Philip Stein

"The writing is about writing, and is written in a way writers will get all excited about" - and this from a man who's a big fan of The Debt to Pleasure! I agree it's both. As someone who 'quite likes' McEwan I don't mind though. Both he and I are big enough to take a bit of intelligent, if caustic, criticism. If I wanted to defend him I would say first that it if it is written "solely for hyper-literary book reviewers", then it magically appeals to a much wider range. On Chesil Beach sold over 100,000 copies in hardback, even before it was on the Booker list, which are sales most popular novelists would envy. As for having "no value to real people," well, I suppose it's possible that all 100,000 who bought it didn't like it, but even if that is the case, well, hyper-literary book reviewers are real people too! As to my original comment, I wasn't aware of any tribal divisions here and didn't intend to stir up old anomisities (if that's what has happened). But I did mean to refer to this forum specifically. I can't cite examples (and wouldn't want to anyway) but it is an impression I gained when browsing here. Maybe it comes from the fact that, as Michelle has said in her sticky message the other day, most of the books discussed here are genre or popular fiction. Maybe fans of those books have a greater sensitivity to criticism than fans of Ian McEwan because they know that their favourite reads aren't typically respected by hyper-literary book reviewers and their nefarious offspring, and tend to have an inbuilt defensive response as a result? I'm just speculating. And to whoever offered to buy me a drink: I'll have a Sex on the Beach please. With extra Chesil.

I've only sold on Amazon and eBay and of those two, Amazon is definitely preferable. You only pay a fee if the book sells, and they deduct it from your takings so you don't have to actively pay a fee to them the way you do with eBay (with eBay, you pay even if it doesn't sell). Having said that, as Michelle says for most normal books you don't end up with much after deductions, and I found it just wasn't worth the hassle of keeping stocked up on jiffy bags and getting deliveries out within 48 hours to keep my feedback rating up. Now I just give my books to the local charity shop.

Haha, I do that too! Often the negative comments tell you more about the book than the positive ones do. I think also the problem with Amazon is that people have gravitated into thinking that anything less than five stars is a damning indictment of the book. It's not so much, as Andy and Michelle have discussed, that people don't write reviews unless they love or hate it, it's that the very act of giving it a score seems to bring people to want to give it either five stars (if they liked it at all) or one star (if they didn't) - the latter always, of course, supplemented by the comment "I only gave it one star because I can't give it no stars!" or the even better "there was one amusing scene (hence the one star)" which misses the point quite brilliantly. On public forums like this one I think it's different. I've noticed on here in particular a sensitivity and defensiveness about books people like. If someone else criticises a book robustly, then others can take it personally and consider it a personal attack. I think this tends to stifle healthy debate.

Changing films to suit test audiences is not a US-only phenomenon, nor a particularly recent one. I remember John Cleese talking about A Fish Called Wanda (which came out 20 years ago) where the original ending, where Kevin Kline's character Otto was killed, was changed because test audiences didn't like it.

No, I read Mr Phillips and because it was rubbish, I didn't read Fragrant Harbour! And he published a memoir recently didn't he, Family Romance?

The story which megglesface describes at the start of this thread sounds a little like The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil by George Saunders, though that country (Little Horner) was so small that it couldn't contain all its inhabitants at once, and every time one of them went over the edge, Greater Horner (the country that surrounded them) considered it an act of invasion... I don't remember the biscuit breaks though. I've read all but one of Vonnegut's novels and the scenario doesn't sound familiar from them. It could be one of his stories, which are numerous and I haven't read most of them.

I love John Wyndham, though I think he's one of those authors whose most famous books are his most famous with good reason: The Day of the Triffids, The Chrysalids, The Midwich Cuckoos. The others, like The Kraken Wakes (Triffids-by-the-Sea really), Chocky (a bit too kiddy) and Trouble with Lichen aren't up to the same standard. For me The Chrysalids is his masterpiece. I fondly remember the first time I read it, when I didn't know to begin with whether the book was set in the past, the future or on another world. It's wonderful to discover the elements of the story as the author intended, and I urge anyone reading it not to read the back cover blurb first. Of course that means I can't really say much more about it either, but it's a fascinating indictment of religious fundamentalism, an investigation into genetic engineering, an exploration of social conformity and so many other things, and all in less than 200 pages of highly readable prose. Just terrific!

I'm pretty excited about the late works of Philip Roth, steeped in his obsession with death. I think it's because of all that money he's leaving me in his will.

Oh sorry Andy, I haven't changed my signature for about 18 months which is when I last logged in here! I very much enjoyed The Debt to Pleasure (in fact it was a reread when I listed it here) and indeed at times I thought it full of the greatest sort of pleasure literature can give: a sort of drumming-the-heels-in-merriment at its self-conscious cleverness and wit. But by the end I felt it came down a little, partly because the outcome was too clear, and partly because the debt to Pale Fire was too obvious.

Andy, I'm guessing if you've tackled this that you've probably read the first two in Farrell's 'Empire Trilogy', Troubles and The Siege of Krishnapur. If so, can I ask how you found those? I enjoyed both to some extent - very funny, fine writing - but they didn't half go on! I was bored far too often, and his style just seemed to distant and compressed much of the time. Given that The Singapore Grip is 50% longer than Troubles and fully twice as long as Krishnapur, I had planned to give it a wide berth. Am I missing out?

I think it's a great title! I haven't read it yet, but I love Philip Roth and have enjoyed half a dozen of his books in the last year. It's got to the stage where I don't want to read them too quickly because I like to know I still have some 'in hand' to look forward to! Not that the old boy looks like slowing up any time soon.

Here are some Paulo Coelho quotes so others can judge for themselves!

In Cold Blood is Capote's best book, I think, and indeed is the last full length book he completed, despite living twenty years after its publication. Sadly he seemed to become more interested after that in living an interesting life than in writing interesting books. Many of his other stories are worth a look though, as is the other novella-length nonfiction piece Handcarved Coffins, which is a little like In Cold Blood. His unfinished novel Answered Prayers is entertaining but very fixed in the society circles he moved in and I suspect it suffers if (like me) you don't know which real life person each character is supposed to represent.

Scottishbookworm: Dawkins is an evolutionary biologist and Professor for the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University. He also regularly appears in the broadsheets and discussion programmes, usually on the subject of religion and/or natural selection. If I read you right, Paul - that Dawkins is flogging a dead horse in the way he bangs on about religion - then I suspect he wishes it were so. However, it seems that religion, in many parts of the world, is not only not dead but on the rise, and in startlingly fundamentalist forms too. That being the case, I think he would say (and I would agree) that it's an argument well worth repeating, and repeating, and repeating.

Dawkins would argue that there's no point in anyone having a theology degree, any more than having a degree in unicorns or fairies at the bottom of the garden. Indeed he does argue this in The God Delusion.

Here's my Amazon review of Richard Dawkins' new book The God Delusion. If you're reading this, the chances are you're either a 'radical atheist' (the preferred term of Dawkins' late friend Douglas Adams, to whom the book is dedicated), hoping that The God Delusion will give you a good satisfying dose of anti-religion rhetoric; or you're a devout believer, hoping to be roundly appalled and outraged. Either way, you could be disappointed. For the first half or more, The God Delusion is more rigorous and scientifically demanding than we have been led to expect (Jeremy Paxman in interviewing Dawkins called it 'entertaining': well, yes and no). Dawkins goes to great, and occasionally tiresomely great, lengths to detail why the existence of the universe, the development of life and the variety of creation can be comfortably explained by science and probability. And then he gets to grips with traditional justifications for the existence of God, disposing of them in his own neat way. Perhaps these sections seemed superfluous to me as someone who is satisfied that Dawkins is right and there is no God; and doubtless they will seem equally superfluous - in another sense - to those who believe in God and not in Dawkins. (It's worth saying at this point that when Dawkins means 'God', he means a personal, supernatural creator of the religious scriptures, a God-being rather than the more progressive notion of God as something nebulous that exists in all of us. This is after all the commonly understood meaning of God, which children are taught and most Christian, Islamic and Jewish adults continue to believe in. For sophisticated modern believers, who do not take the scriptures literally, Dawkins doesn't really regard you as religious at all; and you can take that as an insult or compliment as you see fit.) All this is worthwhile but when the book was more than half over, by page 200, and we were still on "The Roots of Religion," I couldn't help wondering when it would all get going. I needn't have worried. Dawkins, who has been quite restrained up until now - his disrespect limited to the odd sneer of 'faith-heads' or referring to the God of the Old Testament as a 'psychotic delinquent' - lets fly with the passion of his true feelings once the subject turns to morality. And it is a thrilling, invigorating display. Dawkins systematically dismantles all arguments for morality being connected to religious belief in any sense (indeed shows how diametrically opposed much religious teaching is to widely accepted morality), addresses tricky issues like the Darwinian explanation for altruism, disposes of a few sacred cows along the way (Mother Teresa is "sanctimoniously hypocritical [with] cock-eyed judgement"), and horrifies us with religion's historical and present-day cruelties and injustices. The other principal benefit of The God Delusion is that it gives us an opportunity to see all Dawkins' religious arguments in one place, having previously experienced them only in snippets of other books, newspaper articles and TV programmes. And he wastes no time in reiterating some of his favourite rhetoric: And having put the fear of, well, God into us by detailing the dark side of religious belief (Dawkins would argue that there is no bright side: if your good morals and deeds are determined solely by a God you believe in, he argues, you are an "immoral person we should steer a clear passage around"), he is too professional to leave us floundering. Instead he injects the last ten pages with a soaring essay on the passion of science, which "widens the window" on what we can see, and leaves us with a lasting taste of the freedom that can be ours if we can only dare to think for ourselves. It is reminiscent of this beautiful passage from his earlier book Unweaving the Rainbow, which seems a good place to end, letting the wonder of what's really there speak for itself:

I'm currently rereading The Debt to Pleasure on your enthusiastic recommendation, Andy! It's extremely funny, and a rare example of a book which is ludicrously over-written and pretentious but which is all the better for it - because it gives us such an insight into Tarquin Winot's personality. Already, less than halfway through, the less-than-subtle hints have made it clear what his real reasons are for fleeing Britain to go to France - or it could be also that I'm remembering it from my first time round, a full decade ago. But the journey is enjoyable even if the destination is clear. Incidentally I am finding this time around that as well as Nabokov, the voice reminds me of one of Gilbert Adair's more self-satisfied narrators (perhaps in his best novel, The Death of the Author) and also of James Lasdun's creepy unreliables in The Horned Man and Seven Lies. At the same time I'm wondering if there is really anything more to it than the clever set-up and revelation of Tarquin's true habits through the wonderfully over-ripe language - or is it all a bit of a one-joke book (rather, indeed, like Nabokov's Pale Fire)? Or perhaps that's enough! Plenty enjoyable anyway.

I haven't read any Grisham but it's interesting that some of you couldn't get on with A Painted House. I know of a couple of people who think it's his best (or, as they put it, his only good one! :shock: ), perhaps because it's more slow-paced and less concerned with action/plot?

Perfume is superb, and has one of the best closing scenes I've read. I wonder if the film will be any good? My only regret is that Suskind has written so little in the 20-odd years since - a couple of novellas and a few stories.

I think A Happy Death is a precursor to The Outsider (or The Stranger), sib, and so not quite a fully formed work as such. I had little joy with another of his unpolished works, The First Man, recently You might want to make sure you've read all his complete and final stuff first, if you haven't already. My eye has been on The Plague for some time...

I read the first of these, Death and the Penguin, and didn't really enjoy it all that much. I found the oddness (or forcedness) of the coincidences you mention, and the frankly not-very-amusing whimsical humour weren't really compensated for by the rest of it. It's most likely a cultural thing, but I wasn't tempted to read the sequel, or the rest of Kurkov's stuff. Kudos to Harvill Secker/Vintage though for continuing to make him available in English.

Yes Andy, I agree that this is (almost) up there with Cloud Atlas. Tell me (sorry if you've already mentioned this on the site), what did you make of number9dream? For me it's the weakest of his first three, too jumpy and contrived, even though jumpy and contrived is something he usually does so well. I haven't read Black Swan Green.

Thanks Andy, I'll have to pick this one up when it comes out in normal paperback!

I haven't read it and don't really intend to, but I did read Tolstoy's other biggie (albeit about half-as-biggie) Anna Karenina last year and found it much more accessible than I expected. I also read his tiny novella The Death of Ivan Ilyich earlier this year and thought it absolutely wonderful.

A friend of mine lives around the corner from him in the Vauxhall area of London. He saw him one morning sitting on the front step in his pyjamas smoking. Thus proving that Will Self is not master of his own home.