July 2010
Read everything you can about everything you hate. Stop reading exclusively about what you love and what agrees with you or get off the bus and let someone else on who’s going to appreciate the ride.
“Keen readers of novels see important things that critics miss. Everyone knows that Patrick Bateman, the narrator of Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho, obsessively details the items of designer garb that he and his yuppie acquaintances are wearing. But someone on the book club website understood what all reviewers and critics, as far as I know, missed: “If you actually take note of the combinations of clothes that these people are wearing (brightly coloured scarves with different brightly coloured shirt and tie and such) they would look ridiculous, but Ellis presumes most readers will reach a stage where they skip over these parts, thus highlighting our own glib acceptance of ridiculous high fashion.)” When he came to talk about the novel at the book club, the author confirmed that he had trawled fashion magazines to make ill-judged combinations of clothing. If you were to “see” Patrick Bateman in any scene, he would look not cool but absurd.”
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