0701 | Moon Palace | Paul Auster
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…
0699 | Pachinko | Min Jin Lee
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…
0693 | Architecture Transformed | Cervin Robinson & Joel Herschman
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,…
0684 | The Heat of the Day | Elizabeth Bowen
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…
0681 | Crash | J G Ballard
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…
0676 | The Moor’s Last Sigh | Salman Rushdie
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…
0674 | The House of Doctor Dee | Peter Ackroyd
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…
0673 | Self-Condemned | Wyndham Lewis
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…
0672 | The Midnight Examiner | William Kotzwinkle
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…
0671 | Platform | Michel Houellebecq
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…
0666 | The Labyrinth of Solitude | Octavio Paz
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…
0652 | The Talk of the Town | Ardal O’Hanlon
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…
0648 | The Romantics | Pankaj Mishra
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…
0642 |The Book of Disquiet | Fernando Pessoa
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…
0641 | Nightwood | Djuna Barnes
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…
0639 | City of God | E. L. Doctorow
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…
0636 | Ada | Vladimir Nabokov
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…
0630 | The Holder of the World | Bharati Mukherjee
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…