0635 | House of Leaves | Mark Danielewski
One of the weirdest books you’ll ever read and it looks like he put a tremendous effort into pulling it off. Does he succeed? Not for me, he doesn’t. This…
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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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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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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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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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0610 | Fall on Your Knees | Ann-Marie MacDonald
About as uplifting as digging out a mass grave, MacDonald’s portrayal of an immigrant family shattered from within by abuse isn’t going to win anyone’s most-loved novel awards. It’s memorable,…
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0604 | Arrow of God | Chinua Achebe
Not as easy to follow, Achebe’s third novel in his African Trilogy is a less straightforward narrative than his famed Things Fall Apart. Although both novels focus feature Nigerian male…
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0600 | Burmese Days | George Orwell
George’s southeast Asian tale translates his scorn for capitalist Britain into the wilds of Burma where the sultry humidity and lazy pace of tropical life do little to dampen his…
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0586 | The Master | Colm Tóibín
It’s been a while since I read this, but the impression it made on me hasn’t left. Tóibín has written a melancholic novel of a man much misunderstood it seems….
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0584 | Promise at Dawn | Romain Gary
This memoir is basically a eulogy to Gary’s mother. Seeing as I have never really had a mother to speak of, this was an interesting one for me to read…
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0582 | The Player of Games | Iain M. Banks
While I’ve read a few of Banks’ non-sci-fi novels, none of them are as memorable as The Player of Games. The world that Banks has created here is truly original…
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0579 | Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow | Peter Høeg
Smilla doesn’t so much come across as an underdog in a portrait of contemporary social injustice as she does a kind of Nordic Lara Croft.
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0577 | North and South | Elizabeth Gaskell
Such was the impression this book left on me that I completely forgot I’d read it. I made no note of it in the list of completed books I keep,…
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0576 | The Golden Notebook | Doris Lessing
A tough read this one, for a number of reasons. Firstly, it’s long and you are going to wish you were nearer the end than the beginning on many occasions….
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0571 | Sister Carrie | Theodore Dreiser
This is the story of a young woman who, somewhat naively, leaves home to make a life for herself in Chicago. Unlike most novels of this sort, where the author quite…
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0570 | Princess of Cleves | Madame de La Fayette
Massively influential in French literature at least, this story of unrequited love is a eulogy to virtue whose message should be more widely known outside its native land. Wikipedia will…
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0569 | On the Eve | Ivan Turgenev
So, this is one of those novels for which an understanding of the historical context is essential for a full appreciation of its significance. The era is the early 1850s…
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0568 | The Accidental | Ali Smith
This is a quirky story told from the perspective of each member of a family who rent a holiday home in the English countryside for the summer. When a mysterious…