I've read it all, love all of it. Fat bourgeois slugs will never understand us
I believe that I have read all of the ones mentioned by this point in the thread and I think every one of them I enjoyed... maybe the lowest mark being a six or seven and the highest being nine or so. So going by that small amount of evidence, this is indeed a promising looking genre in terms of quality control, so far no real fucking stinkers have been unearthed. That said though, come to think of it, Bukowski does kinda piss me off, and although all his books are the same, in fact literally identical down to the very word, some of them are quite bad, while at other times he just nails it.
If you're not in the mood... no fuck that, it's nothing to do with your mood, I'm letting him off too easily there, it's down to him. Some versions of his book are clear-eyed, no bullshit views of the minutiae of drinking a fifth of whiskey and failing to get an erection or surgical eviscerations of the pointless futility of a life which revolves around the most mundane jobs - but sometimes his book suddenly transforms into something which is itself a pointless and futile exercise in that very boredom.
I want to put that better - sometimes (for example when he called it Factotum) he skilfully captures the boredom of a job - and of course, by extension, his life as well - and once he safely has it trapped he toys with it in front of you for your amusement or enjoyment or understanding or something, but sometimes (eg when he named it Post Office) he grabs hold of the boredom more crudely and not so safely and due to this carelessness the boredom is not properly contained and in my case it actually infected me. I was annoyed about that. Cos you read a book to get away from boredom and yet, cos of his carelessness (most likely cunt was drunk) he gave me a huge dose of it that took me ages to shake off.
In fact I can remember that, it must have been one of the worst cases of boredom that I have ever come down with. I remember I was in my girlfriend's flat in Nottingham at the time and her flatmate was so boring. She hated tasting stuff and I remember a long conversation about onions on pizza and how she said that she was happy to put onions on pizza but as long as you cooked them first for ages and ages before you put them on the pizza to ensure that there was no chance that anybody eating the pizza could taste the onions in any way. And I remember thinking that that is such a boring thing to do, and talking about it is even more boring - I wasn't even gonna eat the pizza, it was nothing to do with me - and she had a boring voice. I was trapped by triple boredom and too bored to move and escape. It was terrible. I don't know if I can blame Bukowski for that - I mean, she hadn't read it or anything but it was in the house, so at least part of me does, I think the boredom escaped from the book and infected us and trapped us, cos she went on to be relatively interesting later, so something HAD in fact made her more boring at that point. It must have been the book right? With hindsight it's the only explanation. Mystery solved that's good to know... um... I don't know what the fuck I'm talking about, sorry guys I think I've totally lost it. Why am I even writing this down it's gibberish?