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The first half sounded like Hari Kunzru's The Impressionist. But the second half just sounds mental... Have you thought about doing a 'search inside' search on Amazon.com? There can't be that many novels with snake, van, gigolo, Indian, etc as keywords...

I think they made the above rule after Small Island and Palindrome Hannah tied, Moto, so that there wouldn't be two books being discussed in one month again.

I agree with SFG on the "I am leaving this forum for good..." thing - very good! As for "With all due respect..." if you really want to get someone's back up you can extend it to its true meaning: "With all the respect that is due to you..." Then it's unambiguous...

Perhaps the mods could just have put an 18/15 cert icon on the post instead of deleting parts? I read the earlier version too and agree that this is an excellent review. Also check out Roger Ebert's comments (referred to by Stewart). You could put the uncensored version on your review blog...

Sitaram's points would be easier to address if he didn't put so many in one post. ... Am I the only one with this nit-picky problem? Nope.

I'm not sure if steffee is now in agreement with beer good here, but for the record, beer good is right. There is no prosecution in this case: there are claimants (or plaintiffs) - Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh - and a defendant - Random House, Dan Brown's publishers. The judge hears the...

Without wishing to sound negative, isn't this the series of tendentious Christian propaganda books masquerading as proper novels? Or am I thinking of something else? EDIT: Yep, I was right. Latest Amazon.co.uk review: Or how about this? The five-star reviews are even more revealing...

I agree with ds.

The Satanic Verses is the only book of Rushdie's that I've not only thoroughly enjoyed but enjoyed so thoroughly that I've read it twice. I struggled through Midnight's Children, and never finished Shame, The Moor's Last Sigh or The Ground Beneath Her Feet, but for some reason I really enjoyed...

So, 'should be interesting' I said ... but wasn't. The interview came to naught as Douglas Coupland decided he didn't want to interview Morrissey after all, so whatever was said in their 105 minutes together will remain unknown. At least he's on Jonathan Ross's chat show again this week -...

I got (daily disposable) contact lenses last year and love them, but it took three hour-long sessions for them to teach me to put the lenses in and take them out again. I thought I would never manage it. I suppose it's a question of overcoming the 30-year-long reflex to shut your eye whenever...

I suggest Making Sense of the Troubles by David McKittrick and David McVea. I haven't read it (coming from Belfast, I have long since given up any pretence at making sense of the Troubles) but it comes highly recommended and David McKittrick, the respected NI correspondent for the UK's...

OK, I'm not talking about using tiddly font (like the omnibus edition of George Orwell's complete novels: just ridiculous, and I had similar problems with an omnibus Penguin Modern Classic edition of three Nancy Mitford novels, where there was so much text per page I got bored before the end of...

I so agree, cabbagescribe! My particular hatred is when they bump up the font size and line spacing for the paperback, so the page count is often 100 pages higher than the hardback - eg Andrea Levy's Small Island, one of Michael Dibdin's latest, the recently reissued adult editions of Harry...

A likely story. I love the highly literate Amazon reviews: All the reviews, of course, are written by people who have never reviewed anything else on Amazon - what a coincidence! Still, if the prose is half as good as the cover, include me in!

The latest study I can find shows no connection between health risks (by which I take it we all mean brain tumours) and phone use. Nor does the next most recent (and even bigger) study, not made by a phone company. Having said that, I use my phone mostly for text messages and only occasionally...

If they really meant 'written in real time,' ie seeing the words appear on the screen as he writes them, then I'd be interested! As for breaking new ground, bar the gimmick of a few links to other online resources, it seems like any other serialised novel (eg Ronan Bennett's Zugzwang, currently...

I've never got much pleasure out of the straightforward crime novels I've read - Thomas Harris, Barbara Vine/Ruth Rendell, Fred Vargas - they all seem a little too much like a jigsaw to me, neat and tidy at the end. But I have enjoyed James Ellroy - no-one could call his stuff neat and tidy -...

I think you're right, Miss Shelf, and it's down to the relentless length of US TV seasons. When I started watching Desperate Housewives last year, it was a great bit of fun, but when it didn't end after about 12 weeks - and kept on not ending - I started to get increasingly bored. Man, I...

I read Giovanni's Room some time ago and liked it enough to read others of his (Another Country and Just Above My Head). But I'll stick to my guns and third Revolutionary Road instead... again...