0589 | Norwegian Wood | Haruki Murakami
Last summer, just before a week in Sweden, we were staying at some friends. Browsing their bookshelves, I came across a lovely little two-volume boxed edition of Norwegian Wood. Perfect…
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0588 | If on a winter’s night a traveller … | Italo Calvino
I can’t think of many novels that are as memorable as this one for its sheer audacity, its outrageous cheek, and the utter genius with which the writer sets out…
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0587 | The Day of the Triffids | John Wyndham
An even better read than The Midwich Cuckoos, Wyndham’s best-known novel gets off to a great start even if the ending leaves you hoping for a climax which never comes….
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0586 | The Master | Colm Tóibín
It’s been a while since I read this, but the impression it made on me hasn’t left. Tóibín has written a melancholic novel of a man much misunderstood it seems….
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0585 | Ulysses | James Joyce
Notoriously difficult to read, even more notoriously difficult to understand, whatever your opinion about this novel it is not notoriously difficult to appreciate the genius that lies between its covers….
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0584 | Promise at Dawn | Romain Gary
This memoir is basically a eulogy to Gary’s mother. Seeing as I have never really had a mother to speak of, this was an interesting one for me to read…
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0583 | The Radetzky March | Joseph Roth
A book filled with melancholy not only for the characters but the world in which they live, The Radetzky March is a carefully constructed memorial to a lost age. Roth…
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0582 | The Player of Games | Iain M. Banks
While I’ve read a few of Banks’ non-sci-fi novels, none of them are as memorable as The Player of Games. The world that Banks has created here is truly original…
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0581 | He Knew he was Right | Anthony Trollope
Trollope’s story of a marriage and a life destroyed by the jealousy of a husband could have been a vivid portrayal of how delicately married life can be balanced. Instead,…
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0580 | Vernon God Little | DBC Pierre
Pierre’s adventure tale of the pursuit of poor little Vern by virtually the entire machine of ‘Merica is a combustive mix of satire and suspense. The pace doesn’t let up….
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0579 | Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow | Peter Høeg
Smilla doesn’t so much come across as an underdog in a portrait of contemporary social injustice as she does a kind of Nordic Lara Croft.
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0578 | The Recognitions | William Gaddis
The literary critic jack green is probably best known for insisting that his pseudonym be written, like adidas, without capital letters. He’s arguably less well known for lambasting those critics…
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0577 | North and South | Elizabeth Gaskell
Such was the impression this book left on me that I completely forgot I’d read it. I made no note of it in the list of completed books I keep,…
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0576 | The Golden Notebook | Doris Lessing
A tough read this one, for a number of reasons. Firstly, it’s long and you are going to wish you were nearer the end than the beginning on many occasions….
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0575 | The Feast of the Goat | Mario Vargas Llosa
Powerful and at times gripping, this is not what I’ve come to expect from novels from Latin/South American authors. In fact, this is the very first of the many I’ve…
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0574 | Against the Day | Thomas Pynchon
Absolutely pointless and not worth anyone’s time, this is a novel by a man entirely self-absorbed. It says nothing about any particular era, has no characters more three dimensional than…
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0573 | The Time Traveller’s Guide to Medieval England | Ian Mortimer
I kind of like history and so, when I started to dip into this in a bookshop, I thought it would be right up my street. In the end, I…
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0572 | Antic Hay | Aldous Huxley
Not the most memorable novel I’ll ever read. Apart from pneumatic trousers (a chindogu candidate if ever there was one), little remains a couple of months on as I write this…