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,…
-
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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:…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
0448 | The History of Love | Nicole Krauss
You know, I’m always disheartened when picking up a book to find a sticker staring back at me declaring that it’s been “Shortlisted by Richard & Judy’s book club.” What…
-
0447 | A Tale of a Tub | Jonathan Swift
Swift is better known for his later works (Gulliver’s Travels and A Modest Proposal in particular) and having read those before turning to this, it’s easy to see why. In fact,…
-
0446 | The Enigma of Arrival | V. S. Naipaul
Once I’d settled into this, it was a beautiful read. Naipaul is a Nobel Laureate and so you expect that the prose will be challenging. But while A Bend in…
-
0445 | ADMT III: The Acceptance World | Anthony Powell
I felt this was the strongest volume so far of Powell’s 12-volume Dance to the Music of Time. Things seemed to have bedded into a nice rhythm as the characters…