0489 | Nemesis | Philip Roth
And so back to Philip Roth after a long break of nearly six years and The Plot Against America which I thought was excellent. Nemesis is also, like Plot, set among…
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0488 | Solaris | Stanislaw Lem
Lem’s account of a planet covered by what seems to be an intelligent ocean is the work not just of immense imagination but also a critically insightful mind. Kris Kelvin…
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0487 | Star of the Sea | Joseph O’Connor
This was a very quick read due to O’Connor’s engaging and eclectic writing style and ability to construct some very strong characters and bring them together in creative ways. Star of…
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0486 | The Water Babies | Charles Kingsley
This was not for me. Yes, I understand the importance of the book at time, how it was a satire on Darwin’s classic and the fact that it predates Alice…
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0485 | Moby Dick | Herman Melville
Moby Dick is one of those books, like War and Peace, that kind of separates the serious reader from the airport novel consumer. It’s not like Proust, which even serious…
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0484 | Wuthering Heights | Emily Brontë
Well this got off to a pretty good start with some excellent characters and plenty of tension between them. And then, about halfway through or even, probably, less than that,…
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0483 | Woman at Point Zero | Nawal El Saadawi
There aren’t many books you’ll read where you find yourself siding with a murdering prostitute, but this is definitely one of them. El Saadawi has written an absolute classic; classic…
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0482 | A Boy’s Own Story | Edmund White
This is an important book but it is not an easy one to read. The front cover of my edition had blurb on it that said it combined J D…
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0481 | The Marriage Plot | Jeffrey Eugenides
You’ll think this is pretty good if you come to it without having first read Middlesex or The Virgin Suicides. You’ll think he’s a witty, clever incisive writer who has…
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0480 | The Sea, The Sea | Iris Murdoch
Now this was good, an excellent novel which, if it wasn’t quite as long as it is, could be read several times in order to savour every last bit of…
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0479 | Citadel | Kate Mosse
Oh my goodness me. I haven’t read anything this bad for a long, long time. And I haven’t read anything this long and this bad for as long as I…
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0478 | The Third Wedding | Costas Taktsis
The Third Wedding is the story of two Greek women and their lives from the 1920s through until the years following WW2. One is called Hecuba. The other, who narrates…
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0477 | Emma | Jane Austen
Probably one of the most accessible Austen’s brings my reading of her works to a close. Emma wasn’t too bad actually. Of course, there’s the usual love triangle and convoluted…
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0475 | ISOLT VII: Time Regained | Marcel Proust
Finally, finally, finally; after reading about 10 pages a day for an entire year, In Search of Lost Time is read. I will never, ever read it again but I…
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0474 | ADMT XI: Temporary Kings | Anthony Powell
Nearly done and the penultimate volume of Powell’s panoply was quite a good read. Considering the parallels with Proust, it was inevitable that at some point, we end up in…
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0473 | ISOLT VI: The Fugitive | Marcel Proust
The departure of Albertine at the end of Volume 5 sets Proust up for Volume 6 which is all about finding out where on earth Albertine has got to. There…
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0472 | Sense and Sensibility | Jane Austen
Eminently forgettable. Two months after finishing this, I started recording my initial thoughts about Emma by saying that I only had one Austen novel to go to complete her works:…
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0471 | ADMT X: Books Do Furnish a Room | Anthony Powell
By quite a margin, I found this to be the most readable of the entire series of volumes so far. This is because Powell develops a number of minor characters…