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"To live outside the law you must be honest," Bob Dylan sang once, and few books I've read stick as closely to that as Siberian Education, the story of Nicolai Lilin's youth in the contested republic of Transnistria (Moldova/Russia). According to Lilin, this is where Stalin sent more or less the entire Siberian mob back in the day, and they've all settled there and carried on their business. We get to follow the young Nicolai from childhood - starting with the first time he sees the police come into their home to arrest his grandfather, only to get sent packing outgunned, humiliated and ridiculed - until he turns 18, by which time he's been to juvenile prison twice, seen a lot of violence (really, a LOT) and taken active part in much of it himself.

The word "honesty" is indeed used a lot here, and almost exclusively by and about people who live outside the law. This is a society which has evolved under pressure from the outside, and survived through both political purges, the rise and fall of empires, a state that actively wants to get rid of them, and obviously the fact that they all get sent to jail or get killed regularly. In return, they've become a tight-knit community with very strict rules, where family and faith are sacred, where the young and strong look out for the weak and old, where everyone works together for the common good, and all that jazz. This isn't just organized crime, it's a society organized around crime. Very well organized. And I say that not to hold it up as an ideal or anything, but because of this odd effect: as Lilin gets deeper into how this society works, all the unspoken rules, all the moral imperatives, all the hidden-to-outsiders meanings, all the things that we take for granted about how the world works without necessarily questioning them suddenly become the text. It becomes more than just a book about how a group of people live (and kill, and die), but also why, how a lot of things that people both here and there take for granted are actually that way for a reason - not quite a philosophical treatise on the construction of society, ethics and moral relativism, but, y'know. Quite fascinating at times.

That's the good. The bad? Well for starters, as always with these sorts of books, you have to decide how to approach it. After all, this is an author who has no issues with telling us in detail how he's hurt others and seen people get hurt. Sure, almost every act of violence described in the book is committed either against police (who are pretty much seen as non-human) or against other criminals (often children, but criminals all the same), but ultimately I assume all these criminals have to rob someone, and while Lilin's silence about that works well as part of setting up how their world works (do you think of Chinese child labour every time you put on a pair of sneakers?), it doesn't make the book any less disturbing. You can take issue with this, or you can read it as a pure objective reportage: "Here's what happens, the naked truth, from the point of view of someone who was there. Questions?" (And then get out your Black Books DVDs and watch the episode where they try to hold a reading for an autobiography by a former gangster.) But there's still a certain feel of wanting to have the cake and beat it too - to entertain and shock with details about the criminal life, while still mostly letting us keep our safe distance from it. And to be honest (sorry), the descriptions of slashed tendons, busted heads and prison rapes soon lose their shock value and become just really repetitive.

Part of that is because of the text itself. Somewhere in Italy, an editor hasn't done his job. Not only is Lilin's prose amateurish to say the least, but the pacing is way off. Lilin tells his story in a series of episodes, each of which keeps getting interrupted so he can explain the meaning of every minute detail, give backstories of every character, and relate anecdotes from years earlier. A good writer might have pulled it off - especially the last 100 pages, before the book ends rather abruptly, read like an attempt to imitate the last 20-30 minutes of Goodfellas - but here, it just feels like he's constantly losing track.

At the end, we're left with a book that fulfills its blurb of being "a snapshot of a violent world," as such it has its merits and if you're into that sort of thing by all means give it a go; but it could have used autofocus, a wide-angle lens, and some retouching.

The first interview is with the widow of one of the firemen who were sent in on the first day. He'd been shoveling radioactive sludge dressed in only jeans and a t-shirt, his skin turned grey over an afternoon, he literally fell apart within days. She caught cancer from sitting at his bedside as he died.

The second interview is with a psychologist who lived through World War II in the Ukraine and still can't find anything that compares to working in the Zone.

The third is with one of the old women who moved back a few years later, lives illegally in her little cottage out in the woods. What else is she supposed to do? The radiation can't be that bad if you can't see it.

The fourth is with a father trying to explain how it feels to bury his daughter, dead from a disease that, officially, cannot exist.

And so on and so on and so on.

Voices From Chernobyl is one of the harshest reportage books I've read. Aleksievich doesn't try for objectivity, for a whole picture, for a rational explanation of the hows and whys and the why nots of what happened on 26 April 1986 outside Pripyat, Ukraine, and the aftermath. The coverups, the reassurances, the suicidal heroism, the disintegration of the USSR along with the people who had to keep on living on radioactive ground. Chernobyl is too big, she argues; its a trauma of mythical proportions, one whose full effect we don't even know yet (certainly not in 1997), it cannot be understood with mere numbers anymore than the Holocaust or the plague can, you need stories. So the book consists of only that; interviews, with Aleksievich's own questions removed, leaving only a chorus of disembodied voices identified only by their first name and a title. Some have enough distance to it to offer their ideas of how it could happen (blame communism, blame decadence, blame deep-rooted Russian fatalism, blame alcohol, blame...), while others cannot look away from their own memories. What it all means to them.

The soldiers who dove, voluntarily, into the cooling tank to vent it manually. Dead now, of course.

The people sent in with orders to find entire cities clean. Who measured lethal radiation in breast milk and could do nothing about it.

The flag they raised over the reactor when the sanitation was supposedly finished, to celebrate the Soviet state's victory.The radiation annihilated it within days. So they raised another one.

A joke: both the Japanese and the US donated experimental remote-controlled robots to be used in the cleanup. The Japanese robot lasted an hour before the radiation fried it. The US robot lasted three hours. The Soviet robot worked for 8 hours, then its commanding officer said "Good work, Private Ivanov, you may take a break." The soldiers were told vodka was good for flushing the radiation out of your system.

The teacher who thought she would be safe by only buying the most expensive food, surely that would be OK... until she found out that the officials had raised the prices on food from contaminated areas to make sure people ate less of that.

The official who realised, to his horror, that the pits they dug to bury the tools and machines they used at the accident site were empty; everything sold on the black market, spread all around the Union, with no way to tell a highly radioactive tractor from a normal one.

The mother, fighting desperately for the life of a daughter born without a lower body; forget walking, she can't even take a dump.

And so on and so on and so on.

It's not the book you should read to get an overview of what happened. It doesn't have any answers, any conclusions, its subjectis too big to do anything but start to outline the questions surrounding a trauma that, argues Aleksievich, hasn't been dealt with yet. 25 years on, 15 years after being written, it's probably in dire need of a sequel. But it is an absolutely bone-chilling documentary.

I first read Breat Easton Ellis' 1985 debut Less Than Zero years and years ago, after reading and falling in love with American Psycho. So now that Elllis has published a sequel to it, I thought I'd start by re-reading the first book, since much like John Self notes in his review of Imperial Bedrooms - and I'll get back to this - I honestly couldn't remember much about it.

It's a different novel now than it was when I read it at 19 or 20. While it's certainly not as pornographic as its scandalous big brother, LTZ is a novel that can be read for shock value alone, a seemingly nihilist tale of sex and drugs and MTV. No wonder I couldn't remember the story; there really isn't much of one. Clay, an 18-year-old from California and from money, has finished his first semester at college in New Hampshire and is now coming home to spend Christmas with his friends and family. For four weeks before heading back to college, he does little but go to a never-ending series of parties, do copious amounts of drugs, tan, sleep with acquaintances of both sexes, try to avoid conversations that always end up petering out or spinning off into a never-ending who's-dating-who's-dealing-who's-dead. It's all surface - but as always with Ellis, it's the kind of surface that invites you to punch (or stab) holes in it and see what's (lacking) underneath.

"But you don't need anything. You have everything," I tell him.
Rip looks at me. "No. I don't."
"What?"
"No. I don't."
There's a pause and then I ask, "Oh, shit, Rip, what don't you have?"
"I don't have anything to lose.

...which, admittedly, is not one of the novel's subtler moments. Ellis wrote this when he was 19, and at times it definitely shows that it's a first work: the prose falls apart now and then, and for all their empty-headed hedonism, some of the characters are a little too fond of stating the theme of the novel.

Typical Hollywood crowd. All the kids are on drugs and all the adults are on rollerskates.

These are kids who've always had it all. Who lack for nothing. They get Porsches for christmas, they've done it all at 18, they'll never have to work a day in their life. And yeah yeah yeah, you know where this is going, the emptiness of success and materialism in the glitzy 80s, we've heard it already. But there are few stories we haven't heard before, and what makes LTZ so fascinating is the narrative, the way it feels like a free fall through it with nothing to break the fall. Clay speaks to us in short, frantic chapters, a modern noir detective except tan and successful, searching for a plot that got lost. Sure, there's a missing friend mixed up in bad company whom he's trying to find and possibly rescue, there's a sometime girlfriend, etc, but he's frequently too cynical and too stoned to care. (One could probably make a good case that Pynchon's Inherent Vice, written 25 years later but set 15 years earlier, is a mirror image of this). Clay is 18 in 1985, he was born in the summer of love, the culmination of America's push to the west, and once it got there everything just piled up against the Pacific and got stoned and commodicized. This is as far as the idea got. Now it's all horrorshow - literally. As in Pynchon, there's a horror movie between the lines, werewolves, zombies and ghosts stalk the stifling Christmas heat of LA. They're just rumours, not real. Probably. But then, what is?

And before I left, I read an article in Los Angeles Magazine about a street called Sierra Bonita in Hollywood. A street I'd driven along many times. The article said that there were people who drove on the streets and saw ghosts; apparitions of the Wild West. I read that Indians dressed in nothing but loincloths and on horseback were spotted, and that one man had a tomahawk, which disappeared seconds later, thrown through his open window. One elderly couple said that an Indian appeared in their living room on Santa Bonita, moaning incantations. A man had crashed into a palm tree because he had seen a covered wagon in his path and it forced him to swerve.

That's more like it. Young Bret could write. Clay isn't a perfect narrator, and that's probably deliberate; he's grown up on the shallowest of lifestyles and ideas, his parents and his grandparents have nothing to pass on to him but money, and now he has no words, no concepts for why everything slips. The clues don't form a whole picture. For all of Ellis' supposed "refusal to condone or chastise [his characters'] behavior", to quote the blurb on the back, the howling emptiness under the glitzy surface is the question of the book. The emptiness that leads people to look for depth in Huey Lewis lyrics (or, if you're feeling mean, Ellis novels). How do you wake up from a nightmare when it contains everything you know?

Some of them would mouth the words to the song that was being played. But I'd concentrate on the teenagers who didn't mouth the words; the teenagers who had forgotten them; the teenagers who maybe never knew them.

Less Than Zero was shocking in 1985. Today, we have Paris Hilton. And the cosmic dance continues.

The Hitch-Hiker's Guide To The Galaxy - the encyclopedia, not the novel - has a lot of information on sequels. For instance, we can read about an expert on robot construction on the planet DNA Prime, who gained fame for a series of five robots often considered the best in their class. They could do tricks, tell jokes, spin absolutely insane stories that still somehow seemed to be about regular people, and were generally just really great to hang out with. (Even if some people claimed that the last robot was pretty depressing, and not in a fun way.)

Sadly, the famous robot builder died before he could build a sixth robot to repair the fifth one, so after a suitable time, his widow hired a successful builder of toy robots from the planet Eringo Beta to build it instead. He quickly dug up the blueprints for the first five and got on it.

After several months of hard work, he presented the result to an excited crowd. At first, many remained cautiously optimistic; sure, the bodywork was patched together from parts that he'd copied from the five original robots without adding anything new, but they were sure that once he switched the robot on, it was bound to do something entertaining.

He hit the switch.

"Fffffffffroody," said the robot and moved its left knee a bit. (The knee had been a small detail on the third robot, added mostly as a joke, but was now supposed to carry the whole construction.) "Frood. Froooody." It paused long enough for the more fanatical audience members to remember that one of the old robots had indeed used the word "frood" at one point, though it now seemed to make up the new robot's entire vocabulary. "Frood," it added as if to underline this, as a small plume of smoke started rising from its head. (The head, which had been many people's favourite detail in the first five robots, didn't do much at all apart from this, except have a cup of tea now and then.)

The robot builder was, understandably, starting to panic. None of the parts he'd copied from the old robots seemed to be hooked up to the motherboard as they didn't actually do anything, and it was becoming clear that building the entire frame from little throwaway details with no strong structure of his own was a Very Bad Idea. "Uh... um... hang on," he called and ran into his workshop to retrieve an extra part (made from open source technology that everyone already knew) which he attached to the robot's back. The robot, which had only been balanced to stand perfectly still and impress with its mere existence and official Sequel status, immediately tipped onto said back with a hollow "bong" and lay there perfectly still, frooding quietly to itself, while a part from the fifth robot which had never worked right in the first place made a high-pitched whining noise.

One by one, the audience filed out. In the paper the next day, the new robot builder was dismissed as an "epp", which is Betelgeuse slang for "probably a great guy if you buy him a pint, but who doesn't seem to have any clue about building this kind of robot and should probably have let us keep our memories of the old ones intact."

And if you think that joke is old, stay the hell away from And Another Thing... .