A book that is good, and a book that is shit.

So: picaresque tales are big at the moment. And I've read two in about a week, and it's unlikely that the Guardian will pay me to review them, so I might as well do it here.

Okay. One's called Bruce Lee And Me, and the other's called American Shaolin. They're thematically quite similar - author feels like he's missing some fundamental component of masculinity, goes to kungfu lessons, goes to Shaolin temple, has adventures - but their approaches couldn't be more different. One is brilliant, and one is awful.

Awful first: Bruce Lee And Me is all about its author. At the start, he tells us how he decided to train in martial arts - his publisher told him to. From then on, he moans about training, gets schooled by sixty-year-olds, completely wimps out of his plan to try and get a black belt, projects his own values and morals onto absolutely everything he sees and routinely segues off into little diatribes about marijuana, babies or films he's seen recently. Possibly this is because he's 48, and set in his ways. I don't really give a fuck.

By contrast, American Shaolin is sparkly and brilliant. It describes the author's experiences in Shaolin in 1993, when he author was 21 - which makes him much more willing to examine his own experiences, learn from other people's philosophies and generally not act like a prick. He speaks fluent Mandarin, so his chats with the monks have infinitely more depth than the superficial, borderline-insulting chats that the Bruce Lee and Me bloke dredges up. He's got a genuine interest in China, shown by the historical and economic lessons deftly sewn into the text. And he's a very funny writer.

Also, he starts the book with my favourite ever Neal Stephenson quote, which tells you all you need to know about male psychology - 'Until a man is twenty-five, he thinks that, under the right circumstances he could be the baddest motherfucker in the world.' - and he beats a load of sanda champions up.

Excellent.