0010 | Far From the Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
REVIEW: So pleased that this was a delightful read. I’d read Tess of the D’Urbervilles many years ago and found it flowery, overlong and downright depressing. So, it was nice…
0009 | The Glass Bead Game – Herman Hesse
I was lent this by a colleague at work and laboured at it for a few weeks. REVIEW: Boy this was tough. Don’t get me wrong. Despite Hesse’s love for…
0008 | Breakfast of Champions – Kurt Vonnegut
REVIEW: Well it started out okay with some of Vonnegut’s witty aphorisms causing me to laugh out loud on the bus. But as the book went on, and particularly as…
0007 | Crome Yellow – Aldous Huxley
I read this in 69 daily installments care of dailylit.com – a wonderful idea of a website. REVIEW: Huxley had a masterful vocabulary and he uses it to full effect…
0006 | Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
REVIEW: I actually listened to the public domain audio version of this available at www.librivox.com Dark is the right word for this book. On every level I found it depressing…
0005 | Survival in the Killing Fields – Haing Ngor
REVIEW: Chilling, engaging, honest and tragic from beginning to end. Haing Ngor’s life couldn’t have been imagined and written as fiction if someone had sat down and tried to make…
0004 | Cannery Row – John Steinbeck
I actually downloaded a copy of this and listened to it over 4 hours. Beautifully read by Jerry Farmer in a great American drawl. REVIEW: The characters were magical and…
0003 | Cancer Ward – Alexandr Solzhenitsyn
REVIEW I started this wondering where the novel was going to come from. Then it crept up and hit me with such force that I was left reeling for the…
0002 | Staying On – Paul Scott
Read this while travelling around SE Asia. Made me want to take off back to India. Also made me wonder at the life my grandmother had prior to leaving India…
0001 | Disgrace – J. M. Coetzee
Read this with Sheena while travelling around SE Asia. Never read a book about S. Africa so it was an insight simply from that point of view. A S. African…