Shhh! I'm Reading.

I’m a big fat J.G. Ballard fan. To pilfer a Rob Gordon expression, Crash is in my all time top 5. If you don’t like that book, I don’t know, I’m not sure we can be friends. We read Empire of the Sun last month at my book club. I was like, yay!, we’re reading Ballard! People are gonna love this shit! Nope. We score books on a 10 point scale for kicks. Ballard had to work hard for a 6.4 (we are very precise, our club coordinator has a background in finance). Wee Jim was viewed as lacking in humanity, a cold lifeless little wench who didn’t give two pops about his long lost family and seemed content to diddle about on his bicycle, ogling ladies outside his demographic. The punches to the face of the pilot amidst the throes of death were a problem for folks too. As the great George R.R. Martin once said, “pfui!” Ballard’s novel is, in my estimation (and what else matters really?), a brilliant study of the collision of humanity and technology. I think, in many ways, that has been Ballard’s preoccupation throughout much of his work; perhaps most obviously in Crash. It’s a sustained meditation on the borderlands between the human body and machine. And World War 2, if you’re a novelist interested in the dehumanizing effects of industrialization, is the definitive event. That Ballard had a personal connection to the material seems beside the point.  Anyway, this is the great thing about participating in a book club: fiery dissent, irreconcilable differences, intellectual smackdowns. I still love Ballard. Deal with it.