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Arukiyomi

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Arukiyomi
Walk and read. Live and learn.

italy

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

0650 | One, No One and One Hundred Thousand | Luigi Pirandello

Completed1 April, 201922 March, 2020

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…

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fiction

0612 | Portrait of a Lady | Henry James

Completed6 August, 20188 September, 2018

Many regard Portrait as James’ greatest novel. What they mean by this, of course, is that it’s the easiest to read. Written before James went off on the subordinate clause…

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fiction

0605 | Daniel Deronda | George Eliot

Completed28 April, 20189 August, 2018

So often Eliot is held up as the paragon of 19th century English prose. Here is yet another novel to demonstrate why I simply cannot afford her the accolades that…

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fiction

0592 | Cause for Alarm | Eric Ambler

Completed1 December, 201730 December, 2017

Dear me, this hasn’t aged well at all, and I couldn’t wait to get to the end of this one. According to Wikipedia, Ambler is known for his thrillers. I…

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fiction

0581 | He Knew he was Right | Anthony Trollope

Completed14 June, 201729 July, 2017

Trollope’s story of a marriage and a life destroyed by the jealousy of a husband could have been a vivid portrayal of how delicately married life can be balanced. Instead,…

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fiction

0574 | Against the Day | Thomas Pynchon

Completed24 February, 201716 June, 2017

Absolutely pointless and not worth anyone’s time, this is a novel by a man entirely self-absorbed. It says nothing about any particular era, has no characters more three dimensional than…

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fiction

0569 | On the Eve | Ivan Turgenev

Completed1 December, 201616 June, 2017

So, this is one of those novels for which an understanding of the historical context is essential for a full appreciation of its significance. The era is the early 1850s…

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fiction

0532 | The Marble Faun | Nathaniel Hawthorne

Completed24 February, 20165 June, 2016

This was a grind. I really don’t have much time for Hawthorne and this was a bad Hawthorne. On the surface, this is about a group of USAnian young people who spend time in…

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fiction

0530 | The Unfortunate Traveller | Thomas Nashe

Completed18 February, 201623 April, 2016

Here’s a funny old book. Not very long, for which I am thankful, and possibly the only Tudor ‘novel’ on the 1001 list, for which I am also thankful. It’s…

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fiction

0526 | Tender is the Night | F. Scott Fitzgerald

Completed22 January, 201624 March, 2016

A lot more readable than The Great Gatsby which I read many years before Arukiyomi was born, this was a decent enough novel. I found that as long as I…

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fiction

0508 | A Visit from the Goon Squad | Jennifer Egan

Completed1 August, 2015

This was not at all what I expected from the title. In fact, even having finished it, I really have no clue as to why it is called this at…

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fiction

0491 | The Good Soldier | Ford Madox Ford

Completed30 April, 20152 April, 2016

What I enjoyed about this most of all was the narrator and the way he tells the story. As the novel opens, you really have no idea what is coming…

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fiction

0490 | The Wings of the Dove | Henry James

Completed28 April, 2015

The only James I’d read prior to this was the novella The Turn of the Screw which I didn’t blog at the time. It did little to prepare me for…

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fiction

0474 | ADMT XI: Temporary Kings | Anthony Powell

Completed12 December, 2014

Nearly done and the penultimate volume of Powell’s panoply was quite a good read. Considering the parallels with Proust, it was inevitable that at some point, we end up in…

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fiction

0460 | The Count of Monte Christo | Alexander Dumas

Completed29 July, 2014

Wow! What a romper stomper this was. Pretty much from the very first page you’re thrown into a torrent of narrative that affords you barely enough time to attempt to…

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fiction

0452 | Fear of Flying | Erica Jong

Completed26 May, 2014

This book took me very much by surprise. There were mixed reviews online but I thought it was a very bold work of genius. When you consider that this was…

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