0564 | The Well of Loneliness | Radclyffe Hall
With the expiration in the EU of its copyright, this initially suppressed novel is now, somewhat ironically, in the public domain in Europe. Almost 88 years to the day after it…
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0563 | Pierre and Jean | Guy de Maupassant
304 books ago, I reviewed Bel Ami, my first Maupassant novel and, coincidentally, the one he wrote just before this one. Thankfully, although it still deals with the worst of…
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0562 | Inferno | Henri Barbusse
Not a very long novel and not a completely entertaining one either. Barbusse has constructed a hotel room where the unnamed protagonist discovers a hole which allows him to see…
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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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0527 | Tropic of Cancer | Henry Miller
A remarkable novel from start to finish on pretty much every level except, as my rating shows, on the development of any memorable character worth remembering or any plot. But…
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0526 | Tender is the Night | F. Scott Fitzgerald
A lot more readable than The Great Gatsby which I read many years before Arukiyomi was born, this was a decent enough novel. I found that as long as I…
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0507 | Amadis of Gaul | Garci Rodriguez de Montalvo
If you’re a bloke, you’ve got five choices: king, knight, wizard, giant or dwarf. If you’re a woman, you’ve got two: queen or damsel. There aren’t any normal people in this…
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0506 | Bonjour Tristesse | Francoise Sagan
This is France’s answer to Catcher in the Rye and, considering it was published when Sagan was only 18, is astonishing for that. The writing shows great maturity and insight…
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0492 | Rameau’s Nephew | Denis Diderot
This was not for me. A philosophical treatise comparing the viewpoints of a moralist with an amoralist set up as a chance meeting of two guys in a cafe. I…
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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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0481 | The Marriage Plot | Jeffrey Eugenides
You’ll think this is pretty good if you come to it without having first read Middlesex or The Virgin Suicides. You’ll think he’s a witty, clever incisive writer who has…
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0479 | Citadel | Kate Mosse
Oh my goodness me. I haven’t read anything this bad for a long, long time. And I haven’t read anything this long and this bad for as long as I…
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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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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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0466 | A Line in the Sand | James Barr
What the chart of my progress below does not reveal is that the day I started this was in fact in May 2013 whereas I didn’t finish it, after a…