Espedair Street - Iain M. Banks

A fantastic book from Banks. I've read a few biography/auto-biography type books about rock bands; including The Stones, The Beatles, Fleetwood Mac and David Bowie.  The drama, drugs, success and excess that is woven throughout this story could easily have been taken from any of the lives of those real groups.

I want to quote a little piece from near the end of the book. To me, this portion of a long, run-on sentence, contains the entire point of what Banks was trying to say with Espedair Street.

"...it felt like faith, like revelation: that things went on, that life ground on regardless, and mindless, and produced pain and pleasure and hope and fear and joy and dispair, and you were lucky and sometimes you weren't, and sometimes you could plan your way ahead and that would be the right thing to have done, but other times all you could do was forget about plans and just be ready to react, and sometimes the obvious was true and sometimes it wasn't, and sometimes experience helped but not always, and it was all luck, fate, in the end; you lived, and you waited to see what happened, and you would rarely ever be sure that what you had done was really the right thing or the wrong thing, because things can always be better, and things can always be worse."

I highly recommend this book in particular and any of Iain Bank's books in general.  Whether straight fiction or his space opera science fiction, he is an incredibly talented writer.