Suffering from premature evaluation?

Waterstone's decision this week to start taking advance orders on the Sony e-reader has provoked the predictable disgorging of articles on how this new device will be received and what this means for the future of the printed book.

The starting point of all these pieces is essentially whether or not this is the book trade's 'iPod moment'. Aside from being the sort of lazy, whelk-brained journalism in the sort of style which explains Government budget announcements in terms of how they would affect soap characters, it simply isn't.

I did get to have little play with one last year and I'm not really sure why anyone would want one. It's an ugly, bulky piece of kit and it lacks the basic features which make books such a joy, such as being able to flick back and forth with great ease until the reference you were looking for flashes past.

I doubt even many early adopters, if I'm going to go down the road of using such clumsy jargon, are going to go for it. It's hardly revolutionary. It's stand-alone device, not even Mac compatible, which displays text in a format more familiar to devotees of the printed page.

The nearest it has to the high-tech world's Holy Grail of a 'killer app' is the ability, apparently popular with elderly Kindle users in the States, to enlarge the size of the font, providing an instant large print facility. This is certainly a wonderful benefit, but hardly a USP.

This is the flaw in the giddy enthusiasm of many commentators. We simply don't know who will use them and, more importantly, how. I keep reading accounts of how much easier it is to take an e-reader on holiday than half a dozen books. Aside from their undoubted weakness in the presence of sand, sea and sun lotion, is this really all anyone can come up with? A whole new market is not going to open up because of a small saving on Ryanair luggage charges.

I'm not Luddite enough to dismiss the possibility, even likelihood, that such devices will find a significant following. But I suspect it'll take up to a decade. I think foldable, rollable sheets impregnated with ink which can be made to form letters and images under the direction of an electric current will be key. But in terms of functions, I really couldn't say.

Anyway, it's Booker longlist day tomorrow and it's going to be an excitingly open contest again this race. I imagine all the newspaper coverage will focus on Salman Rushdie: clear favourite if he's included, clueless wittering about the lack of household names if he's not. It's the way it always is. I got asked by a reporter why F Scott Fitzgerald had never won the Booker a couple of weeks ago....

Still, at least there's no McEwan to monopolise what little space they'll give it. I might see if I can get my description of Sadie Jones' fantastic debut as the book Ian McEwan would write if he tried properly the whole way through and could write female characters quoted anywhere.

I'm not going to try to predict what'll be on there, as I'd simply be rounding up all the other opinions I've gleaned to make up the dozen or so were promised. There are too many potential candidates I've not read. But it would make me very happy, and slightly less splenetically inclined towards this year's Chair, the Right 'Orrible Michael Xavier Portillo, to see some of the following in contention:

• The Outcast - Sadie Jones
• The Language of Others - Clare Morrall
• One Morning Like A Bird - Andrew Miller
• Netherland - Joseph O'Neill
• In God's Country - Ross Raisin
• Breath - Tim Winton

I won't be drawn further. Oh, go on then: Andrew Miller to win.

Going by my usual record, however, in matters Booker, I have likely condemned all of them to omission. Sorry about that.

On the reading front, there's been Hannah Tinti's The Good Thief, the supposedly uplifting tale of a one-handed boy called Ren, who is rescued from an nineteenth-century orphanage to help out in various scams and thefts. I think it's supposed to be quirkily endearing, but I'm afraid I found Ren such a drip that I soon lost any interest in the fate of the stumpy little twerp and his motley band of cartoon hangers-on, the marginally most ludicrous of whom was the dwarf living up the deaf woman's chimney.

Currently, it's Nadeem Aslam's The Wasted Vigil, which might well be worth adding to that list of Booker candidates. His last, Maps for Lost Lovers, was a sensationally beautiful novel eleven years in the writing, which sets an honour killing in a Muslim community in the north of England.

His new one brings together characters of sharply contrasting backgrounds and beliefs and puts them at the front line of the 'war on terror' in Afghanistan, a nation which was scarcely given time to recover for being s staging ground for the Cold War. Again his lyrical prose contrasts sharply with the senseless brutality which has been carried out in the name of ideology, whether Soviet, Taliban or American.

I've had a Channel 4 documentary about the sandwich industry on while I've been finishing this off. Not surprisingly, there an awful lot of poor quality food being sold in a deeply deceptive way. No mention though of the thing which bugs me most: the signs on the tills in Pret A Manger which say "We're legally required to add VAT to food to eat in. Nightmare!"

I quite mind being patronised by a sandwich shop.

Hype sensitivity

It was with surprise and delight that I stumbled across a half-page news international item in last week's Observer, revealing the hullabaloo which suddenly attends Joseph O'Neill's new novel, Netherland. The New Yorker has declared it a masterpiece and comparisons with F Scott Fitzgerald, Saul Bellow and all sorts of other American literary icons are being cast with abandon.

Now while some of these encomia are inevitably a little far-fetched, for once the hype has some substance. It is a post-9/11 novel, a literary sub-species covering the entire spectrum of metaphorical effectiveness, from Dave Eggers' depiction of wounded American pride and embitterment in You Shall Know Our Velocity to Ian McEwan's preciously imperious Saturday, a book with which I lost patience following the eighteen-page description of a game of squash between two middle-aged doctors, a passage which Proust would have found self-indulgently long-winded.

In Netherland, the role of metaphor is borne by Chuck Ramkissoon, a one-time friend and informal business associate of the narrator. He is the heart and soul of a cricketing community of ex-pats, a would-be Kerry Packer with dreams of an international cricket empire. But he is the immigrant chasing the American dream at a time when the Statue of Liberty has turned its gaze inward.

Essentially, this is the post-colonial novel transferred to a nation of immigrants, where the notion of national identity is little more than a cultural construct. The world has struggled to understand how a country whose image is largely channelled through Hollywood could choose - twice! - George W Bush as its President, but the dichotomy of America's liberal coastal cities and its fundamentalist heartland is filtered out. The country is too diverse in origins and beliefs to function as a unified whole, but the trauma of 9/11 demands a unified response. There is no single quintessential American identity, stereotype though such a definition would have to be.

The novel has a lot more to say than that, of course - there's a plot and everything - and I'm quite sure that I'm imposing my own interpretation on it, but that's a necessary part of any work of art. A novel, a painting, a play: all of these are only potential works of art until witnessed by someone other than the artist and then they become beacons for appreciation and analysis. Anyway, I exhort you to seek out Netherland for yourself.

At a lunch to celebrate its publication, Gill Coleridge, Joe's agent, explained how a desultory offer from Faber, the publisher of his first two novels, led her to offer it to Fourth Estate. Trying to sell foreign rights had been a frustrating experience, with countless European houses expressing doubt that a cricket-themed novel would find much of a readership on the continent. Once The New Yorker had passed judgment, however, the offers came flooding in.

I belatedly discovered that Coleridge is also Richard Ford's agent in the UK, which was a missed opportunity, especially as O'Neill's outsider's analysis of a nation's psyche makes a fascinating reading alongside the Frank Bascombe's gradual surrender to the realities of the American dream.

Anyway, we'll see what the Booker judges make of it. Since each new set of judges probably wants, understandably, to make its mark on Booker history with a distinctive and independent-minded choice of winner, it may be that they will want to avoid feeling corralled into choosing it. (Verb, gerund, gerundive, gerundive, participle? Urgh. Sorry.) I fervently hope though that will recognise that setting aside the hype for any book can still leave a book of considerable inherent merits.

The only books I've read so far this year which I think are worthy Booker competition are The Outcast by Sadie Jones, which I'm fervently hoping will receive its due at this week's Orange Prize ceremony, and In God's Country by Ross Raisin, a book which Joseph O'Neill's editor, Clare Reihill, was deeply disappointed to lose to Viking in auction. More to follow at a later time on those two, I think.

Customers in the shop over the last week or so seem to have been on their best behaviour on the whole, so my subconscious has thoughtfully taken it upon itself to trouble me with oneiric enquiries of its own invention. I dreamed a few nights ago that I was patiently explaining to a customer that "it's A to Z, alphabetical by author", to which my interlocutor responded, "But what about the other letters?"

I suspect it's some sort of premonition.