0474 | ADMT XI: Temporary Kings | Anthony Powell
Nearly done and the penultimate volume of Powell’s panoply was quite a good read. Considering the parallels with Proust, it was inevitable that at some point, we end up in…
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0473 | ISOLT VI: The Fugitive | Marcel Proust
The departure of Albertine at the end of Volume 5 sets Proust up for Volume 6 which is all about finding out where on earth Albertine has got to. There…
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0472 | Sense and Sensibility | Jane Austen
Eminently forgettable. Two months after finishing this, I started recording my initial thoughts about Emma by saying that I only had one Austen novel to go to complete her works:…
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0471 | ADMT X: Books Do Furnish a Room | Anthony Powell
By quite a margin, I found this to be the most readable of the entire series of volumes so far. This is because Powell develops a number of minor characters…
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0470 | Roxana | Daniel Defoe
Now, if you’ve read Moll Flanders, you’ll be forgiven if you think you’ve read this somewhere before. You have. Kind of. Just as Moll gets left with no other social…
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0469 | ISOLT V: The Captive | Marcel Proust
Volume 5 focuses more on the tangled relationship between the narrator and Albertine than any of the others. Things come to a crisis just at the end of the volume…
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0468 | ADMT IX: The Military Philosophers | Anthony Powell
Not my favourite in the series by any means, this volume charts the end of the war and Nick’s subsequent demobbing. The writing carries on in its normal vein with…
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0467 | Life of Christ | Giovanni Papini
By 1921 when this was published, Papini was a man deeply passionate for Christ. This is apparent from the very introduction, let alone throughout the commentary he has written on…
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0465 | The Lusiads | Luís Vaz de Camões
There’s no doubt that this deserves its place on the 1001 books list. There’s no doubt that this is one of history’s greatest works, an epic poem of both literary…
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0464 | ADMT VIII: The Soldier’s Art | Anthony Powell
Well, WW2 is well and truly raging now and a number of fairly well-known characters start to become its victims as Nick Jenkins continues to become further involved in the…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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….
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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…