I read very little fiction, and when I do, I’m drawn to either the thousands of classics I still haven’t read, or the less-conventional in contemporary fiction, like Salman Rushdie, Will Self, Martin Amis, or Michael Brodsky. Which is why I’m rather saddened by the recent passing of J.G. Ballard . Ballard is best known for his novels Crash and Empire of the Sun because they were both made into films (two of my favorite films, coincidentally). I remember when I first read Crash; I was told of the premise, and started reading it with considerable doubts about whether its premise of “auto crash eroticism” could work. To my surprise, about thirty pages into it, I found myself wanting to go crash a car myself, just for the sexual gratification! His use of words can be so compelling that unthinkable things can become thinkable. Which is for me a big part of the appeal of Ballard’s writing. As Martin Amis once put it: “Ballard is quite unlike anyone else; indeed, he seems to address a different – a disused – part of the reader’s brain.” As an occasional writer myself, the 2004 Times Online piece J.G. Ballard: How I Write was kind of an inspiration to me as a person who often writes longhand, and it also inspired me to write daily, and with a little discipline. Aside from a considerable body of work in the form of novels and short stories, Ballard also unrelentingly expressed clever insights about contemporary culture. One of my favorites is his observation (in the preface of the 1990 edition The Atrocity Exhibition): “…it struck me that Reagan was the first politician to exploit the fact that his TV audience would not be listening too closely, if at all, to what he was saying, and indeed might well assume from his manner and presentation that he was saying the exact opposite of the words actually emerging from his mouth“. Although he was referring to the Ronald Reagan who had eventually become president in 1980, the observation was made in response to a question about his short work Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan which was written in 1967.