0443 | ADMT II: A Buyer’s Market | Anthony Powell
The main characters are all now well into young adulthood and most of this volume of Powell’s epic 12-volume A Dance to the Music of Time revolves around social occasions…
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0441 | Season of Migration to the North | Tayeb Salih
This little novel packs a huge punch even today, 50 years after it was published in a Sudan that was in no way ready hammer blow of this magnitude to…
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0439 | Surfacing | Margaret Atwood
Atwood’s first second (thanks Irina!) published novel sees her get off to a good start with this eerie tale of a woman returning to her childhood home in the Canadian…
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0438 | ADMT I: A Question of Upbringing | Anthony Powell
And so we’re up and running with volume 1 of the 12-volume novel A Dance to the Music of Time. Once I discovered Powell’s prose to be very accessible, in…
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0437 | The Golden Ass | Lucius Apuleius
This Ass is packed with tales that are as full of characters as they are hard to follow. Make sure you get yourself a good translation of this if you…
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0436 | The Child in Time | Ian McEwan
McEwan’s third novel and the earliest that I have read wasn’t too bad. It’s about a guy who is estranged from his wife after the abduction of their child in…
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0435 | Our Mutual Friend | Charles Dickens
Haven’t read any Dickens for a while, not since Hard Times almost five years ago to be exact and this was the second time that I attempted this particular tome….
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0434 | The Master and Margarita | Mikhail Bulgakov
What a very, very clever book. To appreciate it, you have to be aware of the context in which it was written and for that I’d heartily recommend the excellent…
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0433 | Nostromo | Joseph Conrad
Supposedly Conrad’s most complex novel, I will admit only that it is his most boring. I seem to have a jinx when it comes to not only reading Latin American…
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0431 | All the Pretty Horses | Cormac McCarthy
This novel is probably the most evocative I think I’ve read out of North America. Hauntingly beautiful, tragic and yet reassuring too, the Texan and Mexican landscape lives and breathes…
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0430 | Tono-Bungay | H. G. Wells
The last of Wells’ works that was on my tbr list for the 1001 books. Wells occasionally delights me, but, on the whole, though I do regard him a genius…
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0426 | That They May Face the Rising Sun | John McGahern
Now I know what many are going to say on finishing this: ‘what the heck was that about? Where was the story? What was the point?’ And I have to…
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0424 | The Secret Agent | Joseph Conrad
Been quite a while since I’ve read any Conrad. In fact, I started this back in about 2006 but never finished it. This time, I listened to it on Librivox…
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0423 | A Confederacy of Dunces | John Kennedy Toole
I was hoping this was going to be funnier than it was. It’s a satirical look at the USAnian way of life through the eyes of one of the great…
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0422 | Jude the Obscure | Thomas Hardy
My my, Hardy does it again. What an excellent novel, all the more so because of the personal price it cost him. In dealing with the subject of marriage and…
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0421 | Persuasion | Jane Austen
Well, having finished this, I’m persuaded that Austen is one of the most, if not the most, hyped authors of English literature. Yet again, we find a love triangle and,…
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0420 | Growth of the Soil | Knut Hamsun
The 1001 books list does it again and throws something superb my way. This one just crept into Arukiyomi’s Hall of Fame, a brooding saga of a novel with symbolism…
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0419 | The Tenant of Wildfell Hall | Anne Brontë
I usually breathe a sigh of relief when I finish a “classic” like Wildfell Hall. I certainly did after Persuasion which I shall review shortly. But Anne’s classic has a…