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…
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…
0712 | Flat Earth | Christine Garwood
Just before Christmas, this popped through the door completely anonymously. Tearing it open, it sounded like just the thing to while away a day or so reading over the break….
0710 | Mother | Maxim Gorky
This reads like a cross between Dr Zhivago and the last part of The Jungle. It’s packed full of characters who, in true Russian fashion, each have seven names they…
0704 | The Circle | Dave Eggers
Whoever reviewed this for The Guardian said it was “prescient, important and very funny.” Two out of three ain’t bad, I suppose; there are precious few laughs to be had…
0698 | Possession | A. S. Byatt
Oh boy, it seems Virgin in the Garden wasn’t large enough of a stage for Byatt to perform her one-woman show of intellectual capacity. 12 years later, she’s back with…
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…
0691 | Touch | David Linden
This has the subtitle The Science of the Sense that Makes Us Human, but nowhere in it will you find an explanation as to why touch apparently makes us any…
0689 | Falling Upward | Richard Rohr
Not a man I’ll read any more of, but this one was recommended to me by some friends and none other than my wife so I wasn’t about to refuse…
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…
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….
0667 | LaBrava | Elmore Leonard
If you like hard-boiled detective stuff, this is for you. Leonard even throws in a faded 1950s movie star so you get a bit of film noir along the way….
0665 | The Goldfinch | Donna Tartt
Some people say this is overlong. I’m not entirely sure I agree. At the pace the novel moves at, I can’t see what might be omitted. What I will state…
0661 | The Man Without Qualities | Robert Musil
This unfinished tome of a book is an extremely strange one to experience. Written in a very Magic-Mountain-like way, we find ourselves party to the life of Ulrich, a minor…
0656 | The Pigeon | Patrick Suskind
This is a little slip of a book and quite why it should make the 1001 Books list at all is a mystery to me. There’s nothing wrong with it,…
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…
0645 | Infinite Jest | David Foster Wallace
My my, what a book. And the eponymous joke is on who exactly? The characters or the readers? Not for the faint hearted at over 1,000 pages including 380 miniscule…
0638 | Testament of Youth | Vera Brittain
While this is one of the classic war books and written from the almost unique perspective of a woman, if you can find an abridged version to read, get that…