Fucking Brilliant, by Lance Arthur#

Go buy this book now. No really. If you like Lance Arthur's blog, then you will love his book. It has many more stories than his blog and a few classics that you can now show off to people more easily.#

Lance's style is so amazing, I can scarcely think of any author similar at all. There is a bit of Nick Hornby mixed with some Clare Naylor all lanced together with the quirkiness of Chuck Palahniuk but with the undeniable intensity and hilarity of LANCE.#

A little sampling of one of my favourite parts...#

Some of the best parts, that I enjoyed reading the most, were when Lance wrote about his strange childhood...

So it happened that I was roller-skating up and down my winding driveway when I stopped at the bottom and looked over, discovering that my head was at the exact same height as the mailbox. And even more remarkably, it seemed to me that my head was the exact same size as the mailbox.

I will pause here to remark on the stupidity of children. Children aren't curious. They aren't ignorant, either. They're just stupid. They do stupid things, and when they aren't caught, they do them again to see if they were as stupid as they seemed the first time.

With my head inside the mailbox, I noticed that I could hear myself breathing exceptionally loudly. And if I then spoke, my voice reverberated back at me like an echo. A very loud, very tinny echo. And in fact I had discovered--having inserted my huge melon-shaped noggin in the mailbox--that my head was, just as I had observed, a perfect fit.

The other part that caught my eye on the second reading was a bit from The Gay Agenda, Part 3 about Tolerance.

If you ignore everything else I have said to you today, and I urge you to do so, please reflect on these words and take them to heart, because I mean them sincerely and believe in them with every shiny black shard of my soul. Treat everyone with kindness, love, and understanding.

From here forward, it doesn't matter how you've been treated, or what names you've been called, or how much anger you've managed to swallow under a sugary coating of tolerance. Tolerance is an ugly, horrid, hateful word. Tolerance means, "I tolerate you." It means that I am allowed to continue to believe the wrong, ignorant, backwards lies I have always been told about you but that I can manage to sit here across the table from you and not take my steak knife and plunge it into your heart. It's been said that tolerance is the most we can ever hope for, and we should be glad of it where we find it.

Do not accept it, ladies and gentlemen. And do not spread it like the plague that it is. Stop tolerating, and start understanding. Ask questions, and listen to the answers. Explain yourself, and listen to explanations. And avoid the simple, gated, picket-fenced sidewalk of tolerance and move down the rocky, shaky, strenuous path of understa