Nick Hornby - The Complete Polysyllabic Spree

Stocking up in Hay-on-Wye; polishing off an authors oeuvre in a week; a new thriller from the brother-in-law.

Bad football grammar; John McEnroe as Holden Caulfield; the Dickens-standard for the appropriate length of a literary biography.

Football season cripples the pace; the Larry DavidRichard Yates connection; plot-busting blurbs; literary hoaxaphilia.

Rescinding and refunding a previous recommendation; the impossibility of reading a Victorian novel in Los Angeles; a balanced fictional diet.

Charlotte Moore is frank about the hardships of raising autistic children, but shes still managed to write the funniest book of the year.

An edible poem; mandarin writers vs. vernacular ones; the futility of moving the pram from the hall.

Reconciling the holidays with a new agenda; reading vouchers; the Cultural Fantasy Boxing League.

The distaste of ones own cooking (and writing); Amazon reviewers; a non-fictional gangland less fun but more entertaining than the real one.

Following through on the Dickens promise; a retort to spareness; computer-animated classics; weedy young women.

This passage from Dickenss Hamlet extends well beyond its plot-function in order to hear more from a guy who shouts Goroo! a lot.

The benefits of peeking into tortured lives; bad literature parties vs. rocking gangster parties; contraception.

Heres a modern poem by Tony Hoagland which wont make you swear.

Reading begets reading in strange and unscientific ways; comics clash with classics; lascivious emails.

The good pop novel; suicidal authors of abstract works; vulgar narrative tendencies.

An unnamed literary novel; an unnamed literary biography; blockbusters; finger-steepling and sharks (in the same book!).

Sex with cousins; instant classics; the impossibility of reading it all.

Looking to fly from Dickens to Martin Amis with just one overnight stop? Patrick Hamilton is your man.

The insane capriciousness of the average critic; the well-stocked bookshelf finally pays off; when innovations stop looking like mistakes.

Useful advice and tough love from A. Chekhov.

The mystique (and apocalyptic imagination) of Bob Dylan; making a point about Philip Roth.

On not walking into a lamp-post but nevertheless enjoying a thriller; having a walk-on part in a friends book; and hanging out with the very old and the very young.

The author gets a history lesson from Sarah Vowell in Gramercy Park.

No more novels about literature please; the pleasures of spotting where you used to live in a novel; plaudits but no foreign sales for John Harris.

Different national tastes in bird books; true crime then (Capote) and now (Gourevitch); two books which really have the mucus.

Coming to terms with my limitations: I dont understand SF; my discovery of Adrian Mole; music as torture; this months Book by a Friend.

Are Martin Amis and Marilynne Robinson modern classics? My sister produces the greatest book ever written; reading for work; Walter Mosley disproves my theory about series and stand-alones.

Losing my appetite for books; the best bookshops in the world; the profound effect of literature on a life.

Vince helps out a call-girl, and has an interesting philosophical debate about blow-jobs with her client, in this terrific opening scene from Jess Walters novel.

Not recognizing much in Candide; reading about American lives.

Anthony Burgess proves right and wrong about Michael Frayn; the book of the film is a surprise; a bad recommendation from a friend.

Foul-mouthed Philip Larkin; is Robert Penn Warren better than the Odyssey? My new bible.

I might only read books about animals from now on; writing books for others; rereading William Cooper.

Jennie Erdal learns she has to write a love story, very requited and very sexy.

The definitive book on vile, abusive, misogynistic behaviour; three great recommendations from John Betjeman; The Office meets Kafka in a new novel.

Joshua Ferris manages to convey the mundaneness and the mystery of office life and make it funny too.

The convectional-rainfall theory of book-reading; walking on the moon and making a mess of the Earth; all thats good about graphic novels; can a book which misquotes the Bible be any good?

In her blocks of black-and-white graphics Marjane Satrapi shows the true colour of life in Iran.

Swapping books on tour; making narrative coherence out of awful accident; feeling smart when reading Freakonomics but whats it about?