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Ah yes, the old "If I had a rock band" novel. Lots of novelists have tried, and most have failed. The tricky thing about writing a good rock'n'roll novel is that most novelists are shit musicians, and their fictional hits very rarely sound like something anyone would ever want to listen to.

So hey, write about the Eurovision where a song being euphorically shit is part of the draw.

Disclaimer: I loathe the Eurovision Song Contest. And yet I love this story of mankind being forced to participate in an intergalactic song contest to prove that we're sentient (and not a threat to intergalactic peace). Valente shamelessly pilfers her tone from Douglas Adams (and admits as much in the afterw... sorry, liner notes), but suffuses the whole novel with her own ideas: overstuffing it with all the glitter, glam, and just plain gleeful silliness you'd expect of a tale of a has-been glam rock band forced to get back together to compete in the silliest competition you could imagine, where the underlying darkness of devastating war and encroaching fascism can only be met with mirror balls, sequined gowns, and sexually ambiguous pop music.

Life is beautiful. And life is stupid.

I'll be damned if she almost makes me appreciate the ESC unironically. Almost.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=1bSPNboKCzM

A love story set between two terrorist attacks that seem almost personal - or technically, it's a story about two loves, both of which end, one of them after a long time, about five people in two different triangles... but it's one love story, a trauma of heartbreak forcing the narrator to look at everything that makes her her. At times melodramatic (but never cheaply so), at others completely physical ... Bouraoui seems incapable of not getting under my skin.

I don't know if happiness is one, indivisible, large, extensive and unique, or if consists of poetic shards - the smell of grass after rain, the first day of summer, a field of poppies, a late autumn sky, a blue luminous glacier, the certainty of being part of a whole that gets on with one and the same power, loves with one and the same love. I don't know if you can measure, decide the amount of happiness. If you can grip it like an object, hold it tightly, stop it from falling.

I'll be godfuckingdamned if Rocky didn't actually plot this one. Excruciatingly badly, obviously, but still. About the time he has God himself snark at Belinda you know what you're in for.

The second "how I became a writer" novel (even if this one is autobiographical) I've read in a while, and it couldn't be more different from The Idiot. Woodson revels in the tempest of impressions, words, people, memories and the only-noticeable-in-hindsight thrum of history of growing up and realising you're part of something, using poetry to shine little pinhole spotlights on one image at a time and narrative to piece them together.

I didn't just appear one day. I didn't just wake up and know how to write my name.

You wake up from cryogenic sleep in a medical bunker underground. The Earth is dead after the final war, first nuked, then radiated, then burned to a sterile crisp. You're not just the last member of Homo Sapiens Sapiens, you're the last biological life form on the planet, full stop. All you have is a bunch of robots of limited AI capabilities designed to Serve Man, your memories, and a cryogenic chamber that can let you sleep for thousands of years at a time if you want. What do you do? Go.

I read this a loooooong time ago and something about it always stuck. Finally managed to find it again and yes, I like it. Sure it's aged a bit, especially technology-wise, but the AI aspect is still pretty clever, and for being basically the inverse of Stapledon's First and Last Men (or a precursor of The Martian with no hope of actual rescue) it holds up. What's man to do but play god, and what's his creation to do but outgrow him?

Teases a horror story that's never fully developed. Shines in the brief flashes of nostalgia for youth and outsiderhood, and unprocessed trauma. Like most things Tidbeck, leaves me wanting more.

Existentialism Is Basically Just Hating Yourself (And Your Wife): The Play.

Well, kind of. Still not sure I actually like Sartre at all, but it is funny, it is effective, it gets in and does what it does.

Now I want to watch (geddit? watch?) a good production of this.
ETA: This one wasn't bad.