STEVE JOBS
Walter Isaacson
£25, Little, Brown

“When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like, ‘If you live each day as if it was your last, some day you’ll most certainly be right’. It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself, ‘If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been, ‘No’, for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.” These are the words of Apple head honcho and tech god Steve Jobs in 2005 when he addressed students at California’s Stanford University. He wasn’t just talking to them, of course; he was talking to himself because at this point he had already been diagnosed with the terminal pancreatic cancer that eventually killed him on October 5, 2011.

As you’d expect when someone of Jobs’ stature dies, there’s a country-mile queue of biographers ready to pen their version of his big-noise life, but whatever comes in the next months and years few will be as exhaustively researched as Walter Isaacson’s simply-titled tome. Amidst the (count ’em) 652 pages, there’s a fair amount of anecdotage about Jobs, which considering he was fiercely private is no mean feat. We learn that when he moved house early in his married life with wife Laurene Powell, Jobs found it difficult to furnish their new home because he wanted everything to be so perfect. “We spoke about furniture in theory for eight years,” Powell admits. We see the same pernickety attention to detail after his liver transplant when he rejected five different oxygen masks on the grounds of their poor design. All of which made for not the easiest-going person in the world, but does provide an enthralling insight to the mind of a visionary innovator. My favourite Jobs quote doesn’t make the cut here due to deadline constraints. They were his final words as retold in his sister’s eulogy: “OH WOW. OH WOW. OH WOW.” Don’t we all want to go like that?

WHAT AM I STILL DOING HERE?
Roger Lewis
£20, Coronet

Someone who probably doesn’t have an oh-wow-oh-wow-oh-wow approach to life is the Welsh journalist and biographer Roger Lewis. Let’s face it, the title gives more than a subtle hint that this isn’t some positive, life-affirming self-help book. When you consider that his previous literary outing was entitled Seasonal Suicide Notes a sunny disposition is never going to be the game plan. Unsurprisingly, grumpy-old-man ranting is Lewis’s stock-in-trade. And he does the pro-class curmudgeon schtick ever so well.

His gripes are myriad and indiscriminate. Wales apparently is “woeful” with “nothing of beauty on view” and us Welshmen have “black spittle pouring from the corners of [our] mouths”, which are clearly attempts at inflammatory home country ire-stoking. He can be genuinely funny, though: “Angela Rippon was such a tremendous bore on The One Show I had to phone up Gyles [Brandreth] and ask him to shoot her dead. ‘You are funny,’ he said – which is what Gyles would say to Fred West, if he’d gone along to Cromwell Road for The One Show to discuss laying a patio.” Hysterical hack hyperbole in the manner of an AA Gill, a Liz Jones or a Charlie Brooker – all essentially journalistic constructs that specialise in faux middle-class, moany anger – is the name of the aim here which will either raise a chuckle or bring on the bile. Whichever, it will certainly provoke a reaction.

HOW I ESCAPED MY CERTAIN FATE
Stewart Lee
£8.99, Faber & Faber

Despite being a comedian, Stewart Lee is also more than a bit of a curmudgeon, but then funny folk, as the hoary, old cliché goes, are prone to their dark demons. Put it this way: I’ve interviewed Lee three times and his demeanour on each occasion has been that of a hunched-shouldered, can’t-be-bothered-to-make-eye-contact, dyed-in-the-wool misery. Even though me and him have previous, I have nothing but praise for How I Escaped My Certain Fate.

But what is it exactly? A memoir? A how-to comedy manual? In truth, it’s a combination of the two. It’s built around the transcripts of three shows from the past decade that established Lee, in a television poll, as the “41st best stand-up ever” (something that became the title of one of his routines). The book begins with Lee declaring, “I never wanted to be a comedian… I wanted to be a writer”, and his literary ambitions make all the difference here. What might have been a shameless grab at the lucrative seasonal book market becomes by turns a masterclass in gag-crafting, a history of contemporary British comedy, a treatise on the relationship between creativity and social interaction, as well as, a remarkably moving autobiography. By far and away the best of the bunch of books by comedians currently crowding the Christmas bestseller lists.

Oh wow, oh wow, oh wow! Jason Jones has gone all non-fictional