0107 | Vile Bodies – Evelyn Waugh
Context: Read this on and off on the bench in my in-laws’ garden. REVIEW What a strange book this was. It was nothing like I expected at all and, despite…
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0106 | The Corrections – Jonathan Franzen
Context: Read this while staying at my in-laws where I gave the spare room a much needed seeing-to. REVIEW This book I liked. It’s the story of your average disfunctional…
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0105 | Gulliver’s Travels – Jonathan Swift
Context: Finished this off at a friend’s house in Hertford, UK. REVIEW Liechtenstein was my 57th country and so I could fairly claim to have travelled a lot. One of…
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0104 | To the Lighthouse – Virginia Woolf
Context: Finished this under a holly tree, by a pond at a friend’s house in Hertford, UK. REVIEW This novel is scarcely 200 pages long. Yet Woolf manages to load…
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0103 | The Singapore Grip – J.G. Farrell
Context: took me a long while to read this and some of that time was spent exploring St Andrews in east Scotland. REVIEW This is a deceptively long book. It…
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0102 | The Heather Blazing – Colm Toibin
Context: Finished this off on this bench at our friends’ house in Newcastle-upon-Tyne. REVIEW Like, Coetzee, Toibin writes in sparse prose that is so wonderfully crafted in this novel that…
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0100 | The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde – Robert Louis Stevenson
Context: Picked this up at a charity shop in Stockton high street and read it as I walked to and from car showrooms buying a second hand car. REVIEW This…
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0099 | The Satanic Verses – Salman Rushdie
Context: Picked this up from a certain university library and finished it while babysitting for my sister. REVIEW Read Midnight’s Children a long time ago and thought it was fantastic,…
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0098 | Deceived on Purpose – Warren
Context: Got this for my birthday and read it to the sound of demolition work over the road from our house in the UK. REVIEW In 2002, Rick Warren published…
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0097 | White Teeth – Zadie Smith
Context: Me and Mrs Arkiyomi read this together a chapter at a time while we toured Europe inlcuding tea on this Aegean ferry. REVIEW My first Zadie Smith and it…
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0096 | CT Studd: Cricketer & Pioneer – Norman Grubb
Context: Picked this up in an apartment with a view of the Bernese Alps where we stayed in Switzerland. REVIEW Norman Grubb is a bit of a legend. He spent…
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0095 | Small Island – Andrea Levy
Context: friend in Albania lent me this and I read it while we hitched from Greece to Liechtenstein via this service station in Rosenheim, Germany. REVIEW Reading this at the…
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0094 | The Moonstone – Wilkie Collins
Context: read this in two decrepit and crumbling volumes that were over 100 years old as we worked our way from Turkey to Croatia REVIEW Deep down in an old…
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0093 | Frankenstein – Mary Shelley
Context: finished this off on the ferry from Turkey to the Greek island of Samos. The final book of four gothic novels that I’ve been reading over the last few…
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0092 | The Monk – Matthew Lewis
Context: Finished this off on the bus from Istanbul to Izmir. REVIEW Absolutely loved this from beginning to end. After reading a couple of other Gothic novels that were hard…
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0091 | Dracula – Bram Stoker
Context: Started this in the Romanian town of Sighisoara (in background), birthplace of Vlad Tepes who some claim to be the model Stoker used for the character of Count Dracula….
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0090 | The Idiot – Fyodor Dostoevsky
Context: Started reading this in The Idiot restaurant in St. Petersburg. REVIEW This is my third Dostoevsky and I’m really beginning to develop a taste for this guy and starting…
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0089 | Angela’s Ashes – Frank McCourt
Context: After the wife had read this, I polished this off whilst in St. Petersburg REVIEW Not a bad book at all actually despite the fact that this was the…