The only good thing about having to read Tom Wolfe’s I Am Charlotte Simmons (summary: ageing novelist with failing powers visits college campus, discovers he ain’t in Kansas any more) is knowing that I’m not alone. The whole world feels my pain.

From The Guardian: “The Literary Review’s annual Bad Sex Award can rarely have produced a clearer favourite.”

From Michiko Kakutani’s review in The New York Times: “Mr. Wolfe takes on the momentous subject of college life (college life? Yes, college life!), and in the course of a very long 676 pages serves up the revelation — yikes! — that students crave sex and beer, love to party, wear casual clothes and use four-letter words.”

The last word belongs to Michael Dirda: “But the book remains a (slightly disguised) hellfire tirade, a vision of students who belong in the hands of an angry God. And that God is named Tom Wolfe.”