0732 | Worship by the Book | D. A. Carson (ed.)
This is a very helpful book primarily because it has a revolving focus on how gathered worship is practiced by different Christian traditions. This therefore means that there’s something for…
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0731 | The Tale of Genji | Murasaki Shikibu
It’s saga time! Cue three (or maybe four) characters whose names you can remember! Cue football stadium of characters whose names you cannot! Cue love! Cue forbidden love! Cue death!…
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0730 | Lost Illusions | Honore de Balzac
The primary importance of Lost Illusions lies in exemplifying that it wasn’t only English readers who suffered from 19th century writers’ predeliction to create unnecessarily long novels via serialisation in…
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0729 | Empire of the Sun | J. G. Ballard
Once Ballard had got the likes of The Drowned World and in particular Crash out of his system, he could finally settle down and write a novel accessible to the…
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0728 | Creating Loving Attachments | Kim Golding and Daniel Hughes
If you’ve managed to make it to adulthood without suffering trauma, you should be thankful. A very large number of us did not have that privilege. As a result, each…
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0727 | The Body | Bill Bryson
Can’t go wrong with Bryson really. He’s readable, amusing, and in the case of his latest spate of fact-filled releases, very informative. Bryon’s Body fits the bill (no pun intended)…
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0726 | Native Son | Richard Wright
This, the first novel about the black community by the black community in the US, was a page-turner as relevant now as when it was written during WW2. It’s incredible…
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0725 | A Severed Head | Iris Murdoch
I’m a big fan of Murdoch but this one just didn’t come up to her usual standards. To be fair to her, what I should say is that it doesn’t…
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0724 | The Double | Jose Saramago
Having enjoyed Baltasar and Blimunda, I was looking forward to this, particularly as it wasn’t going to be dealing with too much obscure Portuguese history. I’m also fond of Kafka-esque…
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0723 | Exegetical Fallacies | D. A. Carson
Anyone whose job it is to interpret texts should be aware of the pitfalls of doing so. In this brief book, the scholar who went on to pen his masterly…
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0722 | Questioning Islam | Peter Townsend
Over the centuries during which thinkers have challenged Islamic claims, many thousands of authors have attempted to write books to help the average person respond to what Muslims say. It…
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0721 | Heartbreak Tango | Manuel Puig
Now here’s a Latin American novel that I would heartily recommend. Despite the fact that it deals with their endless fascination with what they term as ‘love’ (cf. Love in…
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0720 | The Underdogs | Mariano Azuela
If this didn’t influence Cormac McCarthy’s Border Trilogy, I’d be surprised. Azuela’s sparse prose and depiction of individuals caught up in events and landscape that they have little control over…
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0719 | A History of the Early Church | Hans Lietzmann
This is a rare four-volume set focussing on the history of the Christian church from the time of the apostles through to … well, when Lietzmann died in 1942 with…
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0718 | Fantômas | Marcel Allain & Pierre Souvestre
Every now and then on the 1001 Books list, a novel comes along which is a complete walk in the park, takes absolutely no effort to read and is over…
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0717 | Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere | Jan Morris
A very, very long time ago, I read a trilogy by a man name James Morris, the sublime Pax Britannica. It wasn’t until many years later that I realised the…
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0716 | Seeing Islam as Others Saw It | Robert Hoyland
What Hoyland has tackled here is no less than a complete literary survey of any non-Islamic writing that refers to Islam between its 630 AD emergence and 780 when it…
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0715 | Stick and Rudder | Wolfgang Langewiesche
I’ve always been fascintated by flying and, since building myself a computer that can cope with it, I’ve been using a flight simulator to teach myself how to fly. Stick…
