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Arukiyomi

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Arukiyomi
Walk and read. Live and learn.

fiction

0710 | Mother | Maxim Gorky
fiction

0710 | Mother | Maxim Gorky

Completed23 December, 202013 January, 2021

This reads like a cross between Dr Zhivago and the last part of The Jungle. It’s packed full of characters who, in true Russian fashion, each have seven names they…

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fiction

0705 | Baltasar and Blimunda | Jose Saramago

Completed17 October, 202028 December, 2020

The last effort from Portugal I endeavoured to read through was the utterly futile Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa. It is with great thankfulness that I can report Saramago…

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0703 | No One Writes to the Colonel | Gabriel Garcia Marquez
fiction

0703 | No One Writes to the Colonel | Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Completed17 October, 202012 January, 2021

A book of short stories which is far, far more satisfying than ploughing your way through the tedium that is One Hundred Years of Solitude. What Garcia Marquez has done…

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fiction

0704 | The Circle | Dave Eggers

Completed8 October, 202028 December, 2020

Whoever reviewed this for The Guardian said it was “prescient, important and very funny.” Two out of three ain’t bad, I suppose; there are precious few laughs to be had…

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fiction

0701 | Moon Palace | Paul Auster

Completed20 August, 202023 December, 2020

Again, another Auster, and the only question you’re left with is why he bothered writing it. Composing this review by copying and pasting chunks of my review of The New…

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fiction

0699 | Pachinko | Min Jin Lee

Completed21 July, 202020 December, 2020

My word this is a mess of a book. It’s a mess of a story, it’s a mess of characters, and most shockingly for me, it’s a literal mess: it…

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fiction

0698 | Possession | A. S. Byatt

Completed1 July, 202019 December, 2020

Oh boy, it seems Virgin in the Garden wasn’t large enough of a stage for Byatt to perform her one-woman show of intellectual capacity. 12 years later, she’s back with…

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fiction

0696 | Amongst Women | John McGahern

Completed15 May, 202029 November, 2020

Lyrically written as so many Irish novels are, this centres around the inscrutable patriarch of a rural family. Moran rules his family with an iron fist. He’s an old freedom…

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fiction

0695 | The Sound and the Fury | William Faulkner

Completed28 April, 202027 November, 2020

That said, no one should be harsh on you if you reach the end and still aren’t quite sure what just happened.In fact, Faulkner admitted as such at least obliquely…

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fiction

0694 | Clear Light of Day | Anita Desai

Completed16 April, 20204 October, 2020

Although this was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, I couldn’t quite see where this was going or the point of it all. I kept expecting things to happen or the…

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fiction

0692 | The Professor’s House | Willa Cather

Completed11 April, 202027 December, 2020

This is the moving story of a man reaching the end of himself. In many ways, it reminded me of Rosshalde. We have a man who has achieved much yet…

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fiction

0690 | Waiting for the Barbarians | J. M. Coetzee

Completed30 March, 202017 September, 2020

A clear indictment of all nations built on colonial ambition but more broadly the propensity within all of us to characterise and brutalise The Other, Coetzee’s novel pulls no punches….

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fiction

0688 | Invisible Cities | Italo Calvino

Completed29 March, 20201 September, 2020

Such a little book for so much metaphor. Calvino writes prose that, on the surface of it, is deceptively simple. It’s a lot easier to read than much of Borges…

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fiction

0686 | Inside Mr Enderby | Anthony Burgess

Completed21 March, 202028 August, 2020

Enderby is a poet who parps a lot. He’s basically the early British prototype for Ignatius J. Reilly. He has no love except that of poetry which he composes on…

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fiction

0684 | The Heat of the Day | Elizabeth Bowen

Completed17 February, 202022 August, 2020

On the inside cover of this, it says, “The texture of her prose has a gossamer exquisiteness…” Well, here’s an example of what passed for gossamer in the age of…

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fiction

0681 | Crash | J G Ballard

Completed17 November, 201920 August, 2020

Even as I placed my penis in his rectum Vaughan had known he would try to kill me, in a final display of his casual love for me. Crash, page…

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fiction

0680 | Family Matters | Rohinton Mistry

Completed24 September, 201920 August, 2020

Not a patch on A Fine Balance, this starts out alright with a family fighting to survive on the fine margins of lower-middle class Indian life. However, once things settle…

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fiction

0679 | Song of Solomon | Toni Morrison

Completed6 August, 201916 August, 2020

Very readable for a Morrison so that’s a bonus for a start, even though it does bear her trademark style. If you’ve not read her before, this is a great…

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