"To Be Read" pile - Various memoirs of the Space Age - and the inner space age

I enjoyed the Nick Butt memoir ElectricNick: No Direction Home so much that I'm currently reading the similarly-situated Roy Weard memoir, The Way To(o) Weard. 

For balance, I'm concurrently reading the inner-space focused Applied Ballardianism; A memoir from a parallel universe by Simon Sellars, which is positioned as an autobiography but is something much more.  I'll be writing about those two when I'm finished.

Sadly, I did find a 60's Ladbroke Grove book which did not manage to hold my interest. That was Polly Put The Kettle On by Hillary Bailey. I thought that Bailey, Michael Moorcock's wife at the time and Ladbroke Grove regular, would be of interest automatically given the date and the situation. I found that it had two issues which drew me up short. First, she uses an odd punctuation for speech, which meant that every time a character (for this is a novel, not a memoir) spoke, I bared my teeth in a snarl and had to spend a moment before I could return to the plot. Second, the events described seem a little low-key compared with the writings of the male denizens. She may have been aiming for literary, or Kitchen Sink as it was called, but for me ended up with the Eight Deadly Words.

I don't care what happens to these characters.

She didn't have the money to pay the rent and Brian knew it.
'Oh, Trevor, the tea is ready', she said, 'I've mashed it in the china pot with the pink pigs on.'
Trevor was a stocky man with a round face from Chepstow. She met his eyes half way.

(This is not an actual quote from the book.)

In contrast, the books I'm getting on with read more like this:

Zoomer made the obvious joke and so we renamed our band the Mass Debaters. We were young and pretty naive, so we hadn't realized how off-putting this name was to girls, or for that matter men, promoters and managers.
Zoomer was a man with no luck at all, but plenty of drugs. He took three tabs of the brown acid and totaled a new car by running it into a tree. He said he'd swerved to miss a giant Zebedee who had sprung out from behind it. He hadn't even bought the car yet - he was test-driving it. Funny thing is, that was the second time that happened to him. 

 (This is not an actual quote from a book either.)

Anyway, back to the reading mines.