0692 | The Professor’s House | Willa Cather
This is the moving story of a man reaching the end of himself. In many ways, it reminded me of Rosshalde. We have a man who has achieved much yet…
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0690 | Waiting for the Barbarians | J. M. Coetzee
A clear indictment of all nations built on colonial ambition but more broadly the propensity within all of us to characterise and brutalise The Other, Coetzee’s novel pulls no punches….
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0688 | Invisible Cities | Italo Calvino
Such a little book for so much metaphor. Calvino writes prose that, on the surface of it, is deceptively simple. It’s a lot easier to read than much of Borges…
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0686 | Inside Mr Enderby | Anthony Burgess
Enderby is a poet who parps a lot. He’s basically the early British prototype for Ignatius J. Reilly. He has no love except that of poetry which he composes on…
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0684 | The Heat of the Day | Elizabeth Bowen
On the inside cover of this, it says, “The texture of her prose has a gossamer exquisiteness…” Well, here’s an example of what passed for gossamer in the age of…
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0683 | G. | John Berger
While, on the surface, Berger’s prose seems simple enough, any discerning reader will find it hard not to feel as if there are hidden depths that require more explanation. Much…
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0681 | Crash | J G Ballard
Even as I placed my penis in his rectum Vaughan had known he would try to kill me, in a final display of his casual love for me. Crash, page…
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0680 | Family Matters | Rohinton Mistry
Not a patch on A Fine Balance, this starts out alright with a family fighting to survive on the fine margins of lower-middle class Indian life. However, once things settle…
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0679 | Song of Solomon | Toni Morrison
Very readable for a Morrison so that’s a bonus for a start, even though it does bear her trademark style. If you’ve not read her before, this is a great…
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0678 | The Drowned World | J. G. Ballard
As one of Ballard’s early works, this is pretty readable, esp. if you’ve ever tried the atrocious witterings of the likes of Crash. It’s sci-fi, and the basic premise is…
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0677 | The Driver’s Seat | Muriel Spark
Strange little book this one at just over 100 pages. In this very short space of time Spark creates Lise, a very memorable character who I was never quite sure…
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0676 | The Moor’s Last Sigh | Salman Rushdie
Started out alright but Rushdie can’t seem to just sit still and be a good boy. No sooner have you got settled then he’s up and off on some mad…
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0675 | Freedom | Jonathan Franzen
As with Franzen’s other novels, everyone’s got hangups and skeletons in the closet and he spends the novel dragging these out into the light while the characters kick and scream….
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0674 | The House of Doctor Dee | Peter Ackroyd
As with all things Ackroyd, this novel suffers from not only an obsession with London now, but, as if that wasn’t ethnocentric enough, London then. Even though it’s been 8…
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0673 | Self-Condemned | Wyndham Lewis
To a certain extent autobiographical, this again, as with The Driver’s Seat, is about someone making their own decisions. This resonated with me as Professor Rene Harding resigns from his…
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0672 | The Midnight Examiner | William Kotzwinkle
Kotwinkle is probably more famous for writing E.T., not this, and it’s hard to see why this needs to be read by anyone before they die. This is a shame…
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0671 | Platform | Michel Houellebecq
A very strange novel not least because it must be one of the only novels that takes place in the context of the tourism industry. However, lest that conjure up…
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0670 | The Violent Bear it Away | Flannery O’Connor
Reads very much like Wharton but with religion as its theme rather than morality. Stark, grim and dark all the way through, a great caution for anyone involved in religion….