0650 | One, No One and One Hundred Thousand | Luigi Pirandello
Started out a bit Kafka-esque but then didn’t really go anywhere. Maybe that’s the point. It took Pirandello 15 years to write it which equates to just over 10 pages…
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0649 | A Tale of Love and Darkness | Amos Oz
This moving autobiographical tale of Oz’s childhood is fascinating in that it gives a child’s view of the 1948 establishment of the state of Israel and what it was like…
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0648 | The Romantics | Pankaj Mishra
This one was a bit tedious to be honest. Samar, a young Indian man falls in with a bunch of foreigners in Banares who are exploring the esoteric orient. They…
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0647 | Labyrinths | Jorge Luis Borges
When you read, you bring something of yourself to the book so that you can interpret what you’re being told according to your previous reading, your life experience and your…
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0646 | 10:04 | Ben Lerner
Life’s too short to figure out books like Lerner’s. It’s not hard to read. It’s not actually anything except an attempt by a man to show us he understands the…
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0645 | Infinite Jest | David Foster Wallace
My my, what a book. And the eponymous joke is on who exactly? The characters or the readers? Not for the faint hearted at over 1,000 pages including 380 miniscule…
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0644 | The Kindly Ones | Jonathan Littell
Littell’s meticulously researched memoir of an SS officer is a book that no one who reads it can ever forget, and that’s exactly how it should be. It’s absolutely horrific,…
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0643 | Watchmen | Alan Moore
Before the mid-1980s, superheroes were pretty simple. They had special powers, they fought baddies, they fought on our side, and they won. Wathmen changed all that. Moore single-handedly deconstructed the…
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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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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…
