0663 | Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids | Kenzaburo Oe
Very poignant. Very raw. A booked that rocked Japan when published just 13 years after the Japanese surrender in 1945. This is Japan’s Lord of the Flies with important exceptions:…
0662 | Paradise of the Blind | Duong Thu Huong
I thought this was going to be really good. It was the first novel translated from Vietnamese to English even though it was only published in 1988. That says a…
0661 | The Man Without Qualities | Robert Musil
This unfinished tome of a book is an extremely strange one to experience. Written in a very Magic-Mountain-like way, we find ourselves party to the life of Ulrich, a minor…
0660 | The War of the End of the World | Mario Vargas Llosa
A very good long read which has all the intensity of the most roasted Brazilian coffee you can imagine. There’s a lot of conflict here so steer clear if you’re…
0659 | Reasons to Live | Amy Hempel
A book of short stories that are very easy to read and very engaging. I would probably read this again if I came across it again. Sadly, I had no…
0658 | The Left-Handed Woman | Peter Handke
A strange novel that faded from my memory within a few days of reading it. My third short novel in a row and, like the others, it runs out of…
0657 | Miss Lonelyhearts | Nathanael West
A tiny novella which reminded me of The Postman Always Rings Twice or pretty much anything by Raymond Chandler. The protagonist hides behind the pseudonym Miss Lonelyhearts as he writes…
0656 | The Pigeon | Patrick Suskind
This is a little slip of a book and quite why it should make the 1001 Books list at all is a mystery to me. There’s nothing wrong with it,…
0655 | Sentimental Education | Gustave Flaubert
The story of youth, this is a great example of how someone acts when they grow up simply with the morality given to them by the society they emerge from….
0654 | The Museum of Unconditional Surrender | Dubravka Ugresic
I can see how this book is important. It appears to be mostly autobiographical and shares memories of a woman which coalesce around the Balkan War and exile from. The…
0653 | Everything You Need | A. L. Kennedy
This one really got me. Maybe it was because I was also reading the abonimable In Search of Klingsor at the time, a novel that would make any other author…
0652 | The Talk of the Town | Ardal O’Hanlon
Had I not read Angela’s Ashes then this would have been unique and would have totally captivated me. But seeing as this was published just three years after Ashes, I…
0651 | In Search of Klingsor | Jorge Volpi
On the flyleaf of my edition, it says that this has been compared to The Name of the Rose. Either the person who wrote this has never read The Name…
0650 | One, No One and One Hundred Thousand | Luigi Pirandello
Started out a bit Kafka-esque but then didn’t really go anywhere. Maybe that’s the point. It took Pirandello 15 years to write it which equates to just over 10 pages…
0649 | A Tale of Love and Darkness | Amos Oz
This moving autobiographical tale of Oz’s childhood is fascinating in that it gives a child’s view of the 1948 establishment of the state of Israel and what it was like…
0648 | The Romantics | Pankaj Mishra
This one was a bit tedious to be honest. Samar, a young Indian man falls in with a bunch of foreigners in Banares who are exploring the esoteric orient. They…
0647 | Labyrinths | Jorge Luis Borges
When you read, you bring something of yourself to the book so that you can interpret what you’re being told according to your previous reading, your life experience and your…
0646 | 10:04 | Ben Lerner
Life’s too short to figure out books like Lerner’s. It’s not hard to read. It’s not actually anything except an attempt by a man to show us he understands the…