0688 | Invisible Cities | Italo Calvino
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…
0686 | Inside Mr Enderby | Anthony Burgess
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…
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…
0612 | Portrait of a Lady | Henry James
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…
0605 | Daniel Deronda | George Eliot
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…
0592 | Cause for Alarm | Eric Ambler
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…
0581 | He Knew he was Right | Anthony Trollope
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,…
0574 | Against the Day | Thomas Pynchon
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…
0569 | On the Eve | Ivan Turgenev
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…
0532 | The Marble Faun | Nathaniel Hawthorne
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…
0530 | The Unfortunate Traveller | Thomas Nashe
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…
0526 | Tender is the Night | F. Scott Fitzgerald
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…
0508 | A Visit from the Goon Squad | Jennifer Egan
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…
0491 | The Good Soldier | Ford Madox Ford
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…
0490 | The Wings of the Dove | Henry James
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…
0474 | ADMT XI: Temporary Kings | Anthony Powell
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…
0460 | The Count of Monte Christo | Alexander Dumas
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…
0452 | Fear of Flying | Erica Jong
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…