A couple of months ago I wrote about books here. It was the time of the Hay Festival, which is like Glastonbury only quieter, more dusty and without Rolf Harris.

Jilly Cooper had hit out at the intellectual snobbery of it all. “There are two categories of writers,” she said at the time, “Jeffrey Archer and me, who long and long for a kind word in The Guardian, and the others who get all the kind words and long to be able to do what Jeffrey and I do.”

Wise words. But not wise enough, it seems, for the panel of judges who selected this year’s Man Booker prize shortlist.

Joint favourite to win is a book called Brick Lane by Monica Ali, which is centred on the letters exchanged between two sisters, one of whom lives in Bangladesh and one who came to London for an arranged marriage.

Now I haven’t read it, and I never will, but I think we can be fairly sure that neither of the sisters will have a torrid affair with an unsuitable rogue called Rupert.

So what of the other joint favourite? That’s from Margaret Atwood, who has got her, I suspect, voluminous knickers in a tangle over Monsanto and its GM food development. Oryx and Crake, her book, is unlikely to be a comedy.

It’s also worth mentioning Damon Galgut’s The Good Doctor, which is about a young medic who finds himself posted to a tribal homeland in South Africa. Is he dive-bombed by F-15 fighters? Is the Nimitz sunk? Don’t hold your breath.

I have just finished a book by Philip Roth, one of the most revered highbrow authors, and it was astonishing. It’s about the owner of a glove factory in New Jersey whose daughter came off the rails a bit.

I ploughed on through page after page of undeniably beautiful prose dying to know if he’d get his daughter back. But all I got was more and more agonising until it just stopped.

It’s almost as though Roth rang the publishers and asked: “How long would you like my next novel to be?” And when they said 250 pages, he said, “Oh good, I’ve finished”.

Before this, I read Gulag by Anne Applebaum, which was mainly a letter to other people who’ve written about the Soviet camps, saying they were all wrong. Wrong, do you hear.

But worst of all was Stupid White Men by the Stupid White Man himself, Michael Moore.

After the first chapter — an interesting account of how George Bush stole the presidency — it degenerated into an adolescent rant from a student bedsit, circa 1982. Thatcher, Thatcher, Thatcher. Big companies. Thatcher. Rainforests. Governments would rather spend their money on another bomber than education, and why do we fear black men when every bit of suffering in our lives has a Caucasian face attached to it?

He droned on and on and I couldn’t take anything he said seriously because in the introduction, before the eco-friendly, power-to-the-people garbage really started to splash onto the page, he criticised the British for privatising “formerly well-run public entities” — like the rail network.

What? British Rail? Well run? You stupid, fat, four-eyed, grinning, bearded imbecile. He even admitted that he dropped out of college because he couldn’t find anywhere to park. You should have gone on the train, if you love them so much.

I could heap scorn on Moore until hell freezes over — but back to my point. A book needs more than beautiful sentence construction, a left- wing take and wry observation. It needs, more than anything else, a story. With a story, you have the most powerful of emotions: hope.

You “hope” Clint Thrust manages to abseil from his Apache gunship successfully and that the third world war is averted. You “hope” that the heroine meets the hero on the bridge at midnight and they all live happily ever after. You “hope” that the dream to live in Provence works out.

Sure, I got plenty of hope from Philip Roth. I spent the entire time hoping the glove maker would get his daughter back, but it was dashed by the sudden appearance of the ISBN number.

In Stupid White Men, I hoped the author would fall out of a tall building, but that never happened either.

My wife reads books the size of Agas about women in beekeeper hats who spend 50 years in Peru looking for a lost bracelet. Man Booker books, in other words. Sometimes I snatch them away and ask: “What do you hope happens next?” and I always get the same answer: “Nothing really.”

She can take a year to read something, whereas I like a book that becomes more important in my life than life itself.

When I was in the middle of Red Storm Rising by Tom Clancy — which was not selected for the Man Booker shortlist — you could have taken my liver out and fed it to the dog. And I wouldn’t have noticed.

Which brings me to Yellow Dog, by Martin Amis. It’s awful, apparently. Reading it, said Tibor Fischer, the novelist, who reviewed it in The Daily Telegraph, was like your favourite uncle being caught masturbating in the school playground.

His views were shared by the Man Booker judges who have left it out of “the final six”. I bet it’s fabulous.