0593 | Women in Love | D.H. Lawrence
Back when I lived in another world, I listened to The Rainbow, the first of this two volume story of the Brangwens of Nottinghamshire. Rainbow scored 59%. This one has…
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0592 | Cause for Alarm | Eric Ambler
Dear me, this hasn’t aged well at all, and I couldn’t wait to get to the end of this one. According to Wikipedia, Ambler is known for his thrillers. I…
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0591 | Buddenbrooks | Thomas Mann
Now this was a Mann novel I could get into. This masterfully told epic of generations of a German family shows their demise from a close family of business leaders…
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0590 | The Adventures of Augie March | Saul Bellow
Another Bellow, another fellow. This time it’s Augie, a Jewish kid from the ghetto who we follow entirely randomly as he grows and flows out into the world and all…
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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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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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0571 | Sister Carrie | Theodore Dreiser
This is the story of a young woman who, somewhat naively, leaves home to make a life for herself in Chicago. Unlike most novels of this sort, where the author quite…