0481 | The Marriage Plot | Jeffrey Eugenides
You’ll think this is pretty good if you come to it without having first read Middlesex or The Virgin Suicides. You’ll think he’s a witty, clever incisive writer who has…
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0480 | The Sea, The Sea | Iris Murdoch
Now this was good, an excellent novel which, if it wasn’t quite as long as it is, could be read several times in order to savour every last bit of…
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0479 | Citadel | Kate Mosse
Oh my goodness me. I haven’t read anything this bad for a long, long time. And I haven’t read anything this long and this bad for as long as I…
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0478 | The Third Wedding | Costas Taktsis
The Third Wedding is the story of two Greek women and their lives from the 1920s through until the years following WW2. One is called Hecuba. The other, who narrates…
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0477 | Emma | Jane Austen
Probably one of the most accessible Austen’s brings my reading of her works to a close. Emma wasn’t too bad actually. Of course, there’s the usual love triangle and convoluted…
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0476 | ADMT XII: Hearing Secret Harmonies | Anthony Powell
And so it ends; the final volume in Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time is complete exactly 365 days after I started it. Was it worth it. Yes,…
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0475 | ISOLT VII: Time Regained | Marcel Proust
Finally, finally, finally; after reading about 10 pages a day for an entire year, In Search of Lost Time is read. I will never, ever read it again but I…
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0474 | ADMT XI: Temporary Kings | Anthony Powell
Nearly done and the penultimate volume of Powell’s panoply was quite a good read. Considering the parallels with Proust, it was inevitable that at some point, we end up in…
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0473 | ISOLT VI: The Fugitive | Marcel Proust
The departure of Albertine at the end of Volume 5 sets Proust up for Volume 6 which is all about finding out where on earth Albertine has got to. There…
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0472 | Sense and Sensibility | Jane Austen
Eminently forgettable. Two months after finishing this, I started recording my initial thoughts about Emma by saying that I only had one Austen novel to go to complete her works:…
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0471 | ADMT X: Books Do Furnish a Room | Anthony Powell
By quite a margin, I found this to be the most readable of the entire series of volumes so far. This is because Powell develops a number of minor characters…
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0470 | Roxana | Daniel Defoe
Now, if you’ve read Moll Flanders, you’ll be forgiven if you think you’ve read this somewhere before. You have. Kind of. Just as Moll gets left with no other social…
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0469 | ISOLT V: The Captive | Marcel Proust
Volume 5 focuses more on the tangled relationship between the narrator and Albertine than any of the others. Things come to a crisis just at the end of the volume…
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0468 | ADMT IX: The Military Philosophers | Anthony Powell
Not my favourite in the series by any means, this volume charts the end of the war and Nick’s subsequent demobbing. The writing carries on in its normal vein with…
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0467 | Life of Christ | Giovanni Papini
By 1921 when this was published, Papini was a man deeply passionate for Christ. This is apparent from the very introduction, let alone throughout the commentary he has written on…
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0466 | A Line in the Sand | James Barr
What the chart of my progress below does not reveal is that the day I started this was in fact in May 2013 whereas I didn’t finish it, after a…
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0465 | The Lusiads | Luís Vaz de Camões
There’s no doubt that this deserves its place on the 1001 books list. There’s no doubt that this is one of history’s greatest works, an epic poem of both literary…
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0464 | ADMT VIII: The Soldier’s Art | Anthony Powell
Well, WW2 is well and truly raging now and a number of fairly well-known characters start to become its victims as Nick Jenkins continues to become further involved in the…