0507 | Amadis of Gaul | Garci Rodriguez de Montalvo
If you’re a bloke, you’ve got five choices: king, knight, wizard, giant or dwarf. If you’re a woman, you’ve got two: queen or damsel. There aren’t any normal people in this…
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0506 | Bonjour Tristesse | Francoise Sagan
This is France’s answer to Catcher in the Rye and, considering it was published when Sagan was only 18, is astonishing for that. The writing shows great maturity and insight…
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0505 | The Diary of a Nobody | George & Weedon Grossmith
This is a wonderful little breather from the typical weighty tome on the 1001 Books list. A lighthearted look at urban Victorian everyday life with a character which has had…
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0504 | Dirty Havana Trilogy | Pedro Juan Gutiérrez
Very glad to get this one out of the way. Gutiérrez has great ability as a writer and has created some very memorable vignettes of characters and situations in mid-1990s Havana….
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0503 | Wide Sargasso Sea | Jean Rhys
Jean Rhys was a bit of a character and this novel, set in the Caribbean she grew up in, features a misunderstood woman who falls victim to both her Creole…
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0502 | Like Water for Chocolate | Laura Esquivel
I’ve never been inspired by novels written either by South American authors or set in South America. However, Esquivel is Mexican, and as that’s very definitely part of North America, she didn’t fall…
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0501 | Blood Meridian | Cormac McCarthy
An absolutely harrowing novel that makes you feel like you yourself have spent months tramping around the arid wastelands of what is now the US-Mexican borderland. It’s the kind of…
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0500 | Joseph Andrews | Henry Fielding
A picaresque novel and as such, eminently forgettable and largely tedious. I can understand the importance of the book for the time it was written in, but unless you really…
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0499 | A Hologram for the King | Dave Eggers
So, I work in Saudi Arabia. For two years, I lived there too. Recently though, I’ve decided life is better across the 20km bridge separating this nation from Bahrain, where…
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0498 | Independent People | Halldór Laxness
Prior to this, forgetting the purile Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, the only Nordic literature I’d read was also by Nobel laureates (Kristin Lavransdatter and Growth of the Soil). Laxness was therefore…
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0497 | Breakfast at Tiffany’s | Truman Capote
I couldn’t get the film of this little novel out of my mind while reading it. Hepburn brought the character of Holly Golightly to live so vividly that once you’ve…
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0496 | Franny and Zooey | J. D. Salinger
Of course, everyone knows Salinger for Catcher in the Rye, a book I read before this blog began and so never reviewed. That book seemed to be about something. This…
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0495 | Time’s Arrow | Martin Amis
Not read any of Martin Amis’ stuff since I started out with The Information which I rated mediocre 6 years ago. This, was far, far better. Time’s Arrow starts off a very…
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0494 | The Blithedale Romance | Nathaniel Hawthorne
I find Hawthorne tedious at the best of times. This was no exception. So, there’s this utopian get together called Blithedale and it all starts off wonderfully with everyone pulling…
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0493 | Lolita | Vladimir Nabokov
This is a novel which should be approached and dealt with very, very carefully indeed. What Nabokov has done here remains as liable to detonate and rip the world apart…
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0492 | Rameau’s Nephew | Denis Diderot
This was not for me. A philosophical treatise comparing the viewpoints of a moralist with an amoralist set up as a chance meeting of two guys in a cafe. I…
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0491 | The Good Soldier | Ford Madox Ford
What I enjoyed about this most of all was the narrator and the way he tells the story. As the novel opens, you really have no idea what is coming…
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0490 | The Wings of the Dove | Henry James
The only James I’d read prior to this was the novella The Turn of the Screw which I didn’t blog at the time. It did little to prepare me for…