0697 | The Madness of Crowds | Douglas Murray
Boy, I needed this. A birthday present from my sister that really hit the spot. Murray is a gay Spectator magazine columnist so not exactly the kind of writer I…
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0696 | Amongst Women | John McGahern
Lyrically written as so many Irish novels are, this centres around the inscrutable patriarch of a rural family. Moran rules his family with an iron fist. He’s an old freedom…
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0695 | The Sound and the Fury | William Faulkner
My my, you have to persevere with this one. Told from multiple viewpoints, what starts out as a completely fragmented narrative that is almost completely opaque gradually becomes more defined…
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0694 | Clear Light of Day | Anita Desai
Although this was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, I couldn’t quite see where this was going or the point of it all. I kept expecting things to happen or the…
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0692 | The Professor’s House | Willa Cather
This is the moving story of a man reaching the end of himself. In many ways, it reminded me of Rosshalde. We have a man who has achieved much yet…
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0690 | Waiting for the Barbarians | J. M. Coetzee
A clear indictment of all nations built on colonial ambition but more broadly the propensity within all of us to characterise and brutalise The Other, Coetzee’s novel pulls no punches….
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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…
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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…
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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…
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0683 | G. | John Berger
While, on the surface, Berger’s prose seems simple enough, any discerning reader will find it hard not to feel as if there are hidden depths that require more explanation. Much…
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0682 | Towards a Philosophy of Photography | Vilem Flusser
If you have to study photography as I currently do, you need to think about it. Flusser aims to provide enough to get us started, and like all philosophies, it’s…
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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…
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0680 | Family Matters | Rohinton Mistry
Not a patch on A Fine Balance, this starts out alright with a family fighting to survive on the fine margins of lower-middle class Indian life. However, once things settle…
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0679 | Song of Solomon | Toni Morrison
Very readable for a Morrison so that’s a bonus for a start, even though it does bear her trademark style. If you’ve not read her before, this is a great…
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0678 | The Drowned World | J. G. Ballard
As one of Ballard’s early works, this is pretty readable, esp. if you’ve ever tried the atrocious witterings of the likes of Crash. It’s sci-fi, and the basic premise is…
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0677 | The Driver’s Seat | Muriel Spark
Strange little book this one at just over 100 pages. In this very short space of time Spark creates Lise, a very memorable character who I was never quite sure…
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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…
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0675 | Freedom | Jonathan Franzen
As with Franzen’s other novels, everyone’s got hangups and skeletons in the closet and he spends the novel dragging these out into the light while the characters kick and scream….