Dear Unc Dysfunc,

A girl I've been sort of mucking about with said she couldn't love anyone who didn't love The Bell Jar. Apparently, this Bell Jar isn't anything to do with kitchen equipment. It's a book by some other bitch. So, I said I couldn't love anyone who didn't love Grand Theft Auto V and then we had a row and now she's going with some nonce who wears a scarf indoors.

What's all that about? I've mentioned this to some mates and they've noticed the same thing.

Not the Bell Jar, but other stuff. One girl said she couldn't love anyone that didn't love Anna Karenina. So, my mate said he'd never touched her but if she was fit and wanted a threesome he was up for it. And then there's this gang of girls down the pedestrian precinct who are always mocking me and my mates, shouting, 'You never read no Jane Austen, mong boy!' This has just happened in the last year or so.

What's happened? I need a list of books that I can say I've read, that will get me loved. Juts give me a heads up. You get me, bruv?
Piers, by email

Dear Piers,

It's hell out there. It's a fucking library. It's this thing that happens to girls. They come over all fictional. It gets really bad in their late teens. They're generally over it by the time they're 30 but I doubt you want to wait that long.

There's no point in trying to cheat on books. You'll just get caught out. And if there's one thing worse than being an illiterate philistine it's being an insecure illiterate philistine. And don't Google "philistine", it looks needy. Leave literature to the birds. No threesome ever conceived is worth having to plough through Little Women. (That's a novel, not dwarf sex.)

What I suggest is that you up the cultural stakes. Get poetry. Then you say, 'Oh, you must know Keats' 'Ode on Melancholy'?" Come back to mine and I'll read it to your twat. Nothing beats poetry. It's the death star of culture. It's the bollocks. And most of all, it's short and rhymes. And if you don't understand it, that's OK because you're supposed to just feel it, like Deep Heat. And you'd be surprised by how much you already know. Songs are all poetry, and they don't make any sense. I tell you, once a girl's got a dose of novels she's a pushover for iambic pentameter. They've got no literary immune system. Sonnets are like aural Viagra, so don't go quoting to people you don't want to get with. "Though seen of none save him whose strenuous tongue / Can burst Joy's grape against his palate fine / His soul shalt taste the sadness of her might…"

Fuck knows what that means but it's the best hook-up line in the world.

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AA GILL ON...

Safari Jackets 
Boredom 
Misogyny 
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