0448 | The History of Love | Nicole Krauss
You know, I’m always disheartened when picking up a book to find a sticker staring back at me declaring that it’s been “Shortlisted by Richard & Judy’s book club.” What…
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0447 | A Tale of a Tub | Jonathan Swift
Swift is better known for his later works (Gulliver’s Travels and A Modest Proposal in particular) and having read those before turning to this, it’s easy to see why. In fact,…
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0446 | The Enigma of Arrival | V. S. Naipaul
Once I’d settled into this, it was a beautiful read. Naipaul is a Nobel Laureate and so you expect that the prose will be challenging. But while A Bend in…
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0445 | ADMT III: The Acceptance World | Anthony Powell
I felt this was the strongest volume so far of Powell’s 12-volume Dance to the Music of Time. Things seemed to have bedded into a nice rhythm as the characters…
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0443 | ADMT II: A Buyer’s Market | Anthony Powell
The main characters are all now well into young adulthood and most of this volume of Powell’s epic 12-volume A Dance to the Music of Time revolves around social occasions…
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0442 | ISOLT I: Swann’s Way | Marcel Proust
Reading the first volume of Proust’s mammoth In Search of Lost Time is akin to undergoing an initiation ceremony: the air is rife with rumours of what is to come;…
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0441 | Season of Migration to the North | Tayeb Salih
This little novel packs a huge punch even today, 50 years after it was published in a Sudan that was in no way ready hammer blow of this magnitude to…
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0439 | Surfacing | Margaret Atwood
Atwood’s first second (thanks Irina!) published novel sees her get off to a good start with this eerie tale of a woman returning to her childhood home in the Canadian…
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0438 | ADMT I: A Question of Upbringing | Anthony Powell
And so we’re up and running with volume 1 of the 12-volume novel A Dance to the Music of Time. Once I discovered Powell’s prose to be very accessible, in…
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0437 | The Golden Ass | Lucius Apuleius
This Ass is packed with tales that are as full of characters as they are hard to follow. Make sure you get yourself a good translation of this if you…
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0436 | The Child in Time | Ian McEwan
McEwan’s third novel and the earliest that I have read wasn’t too bad. It’s about a guy who is estranged from his wife after the abduction of their child in…
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0435 | Our Mutual Friend | Charles Dickens
Haven’t read any Dickens for a while, not since Hard Times almost five years ago to be exact and this was the second time that I attempted this particular tome….
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0434 | The Master and Margarita | Mikhail Bulgakov
What a very, very clever book. To appreciate it, you have to be aware of the context in which it was written and for that I’d heartily recommend the excellent…
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0433 | Nostromo | Joseph Conrad
Supposedly Conrad’s most complex novel, I will admit only that it is his most boring. I seem to have a jinx when it comes to not only reading Latin American…
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0431 | All the Pretty Horses | Cormac McCarthy
This novel is probably the most evocative I think I’ve read out of North America. Hauntingly beautiful, tragic and yet reassuring too, the Texan and Mexican landscape lives and breathes…
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0430 | Tono-Bungay | H. G. Wells
The last of Wells’ works that was on my tbr list for the 1001 books. Wells occasionally delights me, but, on the whole, though I do regard him a genius…
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0429 | A Pale View of Hills | Kazuo Ishiguro
Ishiguro has written some of the best books I’ve read. This is not one of them. Granted, it’s his first published novel so this is understandable. But this one simply…
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0428 | Cecilia | Fanny Burney
Absolutely awful, long-winded and over-elaborate. The novel doesn’t deserve a lengthier review than that. Evelina was bad enough, but Burney has yet another novel, Camilla, on the 1001 list. If…