It may come as a bit of a shock to some of my recent readers, but I’m not just a reader of scifi and fantasy. I love books which are a little absurd, or surreal. I’ve been exploring bizarro this year. I enjoy weirdness and strangeness, and something just a little out of the norm.

However, I don’t usually read non-fiction. It’s just not my bag. I mean, if I wanted to know what’s going on in the world and how many people are being slaughtered and by which raving lunatic this week, I’d turn on the news. And, quite frankly, I’m well over reading the long extended sob story of someone who suffered just that little bit more than last month’s flavour of torture and self-discovery. There’s only so many times you can read an “unhappy childhood” book, and I stopped after Oliver Twist.

Jon Ronson, however. Now. There’s some non-fiction I can read. I would like to say that he’s an insane man. A crazy man. A weirdo gonzo genius.

But he’s not.

It’s his subjects who are weird, crazy, deluded and completely bat-eating insane enough for Ozzy Osborne to flinch at.

The book I read first of Ronson’s was, of course, The Men Who Stare at Goats. By now you may know about the movie. Me not being that way plugged into the universe, only found out about it yesterday. I am, simply, astounded that this has been made into a movie. It doesn’t read like movie material, so I’m wondering how they’ve managed it and how gimmicky it is in relation to a book which is depply profound.

Why is it deeply profound when I claim it to be the funniest non-fiction book ever in the yoon today? Because it underlines the fact that every single person on this planet is the same. We are all stark-raving insane and too afraid others will notice. We believe in the zaniest things, and we grip firmly to them, not realising how stupid these things are even when everyone we know is sniggering up their sleeves at us. I should know. I’m a discordian. And proud of it.

This book reads like a discordian who’s who. And it’s frightening. It’s not frightening because of the beliefs these guys have. Oh, no. Beliefs themselves aren’t frightening at all. It’s frightening because those in power, those with the power to blow stuff up, those who are right now killing people on a massive scale, believe this. That’s the most frightening thing of all. And I am wondering how they’d really translate that googly-eyed mind-bogglingness into the film. It has Jeff Bridges in it, though. If anyone could play one of these guys from the book, it’s him. He’s a whole cloud of weird on his own, is the Dude.

This book shifted my perspective on politicians and soldiers in general. You have all seen X-Files. You all know how silly it is. Aliens. Pfft. Fox Mulder’s wacky zany theories. Well, it turns out X-Files was right, and reading this I truly worry a lot about just what else is going on in that little void of intelligence we think is a mountaintop of fine intellectualism. I mean, we know the politicians are thick as planks, but this shows even those behind them are loose screws and six beers short of a six-pack.

What’s worse is, Ronson then set his sights on extremists and wrote Them, a novel which covered his travels and time with various hardcore extremists around the globe. From known terrorists to KKKers. He followed every extreme belief he could find. David Icke was even in there! I found the single most amazing thing about the book is Ronson’s own surprise to find that basically all these evil-seeming men were just fragile little egos lusting for a spotlight. No different to your average stand-up comedian, really. They were like Tom Green if Tom had access to weapons, or suddenly decided aliens looked like beetles – the car, not the insect – and began giving speeches about it.

Mister Ronson has an easy humorous style that bleeds disbelief into every page. He’s got a charming wit about him that leaves you smiling and you feel that even were he reporting on mass graves in the middle east, you’d still be smiling for the poor lad. Yet, despite the humour, Ronson’s books were eye-opening for me. Very much so. Since then, the whole world seems very different, and a lot more sad, pathetic and human than ever.

For me, it’s also a good thing that these X-Files are buried. Just thinking about our global world leaders getting together in little frat parties and worshipping owls or whatever is just too mad to think about. Honestly, if Fox Mulder were tracking this down, he’d feel a bit of a fool at the end, finding there’s no super intelligent organisation at the end – just a bunch of old men who failed to lose their taste for university hazing rituals and a belief in the occult truths as found at grandma’s knitting circle.