0099 | The Satanic Verses – Salman Rushdie
Context: Picked this up from a certain university library and finished it while babysitting for my sister. REVIEW Read Midnight’s Children a long time ago and thought it was fantastic,…
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0097 | White Teeth – Zadie Smith
Context: Me and Mrs Arkiyomi read this together a chapter at a time while we toured Europe inlcuding tea on this Aegean ferry. REVIEW My first Zadie Smith and it…
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0095 | Small Island – Andrea Levy
Context: friend in Albania lent me this and I read it while we hitched from Greece to Liechtenstein via this service station in Rosenheim, Germany. REVIEW Reading this at the…
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0094 | The Moonstone – Wilkie Collins
Context: read this in two decrepit and crumbling volumes that were over 100 years old as we worked our way from Turkey to Croatia REVIEW Deep down in an old…
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0093 | Frankenstein – Mary Shelley
Context: finished this off on the ferry from Turkey to the Greek island of Samos. The final book of four gothic novels that I’ve been reading over the last few…
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0092 | The Monk – Matthew Lewis
Context: Finished this off on the bus from Istanbul to Izmir. REVIEW Absolutely loved this from beginning to end. After reading a couple of other Gothic novels that were hard…
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0091 | Dracula – Bram Stoker
Context: Started this in the Romanian town of Sighisoara (in background), birthplace of Vlad Tepes who some claim to be the model Stoker used for the character of Count Dracula….
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0090 | The Idiot – Fyodor Dostoevsky
Context: Started reading this in The Idiot restaurant in St. Petersburg. REVIEW This is my third Dostoevsky and I’m really beginning to develop a taste for this guy and starting…
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0088 | Vathek – William Beckford
Context: read this on the train to St Petersburg from Moscow REVIEW A bonkers adventure really of Vathek’s passion ending predictably enough.
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0082 | Glamorama – Bret Easton Ellis
Context: Read this as we travelled from Korea by sea and train to Japan.REVIEW This started out as an interesting alternative to American Psycho, which I read before Arukiyomi got…
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0081 | The Shack ~ William Young
Context: My mate Chuck suggested I read this. I read it in a day as that’s all the time I had at his house in Kumamoto, Japan.REVIEW Not bad but…
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0080 | A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
Context:company on the train from the tea hills to Colombo in Sri Lanka REVIEW This is a mammoth book at 1474 pages and, although it wasn’t always easy going, it…
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0079 | Captain Corelli’s Mandolin ~ de Bernières
Context: Took on the plane to Sri Lanka with me. Nearly finished it by the time we’d arrived. REVIEW I really liked this actually. I wasn’t prepared to having seen…
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0078 | Steppenwolf – Herman Hesse
Context:Read this in a day at the Dutch House, Bandarawela, Sri Lanka REVIEW Hot on the heels of Jazz by Toni Morrison, my brain was reeling from all the metaphysical…
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0077 | Jazz – Tony Morrison
Context: Read this in a day in an easy chair. REVIEW I thought this was pants actually.
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0075 | Foundation – Isaac Asimov
Context: Audiobook I listened to in a couple of days before going to Sri Lanka. REVIEW This gave me unpleasant flashbacks to Atlas Shrugged with it’s paranoid cast of characters…
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0074 | Memoirs of a Geisha ~ Arthur Golden
Context: Audiobook which I listened to on the way to and from private business classes.REVIEW Poetic, intimate and moving at times, this is a good book. However, the novel is…
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0073 | A Fine Balance ~ Rohinton Mistry
Book in Context: This book kept me company one long weekend on the Seoul subway. REVIEW What a powerfully moving book. After a year of my life in India, this…