Seasonal Suicide Notes: My Life as it is Lived [Hardcover]

I got this thinking it would be like David Sedaris' brilliant "Santaland Diaries" and would be a good read for the airport/plane on holiday this year - well all I can say is thank god I brought other books with me! This was a real stinker for many reasons.

The book is divided up into years starting in 2004 and then every year is broken down into months where Lewis talks about what "hilarious" things happened to him in that month.

Lewis talks about how his 1200 page autobiography of Peter Sellers was so much more complex than the film was (fair, given nobody would sit through a 20 hour film) but goes on and on about this for pages. He moans about how his work is underappreciated, how nobody likes him, how little his books sell, and how much he deserves fame and wealth for his book on Sellers and a similarly long and inaccessible book on Anthony Burgess.

And that's what really gets me - the tone. It's this whiny, annoying whinge throughout about how he deserves fame for his work coupled with the sniping at colleagues and "the London literary clique" which he goes to great pains to stress he's not a part of. He goes on about how he's not invited to parties in London but when he is invited to The Times party he makes a point of saying that he stayed home and watched "The Bill". Then he's invited to a magazine party and he stays home to watch "Eastenders". And so on, etc. I think he wants the reader to think he's a cool outsider? It's a bit grasping given he complains yet again about how little he earns and deserves millions for his work. Would a literary outlaw be so tedious?

The completely uninteresting and upper-middle-class worries (good school for the kids, money for expensive holidays), coupled with Lewis' repellent tone of bitterness make this a totally unfunny book for anyone unless you come from a similar socio-economic background. Really disappointing but I'd hate for anyone to be stuck with this for a holiday read given there are much better books out there. The other books I took with me which I highly recommend are "War" by Sebastian Junger, "The Ghost" by Robert Harris, and "Hearts in Atlantis" by Stephen King.

I ended up leaving this in the sick bag on the plane, where it belongs.

I don't blame the publisher for trying to maximise sales by having the standard, insipid Christmas humour title dustjacket, but it doesn't do justice to the book. This is one of the funniest and most incisive books I've read for years and I hate Roger Lewis for being far wittier than I could ever hope to be. At least I'm slimmer (just) and less Welsh ( a lot).

This book will probably appear on gift tables (or even worse, "gifting", which sounds a little rude) in bookshops, but this wonderful, liberating, vitriolic rant is far too good to waste on others. Buy it for yourself.

I asked for this book in the Picadilly branch of Waterstones, 'That's by Lewis Roger' said the pretty sales assistant. An apposite anecdote given the bile contained within this book. Lewis Roger is a grub street journalist trying to make a living when grub street has collapsed and instead of living in London schmoozing with literary types he is washed up in the 'Herefordshire Balkans'.

This short book is a seriously funny account of his life, his complaints, and his erstwhile desire for recognition. Following a much misunderstood, much maligned biography of Anthony Burgess (10 copies sold in the last year of counting), Lewis bewails just about every successful recent British writer/celeb. Delightfully in various ways, he lays into Clive James - a writer of 'mouldy fudge', Andrew Roberts (a baboon), Ned Sherrin, Simon Cowell, Julian Barnes (and his late wife Pat Kavanagh), Jeremy Clarkson, 'sad mother' Julie Myerson and best of all, Harold Pinter (obit) 'what a dreadful clanking beast he was'. Heaven knows how he got this past the libel lawyers. I for one am delighted he did.

Interspersed with this literary bile are delightful snippets of his life as a marooned intellectual in the provinces. He cuts out articles from the local paper and offers snippets of local life: 'Age Concern has introduced a Toe Nail Cutting Scheme in the Community Centre run by "our trained volunteers", and tells filthy jokes picked up from Barry Cryer.

Also in these diaries are laments at his health (he is fat and has fat person's ailments), his kids, his class (he was a butcher's son and feels the London establishment looks down on him accordingly), his lack of money, his envy at other people's money (such as Gyles Brandreth and the late Alan Coren) and his continual snubbing by his publisher's literary parties (which he doesn't want to attend anyway).

Frustrated at being born in a time when the commercial imperative is everything in publishing (true, I used to work as one), and the weak collapse of the educated elites as they pump out more Jordan and Jamie Oliver, Lewis fancies himself as a contemporary, neglected version of his hero Anthony Burgess: a man of voracious intellectual appetites, though sadly without anyone to appreciate it. In the end, Suicide Notes is more like a contemporary Diary of a Nobody (extracted from in the epigram).

Some people predict this book to become a cult classic and I certainly hope it does, as this book is one of the funniest I have read. I think Lewis is due a break, just so pretty Waterstone's assistants will know his name. I think he would like that.