Books.

We'll go to a record shop and buy volumes costing three pounds. We'll buy novelisations in HMV for a pittance. We'll buy buy-one-get-one-free books in Borders. We'll buy books. We're eager for self-fulfillment. We're hungry for the self-worth contained in the slim volumes of popular prose. We'll read just to keep the demons at bay.

We cite authors like they're type-cast. We cite them in platitudes. They're just the icons and pin-up boys of our self-disgust. They're immediate idols we can conjure up just to feel as if we're widely read or as if we know anything at all of the maelstrom of knowledge contained in a classic.

We read our shit-poke books written by the shit-poke authors of the day. A book is a treasure of limitless power. Books are becoming a defunct and prosaic platform for imparting knowledge. Take your time - you have your life. Ask around. Buy books because they're books; not because you want a vain sense of self-fulfillment you think you may find lurking in the pages of a Paul McKenna or some other dross self-help guide; self-help guides are the last refuge for the helpless.

A book is a journey. It's a mirror of society and the human condition. A book can be dangerous and revolutionary. A book can be a window into the soul or a chute which leads straight to hell. A book is what you make of it.

Sylvia Plath, Cormac McCarthy, John Steinbeck, George Orwell, Kurt Vonnegut, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Joseph Heller, Charles Bukowski, Pat Barker, Hunter S. Thompson, Jack Kerouac, The Bronte Sisters, Bill Bryson, Jack London, Aldous Huxley, William Burroughs, J. G. Ballard, Franz Kafka, Vladamir Myakovsky, Joseph Conrad, Albert Camus....

These are all but a few writers I know of quite scantily. I don't profess to be well-read but I admire these authors none-the-less based on what I have read. I know that many of you reading this may've read all of these authors, but, for those of you who haven't, the pages wait eager to be turned.... If you have any favourite reads I've neglected to mention or comments on points I've brought up please fill your boots.