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has anyone read the enormous David Foster Wallace book? I get the impression (from reading his essays) that I wouldn't enjoy it very much, but don't want to dismiss it out of hand.

Infinite Jest? I read about half of it. Not a fan. Some of his short stories are ok.

two excellent summer vacation books:

i just finished richard yates' revolutionary road, which i thought was a great book. a great read that slowly draws you in and conspires with you, then gives you a big slap in the face for being so presumptuous.

also i just reread the great gatsby which is fantastic. it's -- obviously, and deservedly -- a seminal book, and is really entertaining and beautiful to read.

The Great Gatsby is amazing.

maybe you're confusing "important" with "boring, shallow and annoying".

Maybe. Or maybe you never actually read it.

Hemingway influenced Chatwin, our greatest and most eccentric travel writer. There's a bit in one of Chatwin's books (In Patagonia, I think) when he writes something like "Looking at his shelf, I saw he had all the best books".

I quite like the idea that "the best books" exist and that you can quickly scan someone's shelf to check that they've got them. I imagine that there's about nine of them. You probably have to have the right editions, too.

Ah, but, it's dangerous, that. I remember going to a party at this guy's house, and looking at his bookshelves, and he just had everything you're 'supposed to' – everything that's slightly cultish, or cool - Kerouac, Auster, Burroughs, Ballard, Murakami, etc etc. Nothing else. There were no mistakes, no eccentric choices, nothing to indicate that he actually gave a shit – people who like books make mistakes, hate some things, love some things they 'shouldn't'. It really put me off him.

I guess it's the equivalent of having an amazing bike but never riding it.

One hot evening in Padua they carried him up onto the roof and he could look out over the top of the town. There were chimney swifts in the sky. After a while it got dark and the searchlights came out. The others went down and took the bottles with them. He and Luz could hear them below on the balcony. Luz sat on the bed. She was cool and fresh in the hot night.
Luz stayed on night duty for three months. They were glad to let her. When they operated on him she prepared him for the operating table; and they had a joke about friend or enema. He went under the anaesthetic holding tight on to himself so he would not blab about anything during the silly, talky time. After he got on crutches he used to take the temperatures so Luz would not have to get up from the bed. There were only a few patients, and they all knew about it. They all liked Luz. As he walked back along the halls he thought of Luz in his bed.
Before he went back to the front they went into the Duomo and prayed. It was dim and quiet, and there were other people praying. They wanted to get married, but there was not enough time for the banns, and neither of them had birth certificates. They felt as though they were married, but they wanted everyone to know about it, and to make it so they could not lose it.
Luz wrote him many letters that he never got until after the armistice. Fifteen came in a bunch to the front and he sorted them by the dates and read them all straight through. They were all about the hospital, and how much she loved him and how it was impossible to get along without him and how terrible it was missing him at night.
After the armistice they agreed he should go home to get a job so they might be married. Luz would not come home until he had a good job and could come to New York to meet her. It was understood he would not drink, and he did not want to see his friends or anyone in the States. Only to get a job and be married. On the train from Padua to Milan they quarreled about her not being willing to come home at once. When they had to say good-bye, in the station at Milan, they kissed good-bye, but were not finished with the quarrel. He felt sick about saying good-bye like that.
He went to America on a boat from Genoa. Luz went back to Pordonone to open a hospital. It was lonely and rainy there, and there was a battalion of arditi quartered in the town. Living in the muddy, rainy town in the winter, the major of the battalion made love to Luz, and she had never known Italians before, and finally wrote to the States that theirs had only been a boy and girl affair. She was sorry, and she knew he would probably not be able to understand, but might some day forgive her, and be grateful to her, and she expected, absolutely unexpectedly, to be married in the spring. She loved him as always, but she realized now it was only a boy and girl love. She hoped he would have a great career, and believed in him absolutely. She knew it was for the best.
The major did not marry her in the spring, or any other time. Luz never got an answer to the letter to Chicago about it. A short time after he contracted gonorrhea from a sales girl in a loop department store while riding in a taxicab through Lincoln Park.

'So, we went for breakfast, and had a bottle of wine, then we had three more on the way up the hill, and then we got to the bar, and after having four bottles of wine, we started drinking…'

Have you read 'the short and happy life of Francis Mapunder (sp?)', Andy?

Hemingway would have totalled that squirrel too, though, let's face it.

No way 50/52 - more like 53/54.

I'm a long-legged* 5'6.5", and I have one 52 and one 53.5 – she would need the bigger one if she's 5.7 with long legs.

*Sorry, that sounds really vain. But you know what I mean.

I like this thread. I just ventured out of it and read this:

I swear on my mothers life that a few weeks ago near wimbourne I fulfilled a lifetimes ambition in running a squirrel over.
now, as any trail rider knows these rats are so frequently to be seen darting directly across trails in front of you whilst riding at speed, so, the desire to take one out has been building for a long long time,
im not a malicious person, but these creatures are horrid, greedy, wasteful, noisy, nasty and so squirrely that I have no regrets.
it was a direct both wheel splat, I was so pleased went back to check it was done for and saw it just pathetically crawl into undergrowth.
sorry vegans but it rocked!

I'm going to stay in here for a while.

They are both amazing, you're right. The end of AFTA is just heartbreaking. But overall, I think the writing in TSAR is his best.

fuck me. is it bad i was surprised that plurabelle (although the name should have been a giveaway to be fair) was of the tender gender?

Don't worry, you're not alone. I do have a 'male spectrum brain pattern', according to the old Casanova Fingers test.

rocks back and forth autistically

I read Disgrace a long time ago and wasn't sure I remembered it well enough to include on my shortlist, but otherwise would have put it up. On the strength of Boyhood, I'm going to read more of Coetzee's stuff.

Thanks for the tip about Auster. Saved me more excruciating tedium. Assuming the rest of his output is as boring and averagely-written as NYT, what are the "wrong reasons" that get people to bother?

A lot of modern "literary fiction" comes across like an old boy's / girl's club. Most of the "establishment" can write well (or very well), but the themes they choose to deal with are only of interest to themselves and people with lives near-identical to their own. Our forum about fixed-gear bikes in London shows more interest in the real world than most of the last decade's novels.

I suppose we shouldn't really turn this into a hate thread, but I totally agree. McEwan/Amis/Barnes etc being the worst offenders. Amis is embarrassing, but I actually find some McEwan properly awful too – Saturday, notably. Oh, God, and Amsterdam. And yet he invariably gets ecstatic reviews…

Yes, I think he's brill. Just How Late it Was, How Late, mind.

Paul Auster wishes he had a debt to Beckett. Instead of just a hard-on for him. Sorry, like I said, I have been through the mill with him. Actually, though, yes, MoC is probably the least bad.

Pynchon's an acquired taste right enough. But I do think that Gravity's Rainbow is one of the most important books of the last 50 years, without wanting to sound like a wanker.

DeLillo was guilty of the college professor thing with White Noise, but otherwise he's kept his nose mostly clean. On Beauty by Zadie Smith comes to mind as a classic of the genre, but I'm picking at random - there are hundreds of forgettable novels about having an affair with your student and trying to get tenure while suffering from writer's block.

On the writing-about-the-process-of-writing front, I'd include Paul Auster, for New York Trilogy (perhaps the world's most boring book?), Mao II and even At Swim Two Birds, which was at least funny, ish. The problem is that writing, the activity, is very boring to describe, but also something that writers tend to spend a lot of time thinking about.

Paul Auster's terrible. As is Zadie Smith. Auster in particular is one of those writers that I suspect people like for the wrong reasons. I am unlucky enough to have had to read almost his entire output at one point, for work. It gets much, much worse than NYT, believe me. I don't mind his non-fiction writing, though.

I suppose Roth would fall into your college-circle-jerk thing too; and Coetzee. It is pretty unforgivable.

Have you tried any Don DeLillo, other than Underworld? I remember your comment from the advertising thread.

Yeah - I thought White Noise was brilliant.

Raskol, the Pynchon's for work, so I can mentally separate it a bit. Plus, M&D is no *Gravity's Rainbow…
*
Slow, andy? Pynchon? Which book?

Yup, I'm looking forward loads to Moby Dick. I'm taking it to Rome, along with some Henry James, who I love. Can't wait to just read books while sitting outside cafes drinking wine all day.

Murakami is the perfect hipster writer, in my humble etc etc – style over substance. I also can't get along with Marquez at all. I think his books are a bit schlocky.

The Sun Also Rises is a masterpiece, though, I think.

At the moment I'm in the middle of few things – Mason & Dixon by Pynchon, which is unbelievable; I'm re-reading Crash by Ballard; and then some Richard Ford short stories. I'm about to start Moby Dick, too, which I've never read before.

I think the Daily Mail would be more on the side of the sham sanctimony, personally.

I'm so very sorry. How terribly sad.

As Sky news have put it, 'he touched so many'.

Oliver, your pedantry at a time like this is unhelpful

Personally I don't think I would have made it through this without Oliver's pedantry. We all need a log to cling to sometimes.

None of us really know what happened in those situations. We were not there. It is not for us to judge.

Lets not forget, here are alot of sycophants attached to people like him.

There is only 1 man who knows the truth and who Michael will need to answer to and that is our sweet lord and savior, Jesus Christ.

The kids might have an inkling too, of course.

Best telly ever.

Sad news. I'm going to have me a cup of Jesus Juice in memoriam.

Goodnight, sweet prince.

does he have to tell everyone about it?

I don't "get" Dave Gorman.

Have you ever noticed how other observational comics are funnier than him?

Ah, but perhaps we could haggle? Just a bit?

No. That would be unbelievably racist.

no please don't kill yourself over the spelling of pajamas, there's room for both spellings.

btw you say troosers, I say troisers... guess that's what makes the world go round.

You're right, there is room in the world for both. I believe the space that's been allocated for your chosen spelling is called 'America'…

Troisers! Crikey.