0732 | Worship by the Book | D. A. Carson (ed.)
This is a very helpful book primarily because it has a revolving focus on how gathered worship is practiced by different Christian traditions. This therefore means that there’s something for…
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0730 | Lost Illusions | Honore de Balzac
The primary importance of Lost Illusions lies in exemplifying that it wasn’t only English readers who suffered from 19th century writers’ predeliction to create unnecessarily long novels via serialisation in…
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0724 | The Double | Jose Saramago
Having enjoyed Baltasar and Blimunda, I was looking forward to this, particularly as it wasn’t going to be dealing with too much obscure Portuguese history. I’m also fond of Kafka-esque…
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0723 | Exegetical Fallacies | D. A. Carson
Anyone whose job it is to interpret texts should be aware of the pitfalls of doing so. In this brief book, the scholar who went on to pen his masterly…
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0720 | The Underdogs | Mariano Azuela
If this didn’t influence Cormac McCarthy’s Border Trilogy, I’d be surprised. Azuela’s sparse prose and depiction of individuals caught up in events and landscape that they have little control over…
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0717 | Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere | Jan Morris
A very, very long time ago, I read a trilogy by a man name James Morris, the sublime Pax Britannica. It wasn’t until many years later that I realised the…
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0709 | The Triune God | Fred Sanders
Having completed The Deep Things of God by Sanders only recently, I was encouraged by that to continue with The Triune God, a book I was having a hard time…
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0705 | Baltasar and Blimunda | Jose Saramago
The last effort from Portugal I endeavoured to read through was the utterly futile Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa. It is with great thankfulness that I can report Saramago…
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0703 | No One Writes to the Colonel | Gabriel Garcia Marquez
A book of short stories which is far, far more satisfying than ploughing your way through the tedium that is One Hundred Years of Solitude. What Garcia Marquez has done…
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0696 | Amongst Women | John McGahern
Lyrically written as so many Irish novels are, this centres around the inscrutable patriarch of a rural family. Moran rules his family with an iron fist. He’s an old freedom…
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0695 | The Sound and the Fury | William Faulkner
My my, you have to persevere with this one. Told from multiple viewpoints, what starts out as a completely fragmented narrative that is almost completely opaque gradually becomes more defined…
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0688 | Invisible Cities | Italo Calvino
Such a little book for so much metaphor. Calvino writes prose that, on the surface of it, is deceptively simple. It’s a lot easier to read than much of Borges…
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0686 | Inside Mr Enderby | Anthony Burgess
Enderby is a poet who parps a lot. He’s basically the early British prototype for Ignatius J. Reilly. He has no love except that of poetry which he composes on…
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0678 | The Drowned World | J. G. Ballard
As one of Ballard’s early works, this is pretty readable, esp. if you’ve ever tried the atrocious witterings of the likes of Crash. It’s sci-fi, and the basic premise is…
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0677 | The Driver’s Seat | Muriel Spark
Strange little book this one at just over 100 pages. In this very short space of time Spark creates Lise, a very memorable character who I was never quite sure…
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0670 | The Violent Bear it Away | Flannery O’Connor
Reads very much like Wharton but with religion as its theme rather than morality. Stark, grim and dark all the way through, a great caution for anyone involved in religion….
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0657 | Miss Lonelyhearts | Nathanael West
A tiny novella which reminded me of The Postman Always Rings Twice or pretty much anything by Raymond Chandler. The protagonist hides behind the pseudonym Miss Lonelyhearts as he writes…
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0654 | The Museum of Unconditional Surrender | Dubravka Ugresic
I can see how this book is important. It appears to be mostly autobiographical and shares memories of a woman which coalesce around the Balkan War and exile from. The…
