0118 | Northern Lights – Philip Pullman
Context: Finished this off on my in-laws’ decking in the garden. REVIEW For a long time I’ve been wanting to get my hands on the first book in His Dark…
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0117 | Oblomov – Ivan Goncharov
Context: started this on a walk in the country in Portugal with my family. REVIEW Never heard of this and would never have done if it wasn’t for the 1001…
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0116 | Hind’s Feet on High Places – Hannah Hurnard
Context: Read this a chapter as a time as part of my daily devotional and finished it on the plane back from Portugal to the UK. REVIEW This is one…
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0115 | The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
Context: Finished this in the taxi from my mum’s in Portugal to the railway station. REVIEW It’s quite something to write a novel in a language foreign to your own….
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0114 | The Virgin Suicides – Jeffrey Eugenides
Context: Finished this off in my mum’s jacuzzi. REVIEW Now that Middlesex has been removed from the 2008 edition of the 1001 list, Eugenides’ work is represented by this one…
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0113 | Under the Net – Iris Murdoch
Context: Read most of this in the forest at the end of my mum’s garden in Portugal. REVIEW Sometimes I read a book, get to the end and wonder why…
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0112 | The Reader – Bernhard Schlink
Context: Read this in a day and finished it with the cat next to me in the study at my mum’s place in Portugal. REVIEW Poignant, evocative, thought-provoking and strong….
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0111 | Hawksmoor – Peter Ackroyd
Context: Finished off in the garden of my mum’s house in Portugal. REVIEW I’d read a bit of Ackroyd’s non-fiction as well before this and know that while he can…
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0110 | Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
Context: Started this in the UK and finished it off on the lawn at my mum’s in Portugal. REVIEW I know this book has had a lot of praise and…
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0109 | Strait is the Gate – Andre Gide
Context: Finished this in a day on my bed at my mum’s place in Portugal. REVIEW This started off as an unassuming romance novella but, before long, I realised that…
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0108 | Agnes Grey – Anne Bronte
Context: Finished this off in bed at my in-laws’ place near Cambridge, UK. REVIEW Nothing much to report here. This was an entirely predictable Bronte piece which, unlike her sisters,…
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0107 | Vile Bodies – Evelyn Waugh
Context: Read this on and off on the bench in my in-laws’ garden. REVIEW What a strange book this was. It was nothing like I expected at all and, despite…
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0106 | The Corrections – Jonathan Franzen
Context: Read this while staying at my in-laws where I gave the spare room a much needed seeing-to. REVIEW This book I liked. It’s the story of your average disfunctional…
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0105 | Gulliver’s Travels – Jonathan Swift
Context: Finished this off at a friend’s house in Hertford, UK. REVIEW Liechtenstein was my 57th country and so I could fairly claim to have travelled a lot. One of…
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0104 | To the Lighthouse – Virginia Woolf
Context: Finished this under a holly tree, by a pond at a friend’s house in Hertford, UK. REVIEW This novel is scarcely 200 pages long. Yet Woolf manages to load…
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0103 | The Singapore Grip – J.G. Farrell
Context: took me a long while to read this and some of that time was spent exploring St Andrews in east Scotland. REVIEW This is a deceptively long book. It…
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0102 | The Heather Blazing – Colm Toibin
Context: Finished this off on this bench at our friends’ house in Newcastle-upon-Tyne. REVIEW Like, Coetzee, Toibin writes in sparse prose that is so wonderfully crafted in this novel that…
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0100 | The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde – Robert Louis Stevenson
Context: Picked this up at a charity shop in Stockton high street and read it as I walked to and from car showrooms buying a second hand car. REVIEW This…