0494 | The Blithedale Romance | Nathaniel Hawthorne
I find Hawthorne tedious at the best of times. This was no exception. So, there’s this utopian get together called Blithedale and it all starts off wonderfully with everyone pulling…
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0493 | Lolita | Vladimir Nabokov
This is a novel which should be approached and dealt with very, very carefully indeed. What Nabokov has done here remains as liable to detonate and rip the world apart…
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0492 | Rameau’s Nephew | Denis Diderot
This was not for me. A philosophical treatise comparing the viewpoints of a moralist with an amoralist set up as a chance meeting of two guys in a cafe. I…
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0491 | The Good Soldier | Ford Madox Ford
What I enjoyed about this most of all was the narrator and the way he tells the story. As the novel opens, you really have no idea what is coming…
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0490 | The Wings of the Dove | Henry James
The only James I’d read prior to this was the novella The Turn of the Screw which I didn’t blog at the time. It did little to prepare me for…
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0489 | Nemesis | Philip Roth
And so back to Philip Roth after a long break of nearly six years and The Plot Against America which I thought was excellent. Nemesis is also, like Plot, set among…
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0488 | Solaris | Stanislaw Lem
Lem’s account of a planet covered by what seems to be an intelligent ocean is the work not just of immense imagination but also a critically insightful mind. Kris Kelvin…
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0486 | The Water Babies | Charles Kingsley
This was not for me. Yes, I understand the importance of the book at time, how it was a satire on Darwin’s classic and the fact that it predates Alice…
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0485 | Moby Dick | Herman Melville
Moby Dick is one of those books, like War and Peace, that kind of separates the serious reader from the airport novel consumer. It’s not like Proust, which even serious…
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0484 | Wuthering Heights | Emily Brontë
Well this got off to a pretty good start with some excellent characters and plenty of tension between them. And then, about halfway through or even, probably, less than that,…
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0483 | Woman at Point Zero | Nawal El Saadawi
There aren’t many books you’ll read where you find yourself siding with a murdering prostitute, but this is definitely one of them. El Saadawi has written an absolute classic; classic…
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0482 | A Boy’s Own Story | Edmund White
This is an important book but it is not an easy one to read. The front cover of my edition had blurb on it that said it combined J D…
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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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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…