A caveat: if we're going dark, I'd be a supervillain in Ed Brubaker's Sleeper. Rock a suit and a domino mask, commit crimes for fun and profit, and share origin stories over drinks in a sleazy bar. Shortened life expectancy aside, it'd be a blast.

I'd love to live in a world with superheroes, but a fun world. Think The Incredibles, rather than Watchmen.

Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis. Or any other English comic novel from the 30s through the 50s featuring country houses, mild class conflict, and slapstick.

"any version of London where you can be a writer and/or a cartoonist and still live in that building is great by me."

I probably wouldn't last five minutes in an Ellroy novel (or Chandler, or Hammett for that matter) but I'd love to visit.

Post-live chat summing up comment
Just want to say thanks for covering this. I read the book about a year and a half ago on recommendations in the AVC comments, and it was such an brutal, lyrical, layered, intense work of literature, especially to read on one's own. There was so much stuff within the text that I…

"John Travolta's wildly successful post-comeback crusade to become synonymous with crap" is a line for the ages. Or at least, the ages that remember Join Travolta's post-comeback career.

It's also full of extremely un-PC humour, by the standards of today - see the scene where Matthau takes the Japanese delegation round the control centre, insulting them all the way. Very much a time capsule film that way. The value of remaking it (especially with Tony "seizure-inducing" Scott at the helm) is…

Walter Hill's a pretty cool director - makes tough, lean action movies without any pretensions. He's like Don Siegel in that way. I think he gets short shrift for being a craftsman rather than an "auteur" - his films may not be high art, but everything they do, they do just right.

Very good point, Doy. It seems to chime with the third quotation at the front of the book, about the 300,000-year-old skull that had been scalped. Is McCarthy making a point about violence being an essential and permanent feature of the human condition? Even in the last chapter, when the old West is being cleared out…

I've seen a film that mbs hasn't? I feel a strange sense of achievement…

"no spin-offs or sequels"
When I saw this on TV years ago I vaguely remember it ending with a scene promising a sequel. Even at that young, crappy-film-accepting age, I knew there wasn't going to be one.

"We're yet to see a genuinely irredeemable character, though, are we? How about asking us to identify with someone completely indefensible."

Thanks, commenters!

Justifications
I think the most interesting component of series featuring an amoral protagonist is how they (and we) justify their actions. You're with Tony Soprano or Vic Mackey for much, much longer than a film, and where you would happily see them get their comeuppance inside two hours, when you've watched them…

I told myself I'd read through BM with a dictionary this time. But I still have no idea what a "thrapple" is.

I'd read a TV Club Classic on The Shield. I missed large chunks of the third and fourth seasons, so it would be good to go back and fill in those gaps. Plus, the whole sprawling money train storyline definitely needs a revisit.

The "burning bush" section
That passage is one of my favourite parts of the novel. In amongst all the carnage, those moments of lyricism where McCarthy describes the landscape and animals show nature as utterly beautiful, yet utterly pitiless. That description of the animals in the desert huddling around the tree with…

It's a nice bit of onomatopaeia. BAZOW!*

Do a deal for kicks and get rich quick?