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................that's right, I do, it helps keep the mice away!! :) Keep up the good work mate, I love the way you're still doing the killer thing of pretending not to read people's posts properly so you can misrepresent them in your responses!! :rofl: .......................that kills me that...

This thread is the best laugh I've had in ages. I love the way the chap pretending to be a right wing nutter has resisted the temptation to come out of character. The clues that he was a satirical construct (perhaps by Chris Morris; a clue in the name?) were there from the beginning though: 1...

A little late, but I've read Flicker, Stewart (see how the advent of certain websites makes me want to spell it Flickr?). It's a great romp, like Foucault's Pendulum only a little hokier, and pretty interesting on the subject of film. I re-read it a couple of years back and it wasn't quite as...

Most book discussion sites suffer from fatigue in the Book of the Month discussions after a time. The following may not work for everyone, but on Palimpsest we have breathed some new life into our monthly book choice by removing the democratic element and the admins selecting a list of books...

I've read 12 of the 13 on the longlist now (reviews in the link in my sig). My top three* hasn't changed, but Tan Twan Eng's The Gift of Rain is very good, and A.N. Wilson's Winnie and Wolf, and Catherine O'Flynn's What Was Lost aren't. * The Welsh Girl, Mister Pip, Animal's People

A good point very well made.

Of the eight I've read so far, I would rank The Welsh Girl, Mister Pip and Indra Sinha's Animal's People (a real surprise, this last) as strong contenders for the shortlist. Catherine O'Flynn's What Was Lost and Nikita Lalwani's Gifted were nothing special in the end and shouldn't make it any...

Yes mehastings, in my view the McEwan has the shortest odds simply because he's best known. I don't know anyone who's read On Chesil Beach who really thinks it should win, or that it's even near his best. (Then again, he won before for Amsterdam, also widely agreed to be a poor offering.)...

Um, sorry, why exactly are people engaging with chris302116 on this topic? Didn't we establish that (s)he's just a troll last year back on this thread? Suddenly adding the string of religious nuttiness to his/her bow surely just exacerbates this.

I have. The first three books (The Talented Mr Ripley, Ripley Under Ground, Ripley's Game) are very good, well worth a read. The last two (The Boy Who Followed Ripley, Ripley Under Water) are OK but less interesting. She also wrote a whole bunch of terrific non-Ripley suspense novels, best...

I take it you're all talking in gallons (except Peronel)? Well here in the UK it's around £0.92 per litre, which works out around £4.14 per gallon, or $8+ per gallon. So think yourselves lucky!

Another September 11 novel. Soon they will have an area to themselves in bookstores, perhaps alongside the Misery Memoirs section. (My local Waterstone’s does have one of those, in fact called Painful Pasts. I suppose it’s an act of humanity, aimed at decontaminating the rest of the Biography...

I too found a filmic connection to Stasiland, but this time it's the Oscar-winning film The Lives of Others, which explored a tiny element of the work of the secret police (the Stasi) in the former East Germany. After seeing it I had an urge to find out more about the extraordinary deceptions...

I was thinking that too, novella, right up until the moment I read it. Here are my thoughts from my blog (yep, I joined the ranks): Good novels that reflect the politics, repetition and futility of most people’s working lives are few and far between, and are most successful when they also deal...

Thanks for posting this, Heteronym. I'm just getting into Roth myself (American Pastoral and Everyman were among my favourite reads last year) so I'll look this one out next!

Not really. I'd swap it for the three-volume hardback deluxe edition of the complete Calvin & Hobbes!

£80 (~$150) for the Complete Far Side - the hardback, two-volume one. Also £52 (~$100) for a signed first edition (but third printing!) of Martin Amis's Money - which I later threw away in a fit of cathartic clearing-out.

My deepest commiserations.

You're welcome K. No, you're spot on I think, and this occurred to me too as I was reading it. In the end though I decided it was, well, just the way Vidal is, and he's in some sense unaware of it, or at least unable not to do it. There were several times when I raised an eyebrow at some...

Isn't that CTRL+V? Or in my case (I'm on a Mac) CMND+V: Michael Cunningham, A Home at the End of the World