0463 | ISOLT IV: Sodom & Gomorrah | Marcel Proust
Yeah this is one of the greatest novels of all time, but I’m getting pretty fed up of the long drawn out prose about nothing much in particular and endless…
-
-
0462 | The Kreutzer Sonata | Leo Tolstoy
A far cry in length from War & Peace but nonetheless this little novella packs quite the punch. On a train journey, passengers begin to gossip about a story they’ve…
-
0461 | ADMT VII: The Valley of Bones | Anthony Powell
For me, the beginning of three books that make up the war trilogy section of A Dance to a Music of Time was an entertaining read with more of a…
-
0460 | The Count of Monte Christo | Alexander Dumas
Wow! What a romper stomper this was. Pretty much from the very first page you’re thrown into a torrent of narrative that affords you barely enough time to attempt to…
-
0459 | Oliver Twist | Charles Dickens
Yet another Dickens down. The 1001 list is cram full of them. Twist is bit like Pride & Prejudice; a lot of us know the storyline but have never actually…
-
0458 | Animal’s People | Indra Sinha
Not my cup of tea this at all. Yeah, I love India and have read a ton of books about it. But this just didn’t do it for me. I…
-
0457 | How Proust can Change your Life | Alain de Botton
As I’m tackling Proust’s mammoth In Search of Lost Time (ISOLT) this year (and currently over the halfway mark yeah!), when I saw this in a charity shop, I just…
-
0456 | ADMT VI: The Kindly Ones | Anthony Powell
Ah…now here’s a volume that can completely stand alone and is, I feel, by far the best so far in Powell’s 12-volume epic A Dance to the Music of Time….
-
0455 | ISOLT III: The Guermantes Way | Marcel Proust
This was a book of two halves for me. The first half starts off with a relocation to Paris from the coast and the obsession with yet another female. After…
-
0454 | Mark for Everyone | Tom Wright
Tom Wright has done it again with an extremely readable and very accessible translation and commentary on the Gospel according to Mark. I’m reading my way through the entire set…
-
0453 | ADMT V: Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant | Anthony Powell
Powell plays around with the sequence of events for the first time in the series in this volume which starts after the second world war has concluded. Very quickly though,…
-
0452 | Fear of Flying | Erica Jong
This book took me very much by surprise. There were mixed reviews online but I thought it was a very bold work of genius. When you consider that this was…
-
0451 | ADMT IV: At Lady Molly’s | Anthony Powell
Perhaps the most forgettable, for me, of the four volumes so far.Having nearly completed two more memorable volumes since finishing this one off, I had to go back to the…
-
0450 | ISOLT II: Within a Budding Grove | Marcel Proust
Proust continues with a trip to the seaside resort of Balbek which is the backdrop for the majority of the second volume of In Search of Lost Time. It’s a…
-
0449 | Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency | Douglas Adams
Read the Hitchhikers’ Guide ‘trilogy’ many years ago, so this is the first of Adams’ books that I’ve read since then. I loved the books I read back then. I…
-
0448 | The History of Love | Nicole Krauss
You know, I’m always disheartened when picking up a book to find a sticker staring back at me declaring that it’s been “Shortlisted by Richard & Judy’s book club.” What…
-
0447 | A Tale of a Tub | Jonathan Swift
Swift is better known for his later works (Gulliver’s Travels and A Modest Proposal in particular) and having read those before turning to this, it’s easy to see why. In fact,…
-
0446 | The Enigma of Arrival | V. S. Naipaul
Once I’d settled into this, it was a beautiful read. Naipaul is a Nobel Laureate and so you expect that the prose will be challenging. But while A Bend in…