0628 | Slaughterhouse Five | Kurt Vonnegut
What a genius this man was to write a novel so short, so deceptively simple, so (frankly) bonkers and yet so very relevant not just for the age in which…
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0627 | The Untouchable | John Banville
I last read Banville nearly a decade ago. The Sea and The Newton Letter didn’t impress me much. This one was better than both of those put together, I thought….
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0626 | Eclipse of the Crescent Moon | Geza Gardonyi
This is on the 1001 Books list simply because it is a Hungarian classic chronicling the successful defence of Eger Castle from the Ottoman Turks by a vastly outnumbered army….
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0625 | Islands | Dan Sleigh
Absolutely fantastic book. Just one of those that you come across and know immediately that you’re going to end up buying someone a copy because you just want to share…
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0624 | Three Trapped Tigers | Guillermo Cabrero Infante
Nothing to see here people. Move along. At least, if you’ve read any Sterne (1759) or later Joyce or Tristram Shandy or Ulysses (1904) in particular, you will find all…
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0623 | The Story of Lucy Gault | William Trevor
What a beautiful novel is Trevor’s paean to loss, regret and life itself. I can’t tell you how it cleansed the palate after the first three books of Updike’s Rabbit…
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0622 | Rabbit is Rich | John Updike
More of the same from Updike with two exceptions: less happens and there’s more graphic sex. Quite why this novel, of the three Rabbit novels so far, won the most…
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0621 | Rabbit Redux | John Updike
After Rabbit, Run comes this. Rabbit’s now settled down but he’s definitely not put the past behind him. He’s in a real dead end job instead of a pretend one,…
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0620 | Pale Fire | Vladimir Nabokov
It is the mark of genius that most of the world doesn’t get what you are trying to do at all. Such is the case with Nabokov’s Pale Fire, a…
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0619 | Americanah | Chimamanda Ngozi Aidichie
Recently added to the 1001 Books list in the new October 2018 edition, this title was worthy of its inclusion capturing, as it does, the state of race in a…
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0618 | Rabbit, Run | John Updike
A long time ago in a galaxy far away, I was given a copy of Rabbit is Rich by mistake for a birthday present. I’d asked for Pulitzer Prize winning…
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0617 | The Secret History | Donna Tartt
Tartt’s debut novel of a small college clique deciding to knock off one of their own rambles on a bit but is generally an easy read. It suffers from readers…
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0616 | There but for the | Ali Smith
My second Ali Smith, and I’m starting to get the idea now. Ask questions about who people are by rotating the point of view to show us that, as many…
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0615 | Brooklyn | Colm Tóibín
Last summer’s The Master had me wanting more of Tóibín’s writing. So, this summer, I picked up a copy of Brooklyn to see if he could transport me back to the…
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0614 | Hunger | Knut Hamsen
If you’ve not read Crime and Punishment, then this is a good place to start. Far, far shorter, it is nevertheless cram packed with the fevered wanderings of a protagonist…
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0613 | Great Apes | Will Self
20 pages into this, you’d be forgiven for thinking Will Self was a meaningful pseudonym. Pretty much from the get go, this seems to be all about convincing us how…
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0612 | Portrait of a Lady | Henry James
Many regard Portrait as James’ greatest novel. What they mean by this, of course, is that it’s the easiest to read. Written before James went off on the subordinate clause…
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0611 | Germinal | Emile Zola
Britain has The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists. The US has The Jungle. France has Germinal. It falls somewhere between the two in terms of its readability, but it is far, far ahead in…
