Another effortlessly readable Watch book, to collapse in an armchair with between Christmas and New Year.

Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, updated neatly to the closing decades of the 20th century – an ageless video installation and the shadow of AIDS. Utterly glorious writing.

A tale of eclectic sleep disorders within and around a dreamlike clifftop house (a student residence in the past, a research clinic in the present). Gets a lot better half-way in, although the plot’s coincidences become more and more preposterous.

Although beautifully printed, with a lot of innovative arrangement of information, it’s ultimately a bit too hit-and-miss; amid the well-considered deeply-dug trivia is a hefty amount of Internet-skimmable dirge.

Eh, three long, short stories that start well and seem to tail off rather too dreamily. Some good bits of writing, but it took a lot of energy to finish.

Despite the gloriously dated language, there’s far too much detail to read this from start to finish. One to put on a shelf and refer to.

Hitch-hiking around Ireland with a fridge, for a bet; he gets support from a national radio station almost immediately, which seems to render the whole thing a bit pointless. The cheerful facetiousness (“I have thought of a joke; I MUST INCLUDE IT”) wasn’t as grating as it was when he was trekking through the poverty of Moldova, but the author still emerges as a fairly shallow and unlikeable sort of person. Oh well.

A good little handbook on lateral thinking, and how to get into the habit of using it. Fine metaphors, good illustrative ideas (visualising shapes in terms of component elements), and some quality thinking examples.

A strong and powerful idea, not as flawed as I thought it would be (it’s about giving minor whims a chance to live, rather than living entirely at random), and it’s good, solid American-first-person writing, but the sexism is tiresome, and the random sex-scenes seem like an editor-demanded afterthought.

Dreamily feverish but with a convincingly logical baseline, a man is trapped between three motorway sliproads after crashing his car. A simply structured tale of urban isolation, with wonderfully swirling undercurrents.