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Arukiyomi

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Arukiyomi
Walk and read. Live and learn.

mediocre books

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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non-fiction

0693 | Architecture Transformed | Cervin Robinson & Joel Herschman

Completed11 April, 202028 September, 2020

I’m trying somehow to reconcile my love of architectural photography with the demands of the MA in Photography that I’m currently studying. I’m in the first year of three and,…

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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

0676 | The Moor’s Last Sigh | Salman Rushdie

Completed4 July, 201915 August, 2020

Started out alright but Rushdie can’t seem to just sit still and be a good boy. No sooner have you got settled then he’s up and off on some mad…

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fiction

0674 | The House of Doctor Dee | Peter Ackroyd

Completed22 June, 201915 August, 2020

As with all things Ackroyd, this novel suffers from not only an obsession with London now, but, as if that wasn’t ethnocentric enough, London then. Even though it’s been 8…

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fiction

0673 | Self-Condemned | Wyndham Lewis

Completed21 June, 201911 October, 2020

To a certain extent autobiographical, this again, as with The Driver’s Seat, is about someone making their own decisions. This resonated with me as Professor Rene Harding resigns from his…

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fiction

0672 | The Midnight Examiner | William Kotzwinkle

Completed21 June, 201911 July, 2020

Kotwinkle is probably more famous for writing E.T., not this, and it’s hard to see why this needs to be read by anyone before they die. This is a shame…

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fiction

0671 | Platform | Michel Houellebecq

Completed18 June, 20195 July, 2020

A very strange novel not least because it must be one of the only novels that takes place in the context of the tourism industry. However, lest that conjure up…

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non-fiction

0666 | The Labyrinth of Solitude | Octavio Paz

Completed29 May, 20195 July, 2020

This is for die-hard fans of literature really. Very philosophical, this collection of essays wasn’t my cup of tea at all despite whatever place it may hold in Latin America…

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fiction

0652 | The Talk of the Town | Ardal O’Hanlon

Completed4 April, 201923 March, 2020

Had I not read Angela’s Ashes then this would have been unique and would have totally captivated me. But seeing as this was published just three years after Ashes, I…

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fiction

0648 | The Romantics | Pankaj Mishra

Completed22 March, 201922 March, 2020

This one was a bit tedious to be honest. Samar, a young Indian man falls in with a bunch of foreigners in Banares who are exploring the esoteric orient. They…

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fiction

0642 |The Book of Disquiet | Fernando Pessoa

Completed2 March, 201913 November, 2019

Less than halfway through his bundle of tedium, Pessoa says Let the plotless novel come to an end If only … Instead, Pessoa moans on and on for another half…

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fiction

0641 | Nightwood | Djuna Barnes

Completed1 March, 201913 November, 2019

No clue why this is regarded as some kind of seminal work in queer literature. It’s certainly queer, but not in the way the gushing Winterson considers it in her…

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fiction

0639 | City of God | E. L. Doctorow

Completed13 February, 20195 April, 2020

If you’re after a pacy novel with a great storyline and memorable characters that zips you from A to B in a rush of finely written prose, you’ll need to…

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fiction

0636 | Ada | Vladimir Nabokov

Completed15 January, 201911 August, 2019

This was very, very hard going. Nabokov is not an easy man to keep up with when he puts all the power of his mind into something, and he just…

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fiction

0630 | The Holder of the World | Bharati Mukherjee

Completed17 December, 20189 February, 2019

Had I not been held captive in a stifling, airless bedroom of a beach bungalow in Zanzibar by the worst sunburn I’ve ever had in my life AND a foot…

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