily dosed with her perspective - they read like a live commentary playing out in Katie’s head.

When she contradicts these monologues, then, Seconds softly establishes and then reminds you how indecisive she is as a character, which (without spoiling anything) turns out to be sort of the point of the book. But on the surface, it’s just a great running joke.

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Gone Girl - Gillian Flynn (Phoenix Fiction) This is just some great, tight thriller writing. Those last two sentences invite you to play detective, pick back through the scene for the other four lies. They set expectations which Flynn spends the next...

Gone Girl - Gillian Flynn (Phoenix Fiction)

This is just some great, tight thriller writing.

Those last two sentences invite you to play detective, pick back through the scene for the other four lies. They set expectations which Flynn spends the next few hundred pages alternately reinforcing and confounding. But…

As a rule, I tend to pick out passages that are representative of the book as a whole. That isn’t the case here. To me, Gone Girl isn’t a great, tight thriller, though it may be presented as one. At its most effective, Gone Girl a horror story.

That horror is rooted in very mundane, universal fears. Fears about working in a collapsing industry, which in Gone Girl appears to be just about all of them. About being a bad person, deep down, and having to lie to ourselves and others. About how we appear when those lies fail or are overwhelmed by someone else’s.

Most of all, it’s a horror about the fragile unpredictability of love. The book sells Nick and Amy’s relationship without ever really lingering on its happy origins. Instead, the focus is on the couple a decade down the line, as each of those fears is methodically applied to show how they can cause love to dissipate, or to warp into something ugly and harmful.

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WEIRD FOREIGN DRINKS PARTY – Grant Howitt (Look Robot) Grant Howitt’s Look Robot is nominally about games, I think, but it’s one of those blogs that I will happily follow on pretty much any digression. This particular post takes a stroll into a kind...

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Grant Howitt’s Look Robot is nominally about games, I think, but it’s one of those blogs that I will happily follow on pretty much any digression. 

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The Psychopath Test – Jon Ronson (Picador)

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For me, it’s a reminder of how easy it is to become a third-hand expert on a subject after reading/watching/listening to. And of course, before too long Ronson is reminded of that too – in this case, by a well-argued point from documentary maker Adam Curtis. Once again, you’re totally convinced. 

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I’ve said that one of the reasons for this blog is to earmark things I can steal at a later date. This isn’t that, exactly.

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(A portrait of the blogger as a young man.)

…What’s that was I just saying about Grant Morrison really getting his fans?

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