0517 | The Collector | John Fowles
With this creepy tale of captivity, Fowles slinked onto the literary scene in the early 1960s. It’s one of the strongest debut novels you’re likely to read and also one…
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0516 | The Adventures of Roderick Random | Tobias Smollett
Having read Peregrine Pickle, the novel Smollett wrote after this one, three years ago, I kind of realised that, like with Henderson and Herzog, I’d read these the wrong way…
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0515 | Henderson the Rain King | Saul Bellow
Boy this took ages to read. Just couldn’t really get into it until the last 100 pages or so. Couldn’t really place my finger on why, but I think it…
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0514 | The Graduate | Charles Webb
This is even more fun to read than the famous film that is lifted almost entirely from the written dialogue. It’s deceptively short and, as it consists almost entirely of dialogue,…
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0513 | Troubles | J. G. Farrell
This last book in the series completes my reading of Farrell’s Empire trilogy. I wish I’d read them in order. I actually read them back to front. Troubles is a perfect…
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0512 | Clarissa | Samuel Richardson
Well, after finishing U.S.A. at 1,300 pages or so, what better way to follow it up than to write a review of a novel that’s even bigger? What surprised me…
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0511 | U.S.A. | John Dos Passos
My what a splendid book this is. Vast in its scope and magnanimous in its treatment of the varied strata that made up a nation coming to terms with the…
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0510 | The Third Policeman | Flann O’Brien
This starts off as normal as you like and then suddenly, like Alice down the rabbit hole while taking LSD, takes you on a mind-bending and, at times, literarily taxing…
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0509 | Tipping the Velvet | Sarah Waters
Sarah Waters can spin a yarn. She can conjour up a world. She can keep you entertained. But what she absolutely can’t do is create realistic characters or convince me that…
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0508 | A Visit from the Goon Squad | Jennifer Egan
This was not at all what I expected from the title. In fact, even having finished it, I really have no clue as to why it is called this at…
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0507 | Amadis of Gaul | Garci Rodriguez de Montalvo
If you’re a bloke, you’ve got five choices: king, knight, wizard, giant or dwarf. If you’re a woman, you’ve got two: queen or damsel. There aren’t any normal people in this…
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0506 | Bonjour Tristesse | Francoise Sagan
This is France’s answer to Catcher in the Rye and, considering it was published when Sagan was only 18, is astonishing for that. The writing shows great maturity and insight…
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0505 | The Diary of a Nobody | George & Weedon Grossmith
This is a wonderful little breather from the typical weighty tome on the 1001 Books list. A lighthearted look at urban Victorian everyday life with a character which has had…
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0504 | Dirty Havana Trilogy | Pedro Juan Gutiérrez
Very glad to get this one out of the way. Gutiérrez has great ability as a writer and has created some very memorable vignettes of characters and situations in mid-1990s Havana….
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0503 | Wide Sargasso Sea | Jean Rhys
Jean Rhys was a bit of a character and this novel, set in the Caribbean she grew up in, features a misunderstood woman who falls victim to both her Creole…
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0502 | Like Water for Chocolate | Laura Esquivel
I’ve never been inspired by novels written either by South American authors or set in South America. However, Esquivel is Mexican, and as that’s very definitely part of North America, she didn’t fall…
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0501 | Blood Meridian | Cormac McCarthy
An absolutely harrowing novel that makes you feel like you yourself have spent months tramping around the arid wastelands of what is now the US-Mexican borderland. It’s the kind of…
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0500 | Joseph Andrews | Henry Fielding
A picaresque novel and as such, eminently forgettable and largely tedious. I can understand the importance of the book for the time it was written in, but unless you really…