Philip Stein

That's good enough for me, knitnurse. Thanks!

How would you rank his other books, cda? I haven't read the first three (Gen X, Shampoo Planet, Life After God) or All Families are Psychotic. For me Hey Nostradamus! stands head and shoulders above all the others. Utterly wondrous.

Sorry CDA, I find Coupland highly variable in quality and didn't like Microserfs (so I'm not feeling keen on Jpod, which is supposedly 'Microserfs for the age of Google'). Here are my thoughts which I posted elsewhere. It's his longest book, pushing 400 pages, and could have done with a good deal of pruning - maybe 50%. To begin with I thought it was tremendous - it was tremendous - with lots of wit, cleverness rather than wisdom (which is fine with me) and intelligent analysis of a very specific two inches of ivory,or silicon: the work lives (they don't have any other lives) of coders who work for Microsoft in mid-1990s Seattle. The book takes the form of a diary by Dan who, like all Microserfs, dreams of one day meeting Bill Gates (or even getting personally flamed by him in email), religiously watches the WinQuote on his screen which keeps him advised of the value of his stock options, and worries about shipping the product on time. I found pretty much everything about it charming - to begin with. But with no real progression, despite a few plot movements (they leave Microsoft to set up business alone; Dan's father gets sacked; er, that's about it), I felt it did quickly become those things I feared in the days BC (oh come on, don't make me come over there) - glib, modish ... and unfortunately, boring. I reckon I was no more than about halfway through when momentum took over from enthusiasm and I kept reading just to finish the thing - as opposed to Hey Nostradamus!, where I read for the pleasure of completion and completeness. None of that detracts from the fact that Coupland is a whizz with a one-liner: but there's only so many one-liners you can take.

He's an acquired taste, Kell, so if you do try him and don't like him immediately, give him another go (er, just not all at once as I did...). His selected stories Where I'm Calling From is a good introduction.

Yes, we need to know! I say that as a Vonnegut fan who hates Slaughterhouse-Five, so I need reasons to like it!

I know what you mean, Sarahrob. Self is much more likeable and amusing in person or in interview than he can be on the page. As I mentioned above, it was Grey Area which finally ground me to a halt with his stuff (though there was some stuff I liked in it, like the story Scale). Having said that, Cock & Bull is definitely his most accessible and entertaining. I would recommend it, far more enjoyable than Grey Area. (Or the first part of the first story anyway ) At the same time, even when he's not at his most entertaining, there's always a bracing cleverness to his writing. To me, it's nice to feel that sort of infusion of intelligence from above, knowing the author is much cleverer than I could ever hope to be.

Yes and no. I picked up How the Dead Live off a friend who couldn't get through it, with few expectations, and really liked it. That was my first Self in a while, after I had previously got through a string of his earlier stuff - Quantity Theory of Insanity, Cock & Bull, My Idea of Fun, Grey Area - with slowly declining enjoyment. I have Great Apes at home but haven't bothered with it. Dorian is supposed to be good though. Any takers for The Book of Dave?

Yes, Carver is great. I did however make the mistake of re-reading his first collection Will You Please Be Quiet Please? straight through last year and, as far as less is more goes, it turns out that more less is less. If you see what I mean. His prose is so spare and information imparted is so limited that it can start to seem tiresome if you get too much at once. Interestingly, I think his prose became more effusive and 'colourful' later in his (short) career, particularly with the collection Cathedral. Stories such as the title story of that collection, and "A Small, Good Thing" really are as good as story writing gets.

We'll soon find out - his new novel A Spot of Bother comes out in September. It's for adults only, I believe. (No, not in that sense.)

The very idea! Well now, if you want a book with emotional vacuum and things unsaid then The Remains of the Day is the benchmark. For things unsaid within an emotional maelstrom, making the reader work out what's happening between the lines, Patrick McGrath is yer man. I don't think Haddon's a good enough writer to do the whole layers and subtleties and depth thing. In his case I think the appearance of shallowness covers nothing more than real shallowness. Quite, as Stewart said. See also J.L. Carr's A Month in the Country, Ben Rice's Pobby & Dingan or thousands of others. But I think Curious Incident is not so much simple as simplistic. An interesting comparison is Jonathan Lethem's Motherless Brooklyn, which is a detective story narrated by a man with Tourette's syndrome. With its elements of obsessive-compulsive disorder, it in fact has overlaps with Asperger's. It's a rich, rewarding read, with far more depth than Haddon's book.

I suppose they can be hard work, but so can Lolita, and generally effort in reading is repaid... Pale Fire though is pretty easy going. The format is a 999-line poem by John Shade, who died recently. His literary executor Charles Kinbote follows the poem with his own detailed line-by-line analysis of it. It sounds up-its-own-arse - and it is in a way - but it's funny and full of interesting stuff, mainly trying to work out just how mad Kinbote is. He believes himself, for example, to be the exiled King of Zembla, and to be on the run from an assassin who may or may not have connections with John Shade. Plus when he tells us about his own interactions with Shade and his widow, we discover that he's not only lying, but possibly dangerous... Good fun in a brain-workout way.

Yes Wodehouse is a master. The difficulty is that he wrote about 90 books so it's hard to know where to start. I've read maybe a dozen or so. I strongly recommend Leave it to Psmith as one of his best novels. The story collections Meet Mr Mulliner and Ukridge are wonderful too. He has a particular way of phrasing things which is slightly old-fashioned and yet perfectly hilarious. And that's without even mentioning the Blandings books or the Jeeves and Wooster ones (which I don't like quite as much). The plots of his books are almost interchangeable - bossy aunts, drippy blokes, feisty girls, stolen manuscripts, prize-winning pigs - but it's all in the writing.

I'll have to re-read this one Andy, so thanks for the reminder. If you liked it (er, which you clearly did) you might also like Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire, to which The Debt to Pleasure owes a clear, well, debt of inspiration. The same barmy narrator, possible murderer, twisted format etc. Definitely one to consider if you haven't read it already. I must admit I gave up on Lanchester after Mr Phillips. But am I right in thinking you also recommend his last book, Fragrant Harbour?

Yes Cloud Atlas is a modern classic all right. Mitchell's sheer imaginative verve is just amazing (and appalling if you're a frustrated writer yourself) - he literally uses up in one novel, six ideas which could have been entire novels in themselves. The boy has talent to burn. Having said that, I did feel that the whole was not really any more than the sum of the parts. The links between the sections - each character is reading or viewing the text of the story before - and between the characters - they all have this birthmark, so they're all (what?) related or reincarnated? - were not particularly strong, and he would have done better I think to leave those out and just let the six stories sit inside one another, and leave us to work out the linking theme of oppression and abuse of power. My preferred summing up phrase for the book when I read it was 'cumulative nimbleness.' Which is, like, an extremely contrived pun, right...

Excellent review, Loricat! I was interested that you were most happy with the horror story aspect and least happy with the Ellis-as-himself aspect. I think for me it would have been reversed. As you say, though, it's a book probably best reserved for those who are already familiar with Ellis's work, as the opening 50 pages, with its resume of his career and life, and the way it gleefully plays with and twists what we know about Ellis's life (a gay man, suddenly married?) and books. I thought that opening section was as brilliant as anything he's written, and as funny as the opening third of Glamorama. Frankly I was also pleased that Lunar Park never got to be as stomach-churning as Glamorama or American Psycho. As for not liking the fictional Ellis, as a fan of his earlier books surely you're used to unlikeable characters - in fact has he ever written about a sympathetic or likeable protagonist?? I don't think that just because the main character is called Bret Easton Ellis, that makes him any more similar to the author than Victor Ward or Patrick Bateman. And although Ellis has, as you say, in the past mercilessly skewered the vain, shallow and pretentious people who 'slide down the surface of things', I've always felt that a good part of him actually quietly loved it too, and that the satire was coming from an affectionate angle rather than a vicious one. So that he should choose to include himself in it this time is not that surprising.

You should look out for it, everyone, if you haven't already - it's a terrific read, light and amusing without being brainless (it has interesting things to say about care for the elderly, for instance). It should have been on the Booker shortlist in my opinion, and I think it's a rare example of a book that would appeal to all shades of reader.

In that case, Bagpuss, I'm delighted to be able to introduce you to an entirely new experience. I have to say I didn't like this at all. I didn't see any real distinction between Christopher's voice (15-year-old with Asperger's) and, say, Paddy Clarke in Roddy Doyle's 1993 Booker winner (normal 9-year-old). I liked the maths puzzles but the rest left me cold. I suppose it's hard to get readers emotionally involved when the narrator consciously eschews emotion (though others have managed it, so maybe Haddon just wasn't up to the job...) I got a tip-off about it from a friend in the book trade whose recommendations I had liked in the past, and bought it as soon as it came out. So the only upside is I now have a first edition which I am hoping will become valuable one day...

I haven't read any Dan Brown books (yeah, I'm the only one left) but friends who have - and liked them - say that Angels and Demons is almost too close to The Da Vinci Code, almost written to the same 'formula.' Would you agree?

Lamb is just a great book. We studied it for GCSE English and I re-read it a few years ago and the power has only increased (though the setting, contemporary at the time I guess, seems slightly dated now, an unintentional period piece). The final tragedy is just overwhelming. I haven't read many of his other books though. Any advice from anyone?

Agreed that not much happens in The Line of Beauty. Undoubtedly the driving force for the reader is Hollinghurst's beautiful prose: not an action or thought is glossed over, every detail is intimately rendered, and the private admissions and concerns of Nick ring true and familiar throughout - with the possible exception of those moments "when he closed his eyes [and] phallus chased phallus like a wallpaper pattern across the dark." And yet even this representation of a gay man - which at first seems demeaning and stereotypical in Nick's naively sexual appraisal of every man he sees - makes sense in the end, when I recognised that his mindset wasn't quintessentially gay, but just quintessentially male. The impression too often is not that the characters aren't likeable, it's that they're not interesting. Nick is a terrible snob - most clearly displayed when he visits Leo's mother. Whereas the Feddens (and more significantly their extended family and associates) bow to the god of money, Nick bows to the god of beauty, disdaining the tastes of others just as money snobs will disdain the less well off. At one point, when one character praises Toby Fedden as 'handsome' and says 'he had all the luck,' Nick observes: "If looks are luck..." This clarifies that Hollinghurst intends us to view Nick critically, as it chimes with the central theme of his first novel The Swimming-Pool Library where the central character (Will?) traded on his gifted looks and ended up miserable, or at least stuck in a rut, where other characters who made efforts to rise above their born status - who worked at life - thrived. I found that most of Nick's aesthetics were above my head. The first third of the book is subtitled The Love-Chord, but when this mysterious symbol appears in the text - a chord in Nick's head that chimes with thoughts of his budding sex life - it left me cold and baffled, just as all the business about 'the line of beauty' or 'ogee' did. If the central conceits of the book mean nothing to me, what hope is there for a truly informed reading of the book? One of the main problems is that by the end we don't really know anything about Nick, or what he's like, other than that he has a taste for black men's arses, Henry James, and walnut whatnots. He evokes our sympathy only when he's put upon by former friends right at the end, and even then it's more pity than anything else. Although he occasionally expresses a thought to show that he disapproves of much of what the Feddens do and stand for, he almost never speaks it, or does anything about it, too comfortable in their nest, until necessity propels him out of it. All in all it's a good book, I think, but not a great one. Hope this is of assistance to those of you still trying to decide whether or not to read it. If you want to taste Hollinghurst's fine prose in a (slightly) livelier setting, you could try his second novel The Folding Star.

Kell, did you ever feel 'ghoulish' when reading the books, as though you were trespassing on something private (even though Pelzer obviously has chosen to make it public)? I think that's what puts me off reading books like this. There seems to be a big market for them now though - and all with the same white covers and 'handwritten' titles!

Thanks for taking the time to review this Andy. I've seen Collapse in the bookshops but have been frankly put off by that tiny font and thick spine... Perhaps I shouldn't be!

Stewart: don't be put off reading more Vonnegut by one bad experience. His books are extraordinarily variable in quality, and his later ones in particular are weak. Having said that, Slaughterhouse-5 is earlyish (1969) and as you say, is his most widely acclaimed and known book. Nonetheless I couldn't get on with it either. I would recommend The Sirens of Titan, Player Piano (if you can find it: his first novel), Mother Night or - at a push - Cat's Cradle. He also does sentimentality very well, particularly in mid-late stuff like Slapstick, Breakfast of Champions and Timequake. Avoid the likes of Deadeye Dick, Jailbird or Hocus Pocus unless you're a completist.