Writers and Guardian readers discuss the titles they have read over the last month. Join the conversation in the comments

I’ve been enjoying Contrapposto by Dave Eggers. The premise that love and art are the only things that make life worthwhile pulses beautifully through this novel and its two protagonists, spanning decades of their obsession with both, and each other. The tragedy is they are not sufficient alone for a relationship to survive to the exclusion of everything else (namely capitalism, which always has a place at the table), but they remain essential and enduring. Nowhere is this better evoked than here. Think John Williams’s Stoner but with art instead of literature and stuffed with more memorable characters.

The actor on which star he’d devour first on a lifeboat, why he prefers pigeons to dogs and how Trainspotting put the Scottish accent on the map

You’re stranded on a lifeboat with Ewan McGregor, Ewen Bremner, Jonny Lee Miller, Kevin McKidd, Peter Mullan, James Cosmo, Keith Allen and Irvine Welsh. Who do you eat first? DarkAnaemicI77
I suppose you have to think about who’s the healthiest and has looked after their body best. I reckon Ewan would be a wee bit too chewy, and Irvine a wee bit pickled. I’ll go for Kevin McKidd because he’s been out in LA for 20 years, eating good food.

Did you really not like Zippy the West Highland terrier who played Wee Jock in Hamish Macbeth? Campbell97

The Scottish author focuses on gun culture and generational conflict in this darkly satirical tale about a great power in decline

“Why expect unconditional love from somebody you’ve brought into a fucked, dying planet, who then has to sit around and watch you screw it up even more?” So muses twentysomething college dropout Luke Ayrton on his parental lineage as he works the Las Vegas Strip, “comping girls for clubs” in Sin City. His job is to trawl the “plankton” of bacherlorette parties in order to lure the “whales” – rich men willing to spend to try to impress young women.

“In this game your sociology skills sharpened,” it’s observed, but beyond the seedy side hustle lie weightier concerns: the matter of his family legacy. Electronic dance music aficionado and aspiring writer Luke is estranged from his Maga-positive Mom and Dad, and now lives with grandparents George and Molly, affluent boomers with a countercultural past.

Three decades after he channelled his heroin addiction into the cult classic Trainspotting, the Scottish author has discovered the joys of yoga, breathwork and standing desks. But is he quite as ‘Zen’ as he claims?

By rights, Irvine Welsh ought to be photographed somewhere gritty, looking grumpy, he says: “That’s the brand.” Beside a graffitied wall or at the docks, with a beanie pulled low, and definitely not smiling. But here he is, clear-skinned and wholesome in shorts and a T-shirt, drinking tea and – it’s hard to think of anything more off-brand – talking about the health benefits of yoga. Given his reputation for having lived in the worlds his books portray, he should or could look a lot worse. He guffaws at this, eyes a delighted blue, and repeats the phrase as if he’s found a new personal tagline: “Could look a lot worse!”

Over the three decades since his cult debut, Trainspotting, was published in 1993, Welsh’s fiction has explored with humour the darker side of life. Drugs, clubs, alcohol, violence … often alongside psychological or social deprivation. Despite being 17 novels and four short-story collections into his career, selling more than 6m books globally, he remains best known for his first. It achieved, he says, “what most writers want to achieve in a lifetime – the big zeitgeist book that goes into the culture”.

Production based on 1993 novel opens at Theatre Royal Haymarket in London in July, with original songs co-written by the author

It has been a book, a play and a film. It has also spawned three sequels, a prequel and two soundtrack albums. Now, Irvine Welsh’s 1993 debut novel Trainspotting is to find new life as a musical.

Opening at the Theatre Royal Haymarket in London in July, Trainspotting the Musical will be adapted by the author with an original set of songs, plus others that were used in Danny Boyle’s celebrated film.

The author discusses his writing, the movies it created and his own youth, but not all the interviewees in this documentary are quite so gripping

Here, in addition to Paul Sng’s recent documentary about Irvine Welsh, is another one; it is watchable enough, though with less original interview material. The extended footage of Welsh in conversation is certainly engaging, as he discusses his writing and the movies it created, and his own youth in Edinburgh.

Some of the rest of the interviewees aren’t quite so gripping, however, and the film is padded out with a fair bit of redundant anecdotage from people on the subject of getting hilariously wasted in Irvine’s company — or at least his approximate vicinity. As for one 90s ladmag-style story about Irvine doing some kind of Marquis de Sade-themed photoshoot in Ibiza’s Manumission club involving prising apart young women’s buttocks for the camera … well maybe you had to be there.

‘I spent the 90s with Pam – clubbing and partying in the way those times demanded. What I saw was a truly groundbreaking artist, and a life marked by independence, courage and kindness’

• Pam Hogg, fashion designer with a rock’n’roll spirit, dies at 66 – news
• Pam Hogg – obituary

There are people who live life to the full, then there’s Pamela Hogg. Pam’s tenure on this earth is a trawl through just about every significant cultural and creative moment in the UK over the last 30-odd years. One of our most groundbreaking artists, Pam was a colourist of Warholian proportions, creating art to be hung on the body rather than the walls of a gallery. She was a punk who provocatively mashed up gender and sexual stereotypes. Fashion was the art form that freed her imagination, and her success was due to her talent and drive being greater than her disdain of the conformist industry and the gatekeepers surrounding it.

I sat in St Joseph’s hospice in London by her unconscious but serenely beautiful figure – as if she’d made her exit into another work of art – telling her that her jam-packed life was characterised by creativity, independence, courage and kindness. “Hoggy, you left absolutely nothing on the table.”