A Confederacy of Dunces is an absolute joy. I had an enormous, goofy grin on my face the entire time. This is the funniest book I've read since The Book of the Film of the Story of My Life- it may, in fact, be the funniest book I've ever read. I kept turning to whoever was around me at the time (even strangers on the bus, like) and saying: "Oh, oh, this is a good bit, you've gotta hear this!" and then reading them a passage. God, what a gem.

It's the story of one Ignatius J. Reilly, an enormous, erudite thirty-year-old who lives with his mother in New Orleans, circa 1950. Ignatius is at once staggeringly smart and astoundingly stupid. He's got book-smarts, indeed everything he says is eminently quotable, but he applies his philosophies to life so rigorously that he is barely functional, and offends every person he meets with his bizarre outlook.

"I socialize with either my peers or no-one. Since I have no peers, I socialize with no-one."

Ignatius is a real creation. Awful, hilarious, repulsive, not actually malign, but somehow bringing destruction to all those around him. But he'd just be plain annoying if not for the fact that nearly everything he says is pure genius, particularly his frequent "Big Chief" rants which he writes in little notebooks scattered around his room, and his wonderful correspondence with "That Minx" Myrna Minkhoff, a friend he met in College, and perhaps his only friend outside his long-suffering and much-abused mother.

To give you an idea of Ignatius' personality, his favourite hobby is to go to movies (which, like all society, he loves to despise) and loudly point out all the flaws. "Oh, my God! What degenerate produced this abortion?" he cries.

I've got this habit that is by turns both helpful and annoying, in that my brain often 'picks up the pattern' of whatever book I happen to be reading at the time. So when I read Bill Hicks, I find I'm extremely funny, when I read Haruki Murakami I find myself slightly disconnected from the world, when I read a non-fiction book I'm very matter-of-fact, and so on. Unfortunately, whilst reading A Confederacy of Dunces I was very pompous and arrogant (aside: I'm now reading Hunter S. Thompson so am looking forward to being drunk and witty).

The book occasionally drifts to other subplots with other characters, the greatest of which is Burma Jones, a man who can't get through a sentence without exclaiming: "Whoa!" which I found highly amusing for reasons I really can't explain.

Like all great comedy, Dunces is laced with tragedy, at one point quite depressing me (even while remaining depressingly funny) because everyone's case seems so hopeless. But like five episodes of Seinfeld mashed together, all the various threads come together to solve everyone else's problems, and ends on a great high note that to be honest I wasn't expecting.

It's a great work. Read it- It'll be one of the best things you've read. Read it. I demand it! My copy is yours, should you wish it.

So I was heading off to Croatia and I realized that I knew next to nothing about the war there. I knew it had something to do with Serbia and Bosnia or Bosno-Serbi-Cromagnon or something, but really didn't have the foggiest idea what it was all about, how it started, how it ended, who was doing what to whom, and that I should really get my head `round it while I was there (so forgive me if you already have encyclopaedic knowledge of the event. You're in a minority.)

The Fall of Yugoslavia was my attempt to do just that (although, reading a book with that title on a Croatian beach was probably in the same order of stupid as going into an Irish Pub and reading a book called The Troubles: Who's Right and Who's Retarded?). It's the story of Misha Glenny, a 'confessed coward' who nonetheless ended up, in his role as a journalist for the Guardian, in all the hotspots of the various wars that sprung up all over Yugoslavia throughout the former half of the 1990's. Yep, it really wasn't that long ago- the war was still raging less than ten years ago.

I say 'various wars', because the Croatian war was just one of many different wars which sprung up during Yugoslavia's dissolution. The Croatian war was the first of these, and seemed to begin when Serbians in Croatian became alarmed by measures taken by the Croatian government to reduce the role of Serbians in Croatia's cultural and political life. Several of these alarmists formed small militias and overtook the town of Knin (not far from where I was staying in Split), which happened to be the gateway between the economically powerful Dalmatian Coast and the rest of Croatia. They got a stranglehold on Croatia's economy and war swiftly broke out from there, spreading into Bosnia-Hercegovina and then transforming into a three-way conflict, as Serbians and Croatians in Bosnia went on a collosal land-grab, leaving none for the resident Bosnia Moslems, who formed a third faction in the conflict. Other factions included the UN, who largely had their hands tied while the conflict got more and more bloody, and the JNA, Yugoslavia's Federal Army, which began by trying to keep the peace, but as more and more nations seceded from Yugoslavia, became more and more a tool for the Serbian factions.

Confused? I was. It's a confusing conflict. One of the more bizarre sequences in the book is when a Serbian General calls a Croatian General and says: "Mladic! We've left an open grave with all your boys in it near the front, you might want to go and pick up the bodies, they're stinking up the place. How's your family?" There was a lot going on, and annoyingly, the book kind of cuts off in 1993, when the conflict was still going strong.

All the time I was reading the book, I kept looking around myself, at Croatia, asking: "Where the heck are all the Serbs? Surely the conflict didn't just STOP and everyone became friends again after all the horrible atrocities they committed on one another?" The epilogue, which was written in 1996, covers the massive exile of Serbs from Croatia- the largest exile of a people from one country since World War II- and answered my question.

This is disturbing, fascinating, very well balanced, and exhaustively well researched material. I say exhaustive as both a compliment and a warning- it's not a 'light read'. I had to go over some pages over more than once just to figure out exactly what was happening.

It's also a very sad book, just because the entire conflict seemed so bizarre, so needless. The author repeatedly refers to war as some kind of virus (he probably would have said 'meme' if he was a blogger), something that infects people and makes them do horrible things they would never normally do. It's tough to argue with his theory when presented with such awful testimony.

As I sat on golden sands in Croatia, surrounded by tranquility, knowing that most everyone around me had lived through, could remember, had participated in, those insane times, not too long ago, it was a frightening reminder to me of how close any society is to suddenly being infected with the virus.

"So far, so average." says the narrator about two-thirds into The Player of Games, my first foray into the highly recommended world of Iain M. Banks.

"Yup." I internally nodded to myself. Maybe it was my own fault for reading outlandish sci-fi right on the heels of the immacuately-constructed worlds of Infinite Jest and Post Captain. Maybe nothing could live up to those two giants of awesomeness.

Maybe I was just in the mood to be nit-picky. The book begins in a society called 'The Culture', in which all human needs are provided, humans can 'gland' any emotion or high they desire, and they coexist with sentient droids that have the full rights of people. The main character is Jernau Gurgeh, who is the Culture's most renowned game-player. Whatever game you care to mention, Jernau is the master of it (he's also something of a pompous ass, which makes it tough to sympathize with him, or indeed give a shit about the outcome of his fate- death for many a novel).

Jernau is driven into action after cheating in a game with the assistance of a droid, which then blackmails him (along with physical threats) into a course of action that ends up with Jernau on the other side of the universe, playing a very complex, dangerous game (the rules of which are frustratingly never explained in even the slightest depth) that dominates a primitive society.

Now, I have no problem with imagining societies that don't realistically make sense. Take Star Trek for instance- obviously if transporters really did exist, the society that would erupt from such discoveries would be one vastly different to what is portrayed in the Trekiverse (indeed, it'd be difficult to imagine). However I'm willing to put such fickle transgressions aside in the name of a good story.

However, the Culture's, ah, internal inconsistencies aside, I had two big problems with the opening premise of the book. The first is that if any human society would ever develop droids that were so overwhelmingly powerful that they could threaten humans to do their will, they would also develop safeguards against that happening- however Jernau seems completely and utterly suprised that such an event is occuring- surely it'd be commonplace? Fortunately, this complaint is actually addressed (quite satisfyingly) in the very last line of the novel, which made me very happy, but then opened up a much bigger can of worms, namely that while the Culture appears to offer its citizens complete freedom, it does in fact manipulate its citizens to do its bidding, via byzantine and overly-complex conspiracies- which begs the question: why does it bother?

The second problem is that Jernau is the greatest game player in the known galaxy and yet can't think a way out of a simple game of double-bluff! He seems flustered beyond all understanding by the droid's threats. He's obviously never played a decent hand of poker -or clam, for that matter. After that simple slip-up, any of his claims to brilliance just seemed to further irritate me.

[super nit-pick! Jernau, the greatest authority in gaming in the galaxy, states in one of his essays on gaming that chess 'has no element of chance'. Well, it's got one element. Muh.]

It's certainly well written, which I always enjoy, and there is some thought-provoking (although, by the standards of recent sci-fi, somewhat antiquated) material on what kind of society would be ruled by games, but I think the best review could be summarized by what I said immediately after I finished the book- I put it down, and said: "Done!"

"Any good?" my friend asked.

"Meh."

Me and my friend Jayne are working (I write `em, she draws `em) on a comic strip, the first of which is done. As the strips are too large to be posted in the 700px of joy that is da`blog, I'll be placing them in a separate page of their own (which I'll ah, make...very soon!), and letting you know here when new ones come to light.

Enjoy.

Croatia was fantastic, as you'd expect. Lots of beach, lots of reading, lots of drinking, lots of eating. Too much eating, in fact.

I've stuck a few hundred photos here, should you care to peruse them.

We also took a few videos (thanks, Adrian!), mainly of me jumping off of cliffs. They can be found:

Here (horizontal for small cliffs)

and

Here (vertical for HUUUUGE cliffs)

and for even more cliff-jumping fun, I've made a (fun!) animated gif which you can access by clicking below:

Tree Pivo Molim Vas.



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Emailed on the move from Dan's mobile

Rob takes a wee float off the coast of Hvar, the Croatian Island we are currently exploring by boat. Our boat is cool.



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Emailed on the move from Dan's mobile

I've just had a great idea for the caption of this photo!



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Emailed on the move from Dan's mobile

For my next trick, I shall turn wine into vomit.



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Emailed on the move from Dan's mobile

Today there was a mighty thunderstorm. Today we ate a lot of bread and drank a lot of beer. Today we saw some cool cats. Today we went up a very tall tower and got Vertigo...twice! Today rocked.



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Emailed on the move from Dan's mobile