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Jesus was British! I knew it all along. EDIT: Here's the magazine's website.

That's right. It's a popularity poll. In fact if the magazine hadn't provided the names to choose from, good writers like McEwan, Ishiguro etc wouldn't have been placed at all. It would have been Archer, Follett, Cole, etc. So let's be grateful for small mercies. Who would others have put...

Kenny Shovel is right. Paxman is non-partisan (though I understand he is close to some Labour figures, and like many in the media, probably veers more to the left than the right in personal politics, but he keeps that offscreen) - he just wants to get answers. Once he claimed (though he has...

I haven't read any Kingsolver, though I've heard good things about The Poisonwood Bible. Digging to America is only available in hardback in the UK so if do try another it will probably be one of her backlist.

Pale Fire, interestingly, is the opposite of Lolita, in that it seems to me to be less than the sum of its parts. Make no mistake, I'm very fond of it (well, my username is taken from it, after all), but it is really just a big intellectual w*nking session for Nabokov. Nothing wrong with that...

I got through The Accidental Tourist after my post above, but haven't commented on it yet. I enjoyed it, and found much of Macon's habits and practices amusingly developed (and worryingly familiar...). I can't say I loved the book to pieces though. There was an air of formula to it, as though...

I'd join the Lolita thread too (even though I wasn't asked :D ) as I'm a big fan of the book, but to be honest StillILearn, that whole thread I find just too daunting even to open! What is it now, about two and a half thousand posts? :eek:

I would have said that any book which is an established classic, or at least has been in print for 30, 40, 50 years, has a hard time supporting any claim to be 'countercultural.' Counter what culture? Can a book which was contrary to the accepted mores of the time half a century ago still...

As a UK resident, and of a liberal bent, my only knowledge of O'Reilly is through sources such as Al Franken, and as a result I have a preconceived notion of him as a two-dimensional right-wing hack (of the Ann Coulter etc school) who can't stand anyone disagreeing with him. I don't think I'm...

I'm sure she will finish it bad. That would be in keeping with the rest, right?

I got through George Saunders' new collection, In Persuasion Nation (bundled in the UK with his 2005 novella The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil, and issued under the latter title) probably as quickly as I did with his previous collection Pastoralia, in a day or so. This might weigh against...

I've had a chequered time with Margaret Atwood - in truth, I've hated most of what I've read by her, including The Robber Bride, The Handmaid's Tale and The Blind Assassin - but I agree that this collection of stories is terrific. Or so I recall from when I read it, which must be over ten years...

You mean whose. There's something else school could have taught you if you'd been listening. I've wasted enough time on this most whackest of threads. This conversation is now closed.

Actually you said school eleven times, and college just twice. As for not saying f**k, it's a combination of politeness and observing the rules.

Presuming your thread just gets de-f**ked and not completely removed, eyez0nme, then my first question is, when you say you're 'pissed', do you mean that in the UK sense of 'drunk'? That's what it sounds like. It's wildly enjoyable to presume that formal education ain't no good (though it's...

Manuscriptx, I'm not clear whether the extract you posted is from your book or your cover letter. Either way, I'm sorry to say I think most agents/publishers would be rolling it in a ball and practising basketball hoops with it before the end of the first paragraph (all those births!). I...

It is possible, I suppose, to miss the cleverness of Gilbert Adair's Buenas Noches Buenos Aires, as one Amazon reviewer has, and dismiss it as crude, banal and filled with unsympathetic characters. But the observant reader will note the clues which demand that we treat the narrator with...

Kevin Lewis's Kaitlyn, eh? Well, at least we've got a thread all ready for it! (And no, mehastings, that wasn't me seconding the nomination!) My suggestion is Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle. Link. It's a novel set in an alternate present, where the Germans and Japanese won...

Within about an hour's time, I predict, Rabbit is Rich by John Updike.

In reverse order, including those shaming unfinishables... Rabbit is Rich, John Updike (still plodding my way through) The Accidental Tourist, Anne Tyler The Long Good-Bye, Raymond Chandler The Man in the High Castle, Philip K. Dick (R) The Wall Jumper, Peter Schneider Snow is Silent...