0642 |The Book of Disquiet | Fernando Pessoa
Less than halfway through his bundle of tedium, Pessoa says Let the plotless novel come to an end If only … Instead, Pessoa moans on and on for another half…
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0641 | Nightwood | Djuna Barnes
No clue why this is regarded as some kind of seminal work in queer literature. It’s certainly queer, but not in the way the gushing Winterson considers it in her…
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0640 | 1000 Years of Annoying the French | Stephen Clarke
This millennial look at the history of Britain and France is told with wry, sometimes childishly irritating, and rarely laugh-inducing humour. It’s pretty comprehensive, coming in at just under 650…
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0639 | City of God | E. L. Doctorow
If you’re after a pacy novel with a great storyline and memorable characters that zips you from A to B in a rush of finely written prose, you’ll need to…
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0638 | Testament of Youth | Vera Brittain
While this is one of the classic war books and written from the almost unique perspective of a woman, if you can find an abridged version to read, get that…
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0637 | Rosshalde | Herman Hesse
This beautiful, sad and moving book is the story of a man at odds with life, himself, his wife and his sons. I enjoyed it very much. Living in luxury…
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0636 | Ada | Vladimir Nabokov
This was very, very hard going. Nabokov is not an easy man to keep up with when he puts all the power of his mind into something, and he just…
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0635 | House of Leaves | Mark Danielewski
One of the weirdest books you’ll ever read and it looks like he put a tremendous effort into pulling it off. Does he succeed? Not for me, he doesn’t. This…
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0634| The Virgin in the Garden | A. S. Byatt
The influence of Iris Murdoch on Byatt seems to be very apparent here. Virgin reads like an intellectual’s version of Murdoch’s The Bell, written 20 years earlier, but without as…
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0633 | Sabbath’s Theater | Philip Roth
Not the most pleasant read anyone of us will experience. Just under 500 pages describing the purposefully repugnant Mickey Sabbath. While the more prudish among us will simply stop reading,…
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0632 | A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man | James Joyce
Joyce is such a wordsmith, He’s so able, at any point, to spring off with a bound and run with words in such a way that you really have to…
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0631 | Fingersmith | Sarah Walters
Before we’ve reached the 100th page of this, Ms Walters can’t hold it in any longer: Maud stood very still, her pink lips parted [ooh er], her face put back,…
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0630 | The Holder of the World | Bharati Mukherjee
Had I not been held captive in a stifling, airless bedroom of a beach bungalow in Zanzibar by the worst sunburn I’ve ever had in my life AND a foot…
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0629 | The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy | Lawrence Sterne
This is a novel that has, since it’s publication in 1759, divided opinion throughout the ages. It certainly divided mine as you can tell from the review radar below. While…
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0628 | Slaughterhouse Five | Kurt Vonnegut
What a genius this man was to write a novel so short, so deceptively simple, so (frankly) bonkers and yet so very relevant not just for the age in which…
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0627 | The Untouchable | John Banville
I last read Banville nearly a decade ago. The Sea and The Newton Letter didn’t impress me much. This one was better than both of those put together, I thought….
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0626 | Eclipse of the Crescent Moon | Geza Gardonyi
This is on the 1001 Books list simply because it is a Hungarian classic chronicling the successful defence of Eger Castle from the Ottoman Turks by a vastly outnumbered army….
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0625 | Islands | Dan Sleigh
Absolutely fantastic book. Just one of those that you come across and know immediately that you’re going to end up buying someone a copy because you just want to share…
