0711 | Nothing to Envy | Barbara Demick
Barbara Demick has struck exactly the right tone in her classic description of life in North Korea. Granted, the book was written in 2009 so it’s a bit dated now,…
0706 | The Deep Things of God | Fred Sanders
The vast majority of us Christians aren’t as informed on the character of the God we worship as we should be. Neither are we adept at moving out of our…
0700 | No God But One: Allah or Jesus | Nabeel Qureshi
The strength of this book lies in its unique perspective. Very few books comparing Islam and Christianity are written by people who have been committed to both camps. If there…
0687 | Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy | Max Hastings
It’s hard to know where to start with the Vietnam War such was the lengthy prelude that the people of that nation were subjected to by the French and Japanese….
0685 | On Photography | Susan Sontag
There’s at least one photo project on every page of this classic work on photography and there’s good reason for that. Sontag writes eloquently and persuasively about the medium and…
0669 | The Engineer of Human Souls | Josef Skvorecky
If Iain Sinclair wants to know how to eradicate plot but nevertheless write a novel that is at once funny, poignant, moving, funny, sad and tragic, he should put down…
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:…
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…
0632 | A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man | James Joyce
Joyce is such a wordsmith, He’s so able, at any point, to spring off with a bound and run with words in such a way that you really have to…
0625 | Islands | Dan Sleigh
Absolutely fantastic book. Just one of those that you come across and know immediately that you’re going to end up buying someone a copy because you just want to share…
0619 | Americanah | Chimamanda Ngozi Aidichie
Recently added to the 1001 Books list in the new October 2018 edition, this title was worthy of its inclusion capturing, as it does, the state of race in a…
0608 | Gormenghast | Mervyn Peake
As I watched the protagonist ride off into the sunset at the close of the second part of Peake’s vastly underrated trilogy, I couldn’t help but think that he’d mixed…
0606 | The Soul of the Camera | David DuChemin
Picked this up from a fellow photographer at a photography event one evening and, were it not for the fact that I need to get up at 5am for work,…
0596 | The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night | Anonymous
Right, first off, if you’re going to read this, you should do it unabridged. Let’s face it, if you don’t, you’ve not read the 1001 nights but 648, or 385,…
0595 | Silk | Alessandro Baricco
This is a tiny jewel of a novel and, like a jewel, I felt that it deserves to be looked at for longer than it’s size perhaps might initially indicate….
0583 | The Radetzky March | Joseph Roth
A book filled with melancholy not only for the characters but the world in which they live, The Radetzky March is a carefully constructed memorial to a lost age. Roth…
0566 | Journey to the End of the Night | Louis-Ferdinand Céline
Here’s a novel powerful enough to suck the life out of Amazon’s entire self-help catalogue in seconds. In terms of sheer pessimistic cynicism of humanity, Céline’s Night is unparalleled with its tale…
0559 | The Life of Lazarillo de Tormes | Anonymous
What better way to follow a weighty picaresque novel that was incredibly influential with a very light one that is credited with inventing the genre itself. Someone, and we have…