Fahrenheit 451 - Set the oven to 700, just to make sure

Here are the edited highlights of Pope Susanus XXI's list of prohibited tomes (The second vatican council had a lot of things going for it, but the removal of the Index Liborum Prohibitorum was not one of them).

1. The complete works of Frederick Nietzsche. Is there a single suburban cannibal killer who doesn't claim Nietzsche as an inspiration? Dividing the world into men and supermen was always going to be open to some rather obvious simplifications; I'm convinced that if Zarathusra had just kept his fucking trap shut, we would have been about 6 million Jews better off in 1945.

2. The Bell Curve by Charles Murray. Rich people are educated. Educated people are intelligent. Black people aren't educated. Black people are stupid. There you go, that's the whole 1000 pages summarised for you. If you want the full experience, repeat the above four sentences 25000 times, and draw hundreds of little pictures and graphs based on faulty methodology and logical non-sequiters. Then marvel at how many people are prepared to overlook the fact you are talking unsubstantiated shite because you are telling them things they want to hear.

3. The man in the high castle by Philip K.Dick. Nazi's win the war, blablablabla....I love his short stories, but you get to the end of this one and think, what was that all about? And not in a good way. Too much I-ching.

4. La descoberta catalan de America by Jordi Bilbeny. Columbus was Catalan. He was very Catalan. Look, here's a picture of him wearing a birretina and standing next to a picture of Montserrat (I'm not shitting you). He fought for Catalonia's independence, with his crack team of Portuguese freedom fighters, who later became sea Captains. According to Bilbeny, if you look at the list of crew members on his voyages, you will find they were all members of the Aragonese court, not sailors (which begs the question, who the fuck was sailing the boat?). Chauvinist amateurish sub-Von Danniken dross.

5. The Torah and derivatives. By a collection of people suffering various psychological disorders.

Do I really need to explain?

A public book burning will be held on the 1st of August in the Plaza San Jaime, Barcelona, be there or be viewed as a dangerous masonic libertine free-thinker.

Interactive BBC type poll- 5 books you would make compulsory

Here is my first contribution to the blog of my own creation:

It is one of those desperate BBC-style polls, where they try to get the audience to participate and thereby fulfil some squalid "interactivity" clause in their corporate mission statement. *

What 5 books would you make everybody read, were you to be granted dictatorial powers?

My (correct) selection follows (you recieve 5 points for every book also on your own list):

1: Borges, Brodie's report.
2: Tadeusz Borowski, This way for the gas please ladies and gentlemen.
3: Niall Griffiths, Sheepshagger.
4: Bruce Chatwin, In Patagonia.
5: Suetonius, The lives of the twelve Caesars.

That is all.

*If I walked into a bar and found somebody typing the words corporate mission statement on a laptop I would glass them. No questions, no hesitation, no excuses, no "I was writing a blog in which, ironically, I threaten violence against anyone I find writing the words corporate mission statement", no mercy, no nothing.