#1 - Seasonal Suicide Notes by Roger Lewis

My first book of the year - a bargain £1.95 purchase from my local charity shop, bought a month ago for it's promising reviews and timely name - is Seasonal Suicide Notes, a series of diary-letters penned by Welsh biographer Roger Lewis. As a non-fiction book, it was sure to bring some sort of lesson with it, and I promised myself not to be disappointed by the plot, as it's not something you can really twist within the genre. However, the lesson gained from the book wasn't necessarily for me, but for the author himself, and it was a lesson that as a biographer I thought he might of already learnt, what with being a biographer and all. The lesson is simple: If you're going to write a book based around a person, try to make sure they're not a complete tosser.

Giving this book a bad review is a bit of a double edged sword, considering how badly he begs reviewers within the book to be nice, and considering the way in which my mother always used to tell me not to be mean to bullies, because they probably have a lot of pain in their life - a good explanation for the first chapter, 20-odd pages dedicated to the authors distant father getting 'cancer of the bumhole'. But I feel as if the bad review was impossible to not write, considering the reviews written on the sleeve of the book - which promised me that I would 'cry with laughter [...] blubbering, sniffling and gasping' - which were all inaccurate, and all, as it transpires, written by his mates - and when I say mates, I mean the ones he doesn't rapidly insult as soon as their obituaries are written ('Harold Pinter obit. What a ghastly clanking beast he was').

So it is with marginally small amount of guilt that I point out all of the borderline racist humour, intellectual snobbery, complaining about being fat, and whining about how badly he's paid before quickly telling us about his holiday home in Bad Ischl, Austria. Lewis does a lot of name-dropping of people I've never heard of, which is infuriating, and hurts my pseudo-intellectual ego. He also, despite visibly showing a sense of humour in some parts, isn't funny, which together with the reviews written by his friends and relentless name-dropping, tells me that the jokes - which are originally letters to his friends, lets not forget - are one of those 'you had to be there' affairs. And don't get me started on his sons (Sébastien, Oscar, and Tristan) who seem more like the Oxford-rimming posh bastards I see arguing about whether or not coffee is vegan in Starbucks the more I read about them.

The funniest parts of the book are the disorientatingly quirky clippings from the local newspaper - 'A couple in Elmsdale Road have been left "in a state of shock" after a plastic swan "worth around £15" was stolen from their garden.' - and the only bit that genuinely made me laugh out loud was the author clarifying that he was parked next to a mosque, describing it poetically as 'a mosque'. 

Not a terrible book considering the £1.95 I paid for it, but a ruddy awful one considering £13 retail price.

Pages: 200
Bottom Line: Relentlessly quoting obscure writers isn't the way to the heart of a teenager who thinks he knows a lot about literature.