0580 | Vernon God Little | DBC Pierre
Pierre’s adventure tale of the pursuit of poor little Vern by virtually the entire machine of ‘Merica is a combustive mix of satire and suspense. The pace doesn’t let up….
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0579 | Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow | Peter Høeg
Smilla doesn’t so much come across as an underdog in a portrait of contemporary social injustice as she does a kind of Nordic Lara Croft.
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0578 | The Recognitions | William Gaddis
The literary critic jack green is probably best known for insisting that his pseudonym be written, like adidas, without capital letters. He’s arguably less well known for lambasting those critics…
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0577 | North and South | Elizabeth Gaskell
Such was the impression this book left on me that I completely forgot I’d read it. I made no note of it in the list of completed books I keep,…
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0576 | The Golden Notebook | Doris Lessing
A tough read this one, for a number of reasons. Firstly, it’s long and you are going to wish you were nearer the end than the beginning on many occasions….
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0575 | The Feast of the Goat | Mario Vargas Llosa
Powerful and at times gripping, this is not what I’ve come to expect from novels from Latin/South American authors. In fact, this is the very first of the many I’ve…
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0574 | Against the Day | Thomas Pynchon
Absolutely pointless and not worth anyone’s time, this is a novel by a man entirely self-absorbed. It says nothing about any particular era, has no characters more three dimensional than…
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0572 | Antic Hay | Aldous Huxley
Not the most memorable novel I’ll ever read. Apart from pneumatic trousers (a chindogu candidate if ever there was one), little remains a couple of months on as I write this…
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0571 | Sister Carrie | Theodore Dreiser
This is the story of a young woman who, somewhat naively, leaves home to make a life for herself in Chicago. Unlike most novels of this sort, where the author quite…
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0570 | Princess of Cleves | Madame de La Fayette
Massively influential in French literature at least, this story of unrequited love is a eulogy to virtue whose message should be more widely known outside its native land. Wikipedia will…
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0569 | On the Eve | Ivan Turgenev
So, this is one of those novels for which an understanding of the historical context is essential for a full appreciation of its significance. The era is the early 1850s…
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0568 | The Accidental | Ali Smith
This is a quirky story told from the perspective of each member of a family who rent a holiday home in the English countryside for the summer. When a mysterious…
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0567 | Falling Man | Don DeLillo
Many years ago, Underworld scarred me for life. Then I read White Noise. Had it not been recommended by a great friend, I would never have returned to DeLillo. I was…
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0566 | Journey to the End of the Night | Louis-Ferdinand Céline
Here’s a novel powerful enough to suck the life out of Amazon’s entire self-help catalogue in seconds. In terms of sheer pessimistic cynicism of humanity, Céline’s Night is unparalleled with its tale…
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0565 | Fugitive Pieces | Anne Michaels
This was a strange book, the tale of a WW2 Jewish refugee who is initially harboured on a Greek island before emigrating to Canada. Michaels writes her own prose, and…
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0564 | The Well of Loneliness | Radclyffe Hall
With the expiration in the EU of its copyright, this initially suppressed novel is now, somewhat ironically, in the public domain in Europe. Almost 88 years to the day after it…
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0563 | Pierre and Jean | Guy de Maupassant
304 books ago, I reviewed Bel Ami, my first Maupassant novel and, coincidentally, the one he wrote just before this one. Thankfully, although it still deals with the worst of…
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0562 | Inferno | Henri Barbusse
Not a very long novel and not a completely entertaining one either. Barbusse has constructed a hotel room where the unnamed protagonist discovers a hole which allows him to see…