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Read this in one go last night (it's good and short).. I was enjoying the Stephen King creepiness of it and the nicely observed character voices then groaned inwardly halfway through when I realized we're back in Bone Clocks territory with the RPG type guff about orisons, suasioning, Atemporals...

The Mark and the Void (Paul Murray) - it's a bit of a mess, but he has enough of a gift at writing comic farce to keep it moving along.. There's clearly a wealth of material for social satire and scrutiny in the banking crisis / bailout era but I feel like it needs more of a light touch and a...

I read Alias Grace a couple of months back, it's the only one of hers I've read so far but I got the impression that it's a bit different from her usual style, it's a straight-up drama based on a historical murder story in 1840s Ontario. It was hard work to be honest, some patches of beautiful...

City of Bohane (Kevin Barry) - There is some great pungent language in it and an interesting mix of various hard-boiled genre styles, the slang heavy dialogue is kind of tough going though. I think he could have pushed the near-future sci-fi Ireland setting a bit further, it's fascinating...

Did Kerouac essentially write the same book 4 or 5 times? I struggled through Desolation Angels a few years back and it was pretty similar to that description of Dharma Bums (i.e. a fairly engaging travelogue story about bumming around the U.S. with his bohemian buddies, but only after a...

Ahh shit, very sad to hear about this. Was a big fan for years though I have to admit not keeping up with his more recent stuff. The Bridge and Feersum Endjinn are my favourites still I think.

Same here, read loads of them in school. They're only a shade or 2 above being total pulp genre stuff but he did have a few highlights alright. I remember enjoying the trilogy about the guy who had to live nocturnally because of a condition that meant sunlight would burn his skin.. Was set in...

Recently finished Skippy Dies by Paul Murray, and currently about halfway through his first one An Evening Of Long Goodbyes. Very enjoyable stuff. An Evening of Long Goodbyes reminds me a little bit of A Confederacy of Dunces.

This is true, it's several chapters too long and the implausibility of the plot might make it a bit corny for some, but it's a light enough read despite being over 700 pages.. Would like to see how he'd get on with a bit more focus and tighter editing.

Just finished Steve Toltz - A Fraction of the Whole, which I think was recommended on here about 30 or 40 pages back. Bit of a sprawling mess of a book but compelling and quite funny most of the the way through.. Kind of a larger-than-life whackiness to it and it felt like the characters were...

I'll give that one a look, I really liked some aspects of The Savage Detectives while being somewhat infuriated by the jigsaw-piece hundred narrators format, this one sounds like it might be more digestible. I just finished this: Quite understated in comparison to his earlier books, very...

Luke Haines - Bad Vibes It's funny to read him ripping the piss out of mediocre 90s UK acts, felt fairly light in substance though. Not really a thorough enough dissection of the whole Britpop thing for it to be a worthwhile overview of that, or enough insight into his own music, with the...

It took me months of on-off reading to get through that middle 300 or so pages, more out of a determination to not get 'beaten' by it than anything.. I've heard that this book by the same author is a much better read, might give that a shot sometime.

Just finished 'The Savage Detectives' by Roberto Bolano.. Bit of a frustrating slog of a book, to be honest. Mostly about a bunch of young poet bohemian types living in Mexico in the '70s, mainly focussing on the two leaders of a particular poetry movement and their adventures in different...

At Swim Two Birds is actually better if you dip in and out of it instead of reading the whole thing through cover to cover, I found.. The 'plot' is so ridiculous and hard to follow that it sort of gets in the way of just enjoying the language and humour.

Finished 'Microserfs' by Douglas Coupland the other night.. I enjoyed it a lot, definately the best of what I've read by him. I was expecting pretty much a satire of 90s computer geek culture based on the first few pages but it turns into something more interesting... Must say I found it ends a...

Started reading 'Homage to Catalonia' by George Orwell.. I'm surprised by how humour is in it is so far, considering it's about the Spanish Civil War. He's mostly been going on about how unbelievably ramshackle the Republican army was and how he had more chance of dying from hypothermia...

About a third of the way through 'Dance Dance Dance' by Haruki Murakami. It's keeping me entertained so far, though I'm starting to think that he writes essentially the same book every time. I liked 'The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle' and 'Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World' but it's...