Ragtime - E.L. Doctorow

This is an invigorating panorama of American life at the start of the Twentieth Century. In both form and content, it owes a lot to John Dos Passos' mighty U.S.A.. I liked the blend of fictional and historical characters, and it was good to see a prominent role given to one of my heroes, Harry Houdini.

Hollywood Animal - Joe Eszterhas

The tell-all Hollywood memoir is is one of my favourite genres - the more lurid and self-serving the better. Robert Evans' uproarious The Kid Stays in the Picture is still the most scandalously entertaining example, but this nestles comfortably into the second tier alongside, say, You'll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again by Julia Phillips.

The good stuff: Eszterhas was at his peak in the 80s and wrote the scripts for Jagged Edge, Flashdance, Basic Instinct and - oh, yes - Showgirls. He was a true A-lister who enjoyed pissing people off, so there are plenty of great anecdotes. Some of the descriptions, particularly of Sharon Stone, are delectable. The payoff to all the backstory about his relationship with his father also packs a powerful punch.

The bad stuff: At over 700 pages it's ludicrously long, mainly thanks to overly detailed descriptions of his romantic life. More about the work would have been better, even if it is mostly screenplays like Jade rather than anything with actual merit. It is also disheartening that the ending sees this arch-libertine recover from cancer to become a practicing Catholic and anti-smoking-in-movies campaigner. Gah!

Scorsese on Scorsese - David Thompson and Ian Christie (eds.)

Since the death of Kubrick, Scorsese can reasonably be considered the main man of American cinema. There are some great insights on offer here, particularly on some of the influences such as Michael Powell or Italian neo-realism. Unfortunately my edition winds up with the awful The Last Temptation of Christ - I'll have a look at a later version when I can get one.

Edit: Just finished the latest edition, which takes us up as far as Gangs of New York. Lots more good stuff, which made me want to rewatch Bringing Out The Dead (for some visual effects) and Goodfellas (for the influence of the French New Wave).

A Haunted House and other stories - Virginia Woolf

A woman sits alone in a room. She gazes at a mark on the wall and ponders its origin for ten long pages. Eventually her husband walks in and says "What's that snail doing on the wall?" and lobs it out the window. Finis.

Woolf can really disappear in a fog of obscurity at times, but when she anchors her stories in social reality I find her much more interesting. This is a patchy collection but it has its moments, and it was fun to see Clarissa Dalloway pop up in a couple of stories.

Deadeye Dick - Kurt Vonnegut

I always enjoy a trip into Vonnegut's world of satire, whimsy and slapstick disaster. This one has some moments to treasure, often overlapping with horrific experiences, and the mix is extremely satisfying.

The Human Stain - Philip Roth

I have been known to argue that Roth is the world's greatest living writer. this is hardly an idiosyncratic assertion, but The Human Stain only partially supports this theory.

On his most familiar ground - academia, the individual in history, the ironies of America, how we define ourselves - he is brilliant and savagely ironic. The technique of gradual revelation layered through a narrative lasagne of points of view allows the story to unfold with great power and page-turning excitement. It's also very funny - one passage about Clinton's mistake with Lewinsky had me making embarrassing snorting noises on the train.

The clunkiness that limits this to the second tier of Roth's oeuvre lies in his depiction of his less highbrow characters - a cleaning lady and her Vietnam vet ex. I wasn't convinced by either of these important characters, but don't let that put you off. This is a novel that implicitly compares itself with Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter and Dos Passos' U.S.A. and it doesn't come off badly at all.

Washington Square - Henry James

A small, early gem from James, reminiscent of Jane Austen despite the fact that he didn't admire her work for some reason. It is elegantly written, insightful and at times laugh-out-loud funny - it's as much fun as you can have in 175 pages.

The Life and Times of Michael K - J.M. Coetzee

Kafka rewrites The Grapes of Wrath, with all the hilarious hijinks that summary would suggest.

This tale of an inarticulate gardener struggling to survive in war-torn South Africa is grim stuff, then, but Coetzee will always give you crystalline prose and moral insight that helps balance out the overall mood of despair.

This is the second consecutive book I have read where the protagonist loses his sexual innocence in a dispiriting encounter with a lady of negotiable affection featuring hand and mouth based activities but no climax. Makes you wonder why people bother.

The Necropolis Railway - Andrew Martin

A quick historical thriller to race through after the marathon of War and Peace. I was interested in the historical Necropolis Railway, which carted funeral parties from Waterloo down to Brookwood cemetery back in the day, but the plot and characters were pretty dull and didn't really capture my imagination as I had hoped.