[ reading reflection and response ]

The Raw Shark Texts: I read this book last summer and instantly loved it. It's about a guy named Eric Sanderson who wakes up one day with no knowledge of who or where he is. He finds that he has a cat and a psychologist, the latter of whom he goes to see courtesy of directions in a note left by "The First Eric Sanderson." She tells him he has dissociative fugue, a type of amnesia...but in reality, his memories have been eaten by a "conceptual shark" called the Ludovician. The book is sort of a combination of the absurd and the serious. We see a guy named Mr Nobody who melts if he doesn't take personality supplement pills (and who infects Eric with an "idea lamprey" by concealing it in a copy of The Origin of Species with most words replaced with "plant"); a "computer virus mosquito in amber"; a guy from the nineteenth century who becomes immortal by hypnotising people (inadvertently causing a present-day world takeover attempt via the internet); a recreation of the final scene in Jaws in a conceptual fishing boat on a conceptual ocean, and many many more such things (including, of course, the Ludovician and other "conceptual fish"), many with no explanation at all. Times are also treated interchangeably with places ("The First Eric Sanderson" sends Eric letters from the past, complete with lines like "It's raining here in the past. I hope the weather there in the future is better."). The book also gives a name to "the labelless car parks, crawl tunnels, disused attics and cellars, bunkers, maintenance corridors, derelict industrial estates, boarded-up houses, smashed-windowed condemned factories, offlined power plants, underground facilities, storerooms, abandoned hospitals, fire escapes, rooftops, vaults, crumbling churches with dangerous spires, gutted mills, Victorian sewers, dark tunnels, passageways, ventilation systems, stairwells, lifts, the dingy winding corridors behind shop changing rooms, the pockets of no-name-place under manhole covers and behind the overgrow of railway sidings," and that is un-space, which is charted and researched by the secret Un-Space Exploration Committee. It's hard to take a book as bizarre as this seriously, but it's such a good book, you (sort of) do.