0499 | A Hologram for the King | Dave Eggers
So, I work in Saudi Arabia. For two years, I lived there too. Recently though, I’ve decided life is better across the 20km bridge separating this nation from Bahrain, where…
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0498 | Independent People | Halldór Laxness
Prior to this, forgetting the purile Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, the only Nordic literature I’d read was also by Nobel laureates (Kristin Lavransdatter and Growth of the Soil). Laxness was therefore…
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0497 | Breakfast at Tiffany’s | Truman Capote
I couldn’t get the film of this little novel out of my mind while reading it. Hepburn brought the character of Holly Golightly to live so vividly that once you’ve…
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0496 | Franny and Zooey | J. D. Salinger
Of course, everyone knows Salinger for Catcher in the Rye, a book I read before this blog began and so never reviewed. That book seemed to be about something. This…
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0495 | Time’s Arrow | Martin Amis
Not read any of Martin Amis’ stuff since I started out with The Information which I rated mediocre 6 years ago. This, was far, far better. Time’s Arrow starts off a very…
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0494 | The Blithedale Romance | Nathaniel Hawthorne
I find Hawthorne tedious at the best of times. This was no exception. So, there’s this utopian get together called Blithedale and it all starts off wonderfully with everyone pulling…
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0493 | Lolita | Vladimir Nabokov
This is a novel which should be approached and dealt with very, very carefully indeed. What Nabokov has done here remains as liable to detonate and rip the world apart…
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0492 | Rameau’s Nephew | Denis Diderot
This was not for me. A philosophical treatise comparing the viewpoints of a moralist with an amoralist set up as a chance meeting of two guys in a cafe. I…
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0491 | The Good Soldier | Ford Madox Ford
What I enjoyed about this most of all was the narrator and the way he tells the story. As the novel opens, you really have no idea what is coming…
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0490 | The Wings of the Dove | Henry James
The only James I’d read prior to this was the novella The Turn of the Screw which I didn’t blog at the time. It did little to prepare me for…
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0489 | Nemesis | Philip Roth
And so back to Philip Roth after a long break of nearly six years and The Plot Against America which I thought was excellent. Nemesis is also, like Plot, set among…
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0488 | Solaris | Stanislaw Lem
Lem’s account of a planet covered by what seems to be an intelligent ocean is the work not just of immense imagination but also a critically insightful mind. Kris Kelvin…
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0487 | Star of the Sea | Joseph O’Connor
This was a very quick read due to O’Connor’s engaging and eclectic writing style and ability to construct some very strong characters and bring them together in creative ways. Star of…
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0486 | The Water Babies | Charles Kingsley
This was not for me. Yes, I understand the importance of the book at time, how it was a satire on Darwin’s classic and the fact that it predates Alice…
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0485 | Moby Dick | Herman Melville
Moby Dick is one of those books, like War and Peace, that kind of separates the serious reader from the airport novel consumer. It’s not like Proust, which even serious…
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0484 | Wuthering Heights | Emily Brontë
Well this got off to a pretty good start with some excellent characters and plenty of tension between them. And then, about halfway through or even, probably, less than that,…
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0483 | Woman at Point Zero | Nawal El Saadawi
There aren’t many books you’ll read where you find yourself siding with a murdering prostitute, but this is definitely one of them. El Saadawi has written an absolute classic; classic…
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0482 | A Boy’s Own Story | Edmund White
This is an important book but it is not an easy one to read. The front cover of my edition had blurb on it that said it combined J D…