Cassie McCullough

isn't it?

When I think of what detail has meant to me in the last few years of reading, I think of Melissa Harrison's All Among the Barley, which describes rural England in the 30s and just this incredible sense of

season and nature and animals and insects and crops and just this incredibly beautiful detail.

Also, Richard Flanagan's latest book, which I can't even remember the name of it just off the top of my head.

I only read it about two weeks ago, but he has some beautiful detail.

But there can sometimes just be too much detail.

Like sometimes I'm like, come on, get on with this damn story.

I'm sick of hearing all this sort of accretion of atmosphere or...

Or locale.

Kate, you remember me raving on about that Patrick Gale book a year or two ago and his level of detail and I was complaining about how, I don't know, they were arriving at some house in the countryside and we had everything described to us about the building and the extension and where the stairs had been placed and it was just too much, for God's sake.

Get on with it.

So true.

Okay.

So maybe nature in detail is something that I can also bear.

And Tom Stoppard being the playwright of

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead back from the late 60s right through to Arcadia which was you know I think it was in the 90s or something these great big plays really sort of beginning of a certain wave in theatre and I suppose theatre buffs will know exactly what it is I don't have a name for it but yeah a real humour and a kind of invitation into some of the bigger ideas that are around.

The American writer Don DeLillo has written 17 novels and won many awards.

He's also a playwright, a screenwriter and essayist.

He's one of those big names in writing.

Yeah, I've got a sense of guilt about Don DeLillo because someone gave me one of his books for Christmas once and it was so enormous I never read it and I've always felt a little bit bad about him when I think of his name.