These long months of lockdown have strained the good natures of the most well-adjusted individuals. For those of us with what might be called a more artistic temperament, the challenge of keeping your head has been a daily battle.
Reading has not offered its traditional consolations. I know from social media that I’m not the only one to have their usual patterns disrupted. I’ve found weighty, demanding literature almost impossible to consume – life is currently heavy enough.
It took me a while to find what I needed. I wasn’t going to get along with Dostoyevsky or a thousand heavily–footnoted pages of David Foster Wallace. Literature, get me out of here:I’ve reached escape velocity with crime noir, science fiction and intelligently witty satire.
I’ve binged on the magnificently unhinged fantasies of Christopher Moore and the captivating alien world-building of Adrian Tchaikovsky; I’ve sampled a wide menu of drawling southern gothic detectives and devoured the superior Cold War espionage novels of Anthony Price.
But my favourite find has undoubtedly been David Wong. Wong is actually Jason Pargin, an online American humourist whose pseudonym – taken from a villain in one of his early stories – has led to him receiving anti-Chinese hate mail. Zoey Punches The Future In The Dick is his fifth novel and the second in the Zoey Ashe series.
think a mash-up of William Gibson, Sue Townsend and Bill and Ted
Wong has a way with titles. This book’s predecessor was Futuristic Violence And Fancy Suits, while his earlier trilogy, based around a pair of slacker alien hunters, were consecutively named John Dies at the End, This Book is Full of Spiders: Seriously, Dude, Don’t Touch It, and What The Hell Did I Just Read?
