Top 10: books about boredom

Lee Rourke, the editor of the literary magazine Scarecrow and co-editor at 3AM Magazine, is the author of a debut collection of short stories, Everyday, published by Social Disease Publishing.

He named his top 10 books about boredom for the Guardian.

One book to make the list:

Whatever by Michel Houellebecq

Michel Houellebecq's debut - originally published as Extension du domaine de la lutte in 1994 - is a bitterly sarcastic tale of boredom in the technological and information generation. Houellebecq's thirty-year-old narrator is content in his boredom, allowing the quagmire of everyday working life to wash over him, writing strange tales about cows in his spare time. His life changes when he joins a colleague to train provincial civil servants to use a new computer program. Drifting from day to day, from encounter to encounter he slowly drowns in the meaninglessness of the information that surrounds him.

Read more about Rourke's list.

--Marshal Zeringue