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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0566 | Journey to the End of the Night | Louis-Ferdinand Céline
Here’s a novel powerful enough to suck the life out of Amazon’s entire self-help catalogue in seconds. In terms of sheer pessimistic cynicism of humanity, Céline’s Night is unparalleled with its tale…
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0559 | The Life of Lazarillo de Tormes | Anonymous
What better way to follow a weighty picaresque novel that was incredibly influential with a very light one that is credited with inventing the genre itself. Someone, and we have…
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0553 | An Artist of the Floating World | Kazuo Ishiguro
This is a beautifully written novel filled with pathos and written with immaculate prose that describes accurately not only Japan and not only the Japanese character but also the post-WW2 Japanese…
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0552 | The Bell Jar | Sylvia Plath
From the very first classic opening line through to the end, this is a page-turner. Plath wrote this very quickly and it shows in the effervescence of the prose. However,…
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0538 | Les Miserables | Victor Hugo
Another bookshelf breaker under the belt. Now, I’m a real Les Mis fan having seen the musical in London four times, but this did not actually meet my expectations in…
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0513 | Troubles | J. G. Farrell
This last book in the series completes my reading of Farrell’s Empire trilogy. I wish I’d read them in order. I actually read them back to front. Troubles is a perfect…
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0511 | U.S.A. | John Dos Passos
My what a splendid book this is. Vast in its scope and magnanimous in its treatment of the varied strata that made up a nation coming to terms with the…
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0501 | Blood Meridian | Cormac McCarthy
An absolutely harrowing novel that makes you feel like you yourself have spent months tramping around the arid wastelands of what is now the US-Mexican borderland. It’s the kind of…
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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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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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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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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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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…
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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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0454 | Mark for Everyone | Tom Wright
Tom Wright has done it again with an extremely readable and very accessible translation and commentary on the Gospel according to Mark. I’m reading my way through the entire set…
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0452 | Fear of Flying | Erica Jong
This book took me very much by surprise. There were mixed reviews online but I thought it was a very bold work of genius. When you consider that this was…