Sorry to be so long with this review; I am still not sure where to begin. I'd first recommend that the first story or two be read twice, in order to get a good feel for the dialect. Once you reach a suitable comfort level with the scottish dialect, you will probably also be accustomed to the ever-present profanity. (Not that I was particularly offended, but I rarely find this level of profanity in anything I've read, let alone anything worthwhile.) Throughout the book, the characters seem to come from the near-bottom of working class society, and are purposely drawn with few if any redeeming virtues. The stories are compelling, sometimes mesmerizing. They draw you in, and hold you, as if you were watching a train wreck, or a house fire. As suggested by the title, most stories here are reprints, and are bitter, jaundiced stories in which the protagonist rarely finds escape from his situation, or redemption either in the story or the reader's perceptions. The only exception to this is the last story,I Am Miami, the only previously unpublished offering included here. One gets the impression that having achieved some modicum of success, the author has become a bit less cynical and hence more sympathetic with his creations. I give the book three stars because I enjoyed parts of it, and elsewhere it compelled me to go on. It is not a book you could casually recommend to anyone whose tastes you were not familiar with, but I'm sure we all know someone (not your mother) who might enjoy it. ( )

I can't really classify this as a review as I've only finished the first story in the book. I want to get through it, I have a fair amount of experience both reading and listening to various English dialects, but this is hard to get through. It really is like reading in another language and I have to continually stop and process sentences. I haven't read any other Irvine Welsh, and I haven't seen Trainspotting in years (although I did like it). Once I finish this semester I will plow through this and write a real review!

Not a book I could realistically recommend to anyone. I opt to give it two stars because it had moments I enjoyed, but unfortunately they were few and far between.

I came at this collection of short stories having neither read any of his previous material nor seen any of the resultant film adaptations. I did not know what to expect, but was hopeful that I would enjoy this as something of a 'taste test' of Welsh's work. Alas, I took a bitter bite.

I was immediately hit with the thick Scottish brogue which made it excessively difficult to slog through even a few pages of the text. I have some background with Ireland's own interpretation of the English language, so I was hardly a remedial student, but even then I not-infrequently had to re-read a passage. And while that itself isn't necessarily a problem, I object to how frequently it occurred and to what little payoff. Oh, I see, the character is talking about the same things he was talking about for the previous six pages, hooray! It was a challenge each time I picked up this book to summon the will to finish.

Save the first and last stories, and a slight twist to one in the middle, the characters all came off as cookie-cutter druggie youth, with little attention to character development. The first story is quite funny, the last features decent plot without the plodding of the priors, but overall the pieces blur together with little payoff.

Not terribly important, but there were several apparent typos, though because I have a pre-release version of the book I assume these have been found and fixed.

In summation, I think this book may be enjoyed by existing fans of the author, but the rest of us should probably steer clear. ( )

The other reviews covered this pretty well. Did you think that Trainspotting was ruined by the few moments of humanity? Have you wondered how many times you can use the c-word in a story? How do you feel about heroin? I liked Trainspotting reasonably well and then I tried something else of his--I can't remember--and was pretty underwhelmed. Welsh no doubt has his hard core fans and this is for them.

I didn't like Trainspotting. It was ok, I just didn't get into it. At the time, not knowing that it was based on a book, I thought it would have been better as a book, that prose would have been a better medium in which to really flesh out the characters and capture all the nuances of the situations.

Well this book, Reheated Cabbage, is exactly what I thought Trainspotting had the potential to be. It is witty, tragic, nuanced, depraved, depressing, insightful, and brilliant. The characters, thrown into mostly unexceptional circumstances, are so well drawn out that the reader feels he knows each one personally, knows each character's entire life story before even picking up the book. And to say the stories' circumstances are unexceptional, is not to say they are boring or uninteresting. In fact it's the exact opposite. The stories are mostly based around fairly ordinary situations with just enough of wist to make them different from the everyday. And Welsh writes them in such a way as to make them extraordinary.

Irvine Welsh is a true master of his craft and RC is a perfect example of his brilliance. The stories in RC are, in many ways, reminiscent of those of Raymond Carver and Ernest Hemingway. Indeed, one can almost envision Welsh as Carver or Hemingway reincarnated as a modern day, working class Scotsman.

The only reason it rates 4.5 out of 5 stars is that the final story, the novella I Am Miami, is something of a let down. It is brilliant in its own right and quite probably worthy of 5 stars alone, but having already torn through the previous shorter, more rapidly-paced stories, stories thick with Scottish brogue and filthy with the stench of realism, I Am Miami is slow and more detached, more proper in a way. It's a departure that's unexpected and can make the gears grind to a halt. Had the stories been rearranged, with I Am Miami among the first few, and perhaps with the stories with the heaviest brogue toward the end, it would almost certainly rate the full 5 stars. ( )