29 books like The Compleat Motherfucker

Silverton starts with the moment when one of the Sex Pistols used a four-letter word live on afternoon TV in 1976. It’s an appropriate beginning for a highly entertaining ramble through the dirtier byways of the English language, encompassing historical research, pop culture , and personal anecdotes, and showing just how ingrained bad language is in everyday life. His enjoyment and approval spring from every page.

It may seem odd to include a novel in a feature about swear words but Lawrence’s famous/notorious book Includes several taboo terms. True, these relate to sex rather than swearing but there is considerable overlap between the two. This is the long-banned account of the affair between Constance Chatterley, a lady, and Mellors, the gamekeeper on her husband’s estate. Lawrence knew it would not be published openly in Britain in his lifetime. The watershed Old Bailey case in 1960 cleared the book of obscenity and (depending on your point of view) opened the floodgates of filth or ushered us towards the sunlit uplands of the permissive society.

This American title is at the more academic end of books on swearing and oaths. Mohr shows how obscenity evolves over time. Words now considered indecent were acceptable in the Middle Ages while careless invocations of God and Jesus were taboo (that’s not to say they weren’t used). The very title of the book neatly illustrates a difference between US and British culture, with the asterisk being used to soften potential offence in the States. By contrast in the UK, the word usually appears naked and unashamed on the cover (as in Frankie Boyle’s My Shit Life So Far).

Jonathon Green is the doyen of dirty words. Or, more respectfully, he is the premier lexicographer of the graphic, the dubious, and the obscene. For decades Green has been trawling obscure publications and other outré sources for examples of slang in the English language, and publishing dictionaries that are unmatched in their scope and detail. No term, however racist, sexist, classist, or any other kind of -ist, is too small to go unnoticed. In Odd Job Man, a mixture of autobiography and ruminations on bad language, Green describes himself as an ‘anatomist of the underbelly cutting not into ripe cadavers but into riper language.’ It’s a life’s work.

I'm sometimes compared to the late, great, Wilbur Smith, who wrote dozens of books set in Africa. I think that if there is a similarity, then my books are probably most like Wilbur's earlier novels, where he tended to write about contemporary southern Africa (as I do now). My favourites were his stand-alone novels, including The Dark of the Sun about a group of mercenaries who have to rescue a train load of civilians during the fighting in the former Belgian Congo in the 1960s. It was made into a movie back in the day (The Mercenaries), and later provided the inspiration for the Bruce Willis film, Tears of the Sun.

Apart from being a wonderfully talented actor, Richard E. Grant is a fantastic writer.

This 1996 book is a raw and honest account of his early acting career from landing his springboard role in the cult classic With Nails to working with some of the giants in Hollywood from Steve Martin and Bruce Willis to Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese.

Each chapter is a film role, and Grant seems to float through the various hiccoughs and hilarity with a self-effacing charm. His perspective of being the observer, seeing everything from the sidelines; of someone who perhaps shouldn’t really be there, is the essence of his writing.

Richard E. Grant captures the crazy of Hollywood film culture in the narrative and snippets of conversation, nuance of character, situation, and place.

Granted unlimited access to the film production of Tom Wolfe’s best-selling The Bonfire of the Vanities, Salamon serves up a fascinating portrait of one of Hollywood’s most notorious flops. Miscast (Tom Hanks as an arrogant Wall Street heel?) and tone-deaf, the resulting film ran roughshod over Wolfe’s satire and Salamon was there to record every juicy and head-scratching nugget explaining just how the disaster unfolded. Detailing the head-on collision between ego, money, and power in smooth, vivid prose, Salamon will keep any reader interested in Hollywood turning pages long into the night.

This book describes how meaningless talk has conquered the world. It explains why so much written text is entirely meaningless and yet it gets published. But bullshit is not just meaningless – it is speech directly or indirectly intended to mislead or obfuscate. Its very acceptance as false reveals a collusion between the writer or the speaker and their audience – a collusion which precludes the audience from challenging what they hear. Bullshit is not just fashionable babble, it is a serious threat to democratic values and to meaningful public discourse.

This is another book that deals with the subject of sex trafficking, which is why I was drawn to it.

From the first scene, I was immediately pulled in, fascinated that the protagonist, Jamie Austen, is a lone woman in a foreign land, rescuing helpless victims of this awful scourge. Her courageous and spunky character grew on me. Toler throws in a wonderful twist with a romantic element that Jamie Austen does not want or need but falls for anyway.

This is another example of how an author can deal with difficult subjects yet keep the book clean.

This book is raw, brutal, and a tough read, but it’s also clean, and that’s what I appreciated most about Walker’s telling of a girl’s story who is stuck in sex trafficking. Yes, it is another sex-trafficking book, but for me, it is a masterful insight from the point of view of those caught in it or caught by it.

Besides being a raw account of sex trafficking trauma, it’s also a compelling story that kept me wanting to read to find out what would happen. It’s a thriller and has many moments of high suspense. Watching Emma move through the phases of “the life” broke my heart but also opened my eyes.

I applaud Mr. Walker for this book. It could not have been easy to write, but I’m glad he did.